QueerType: A few days and nights in the Big Easy

Thursday, May 19, 2005

A few days and nights in the Big Easy

This year's Saints and Sinners Literary Festival for Queer writers was again a lot of fun. (Thanks again to Paul Willis for his great organizing efforts.) It all began when I had a little too much to drink at the opening reception on Friday night, but I sobered up in time for Saturday's panel on Writing Sex Scenes for Erotica and Romance (with the help of pain killers and a yoga class). Amie M. Evans did a great job moderating and my fellow panelists included Robert Taylor, Radclyffe, and Kelly McQuain. Sunday's What is Taboo panel went well, too, with Rob Stephenson keeping us all on our toes with one question after the next. Also on the panel were Bill Brent, Jim Gladstone, and Sean Meriwether. It was great to see and catch up with a lot of friends and fellow writers and I'm looking forward to going again next year, when rumor has it that it will be integrated into the larger Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in March. To see the crew at this year's events, D. Travers Scott (whose new book One of These Things Is Not Like the Other is just out) has some photos posted at his blog, and Michael Walker of Dreamwalker Group has posted a few of our faces, too.

The Haunted Heart and Other Tales
ghost stories by Jameson Currier

In his newest collection of short stories, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, author Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.

“Jameson Currier’s The Haunted Heart and Other Tales expands upon the usual ghost story tropes by imbuing them with deep metaphorical resonance to the queer experience. Infused with flawed, three-dimensional characters, this first-rate collection strikes all the right chords in just the right places. Equal parts unnerving and heartrending, these chilling tales are testament to Currier’s literary prowess and the profound humanity at the core of his writing. Gay, straight, twisted like a pretzel…his writing is simply not to be missed by any reader with a taste for good fiction.”
Vince Liaguno, Dark Scribe Magazine

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier, published by Lethe Press, brings together 20 of the author’s short stories about the impact of AIDS on the gay community which have been written over the last three decades. Along with ten stories from Currier’s debut collection Dancing on the Moon (1993), praised by The Village Voice as “defiant and elegiac,” are ten newly selected stories written by one of our preeminent masters of the short narrative form. And for this new collection the author has also chosen stories that revolve around gay New Yorkers—those lost, those surviving, those displaced, those undaunted, and those who became expatriates.

"In these stories, Currier fictionalizes queer life and times from three decades of the AIDS era, capturing the years in his prose. It has the literary heft of Camus and the quiet urbanity of Cheever…. Currier chronicles not only a defining era in gay America, but the private lives of the people who triumphed through what looked like defeat. These lives are often so finely drawn, Currier never has to resort to cliché… Gritty, esoteric, funny and passionate, Currier’s courageous prose reminds us that we must never forget."
Lewis Whittington, EDGE