{"id":31308,"date":"2019-01-11T03:59:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T11:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=31308"},"modified":"2019-01-09T15:19:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T23:19:21","slug":"sharing-their-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/01\/11\/sharing-their-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing their stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Makeda Zook, left, and Sadie Epstein-Fine, editors of Spawning Generations<\/em>. (photo from Demeter Press)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook will be in Vancouver for the Jan. 17 launch of Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents<\/em> (Demeter Press, 2018), which they co-edited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is really important to us that this book\nwas written and edited by queerspawn. So often our stories are told for and on\nbehalf of us by researchers, journalists and academics,\u201d Epstein-Fine told the Independent<\/em>.\n\u201cOur intimate, personal family lives have been under the microscope for our\nentire lives, proving to the world that we turned out all right. By curating\nstories from our community, including our own stories, Makeda and I ensured\nthat we were not, as we like to call it, airbrushing our stories, but that we\nwere allowing our contributors to tell the nitty gritty, the details of their\nstories that they have never been able to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the book\u2019s introduction, Epstein-Fine and\nZook explain that the term queerspawn to describe someone who has one or more\nLGBTQ+ parents was coined by Stefan Lynch, the first director of COLAGE, an\nAmerican \u201cnetwork dedicated to connecting and supporting queerspawn,\u201d which has\none chapter in Canada (in Toronto).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"book<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy giving a name to our identities and\nexperiences, he laid the foundation for connecting and politicizing queerspawn;\nLynch gave us a term to organize around,\u201d they write, acknowledging that the\nterm \u201cis not without controversy. Although some people feel empowered by\nreclaiming both words (\u2018queer\u2019 and \u2018spawn\u2019), others do not like the association\nwith \u2018spawn of the devil.\u2019\u201d Another term, \u201cgayby,\u201d also has its proponents and\nits critics, those who \u201cfind it infantilizing and only representative of people\nwhose parents identify as gay,\u201d note Epstein-Fine and Zook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, the editors chose to use queerspawn\nfor the anthology because it is \u201cunapologetic and bold.\u201d As well, it is \u201cthe\nword most often used in Canada and the United States and, as such, it helps us\nfind each other; it is a common word we can rally around. We often feel highly\nvisible in straight communities and invisible in queer ones. The term\n\u2018queerspawn\u2019 creates a space for us, and helps us to feel strength in numbers\nand a sense of belonging at times when we feel all too visible. When we feel\ninvisible, naming ourselves as queerspawn tells the queer community that we are\nstill here, even if we have grown up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Epstein-Fine was born in Toronto in 1992 to two\nmoms, in an activist home, \u201csurrounded by 11 other women.\u201d She carries on her\nfamily\u2019s activist tradition and describes herself as a queer(spawn)-political\ntheatre maker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to her bio, Zook \u201cwas born in\nVancouver in 1986 to her two lesbian feminist moms. She was raised in a\nmixed-race family surrounded by anti-oppression politics and her OWLs (older,\nwiser lesbians).\u201d She works in sexual health promotion for a feminist\nnongovernmental organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Epstein-Fine shared with the Independent<\/em>\nhow she and Zook came to be the editors of Spawning Generations<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDemeter Press approached Makeda and I to edit\nthe anthology because they saw a gap in their literature,\u201d she explained. \u201cThey\nmostly publish books about motherhood, through a feminist lens, and they\nrealized that, while they had a lot of literature about queer parenthood, they\ndidn\u2019t have anything from the children. This is a trend in the majority of\nqueer parenting literature \u2013 we hear a lot from the parents, but rarely from\nthe kids raised in queer households.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, it\u2019s true, Makeda\u2019s and my primary focus\nis not editing. Previous to editing this anthology we were both writers, which\nis how we got connected to this book. Our (queerspawn) community is small and\ndisparate, there is not a plethora of options available. When Demeter first\napproached me with this project, I tried to think of folks who could do this\nproject, and there was no obvious answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMakeda and I learned to be editors in trial by\nfire,\u201d she admitted. \u201cWe always say that we didn\u2019t just grow alongside this\nproject, but that this project grew us. After three years of working on this\nproject, we now feel confident in our editing skills, which we didn\u2019t feel\npreviously.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the pair has done a commendable job in\nkeeping the essays on point. The editing is such that each contributor\nmaintains their own voice, which adds to the book\u2019s readability and interest.\nContributors range in age, from 9 years old, to teenagers, to 20-somethings and\nolder queerspawn. And the writers come from all over the world, from as far\naway as London, England, and as close as Victoria; one was born in Vancouver\nbut seems not to live here anymore. While all the contributors have being the\nchild of one or more LGBTQ+ parents in common and have shared some similar\nexperiences, each story is unique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a call for writers, which we spread\nas far as we could,\u201d Epstein-Fine explained about how the essays for the\nanthology were chosen. She said they asked COLAGE and several organizations and\npeople they know in Canada to publicize the call, which went out in the winter\nof 2015, with a due date of May 1 that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe received 25 submissions and we took every\nsingle one,\u201d she said. \u201cWe thought that each person had an interesting story to\ntell and we were committed to helping them tell their story the way they wanted\nit to be told. We initially thought that we wanted to be more selective and, if\nwe had received more submissions, we would have been forced to be. However, the\nwonderful result of us taking everyone is that our book is not just filled with\nworks from professional writers, but we have contributors with a range of\nexperiences \u2013 from people who have never written a personal essay to\nprofessional writers. It gives a real scope of our community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Spawning Generations<\/em> book launch takes place Jan. 17, 7 p.m., at Massy Books, 229 East Georgia St., in Vancouver. For more information, visit facebook.com\/spawninggenerations<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Makeda Zook, left, and Sadie Epstein-Fine, editors of Spawning Generations. (photo from Demeter Press) Sadie Epstein-Fine and Makeda Zook will be in Vancouver for the Jan. 17 launch of Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents (Demeter Press, 2018), which they co-edited. \u201cIt is really important to us that this book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[5914,1384,4526,8616],"class_list":["post-31308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-identity","tag-lgbtq","tag-memoir","tag-queerspawn"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}