October 15th, 1997 to October 21st, 1997

The Writer and Her Imagination:

Minnie Bruce Pratt

by Jorjet Harper

Award-winning lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt will read from her works at the Chicago Cultural Center on Friday, Oct. 17, as part of this year's Chicago Women Writers' Conference, an annual event organized by the Guild Complex. She will also deliver the conference's keynote address, on Saturday, Oct. 18, at Columbia College.

Pratt is the author of Crime Against Nature, We Say We Love Each Other, and Rebellion: Essays, and a volume of autobiographical stories, S/HE, that focuses on her relationship with her life-partner Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch Blues.
Pratt's keynote speech at the conference will be called "How the Mockingbird Learned a New Song: On the Writer and her Imagination in the 21st century." It is an extension of a speech she first gave at OutWrite, the Lesbian and Gay Writers' Conference held in Boston last year. "It's a huge topic, of course, but it's something I've been thinking about for the last three or four years," Pratt says. "I want to talk specifically about what it means to be a woman writer at this point in time in this country, and what it means for us to continue breaking through to new material in our writing."

Pratt feels that one of the victories of women's liberation was to make women "believe that our lives were worth saving, and not just literally but in every other way. We were told: Write in a journal. Save the journal. Send the journal to the archives." She praises the visionary work of lesbian archivists Joan Nestle and Deb Edel. "These kinds of records make us conscious of our force as members of history, as actors in history, whether or not we thought our names would ever make it into the history books. Just to know that we exerted power within our own historical context is so important."

And in light of this, Pratt asks the question: What does it mean now, in 1997, to continue to break through silences and taboos? How do we move beyond telling the same stories again with just slightly different variations or more skilled style? "Developing our skill in writing and our ability to give subtlety is important, but it stagnates after awhile, becomes stultifying. And in a way it is dishonest, because it means that instead of breaking through to your own meaning in the material, you're just going over ground that someone else has already cleared."

Pratt credits the second wave of women's liberation with "releasing us into telling stories that we never dared speak." And, Pratt adds, "we never dared speak them for good reason: because we were punished for telling. To raise our voices, to speak what had happened to us, meant terrible punishment. And of course some of us at that edge of telling did suffer for it. We have said and done amazing things in the wake of that liberation movement."

Pratt herself suffered for the honesty of her own experience as a lesbian. "One of the defining events in my life was my struggle over custody of my children. I kept a journal, and of course the things that were written in there were completely candid things about loving another woman. My husband said that he had taken my journal and photocopied it and was going to use it in court against me." At that time Pratt did in fact lose custody of her two young boys.

Pratt was a member of Feminary, the influential Southern women's publishing collective. "We all said, 'Well, we've got to learn how to make our own books.' And we did. Some women in the collective had learned how to print. And a bunch of others of us learned to do layout and to make the metal plates that we were printing from." Pratt's first book of poems, and a chapbook by Mab Segrest, were among the group's projects. Her two sons helped collate, staple, and trim it. "There was a trimmer that looked like a guillotine, as big as a floor freezer, and my children came with me and helped me do all of this stuff. It was really amazing. When I had my 50th birthday last year, the boys came up, and one of them said that one of his first memories, one that was very important to him, was making art with me-that book of poetry."

Pratt recalls the excitement and independent spirit of the Women In Print movement of the 1970s and early '80s: "We were everywhere. In Chicago, there was Black Maria and Metis Press. There were all these magazines everywhere and all these newspapers. I think of it all the time, when women come up to me and talk to me about how to get published. And I say to them, 'Do not wait around!' I mean god, we're not talking about how to do your exposures on a metal plate anymore, or learning how to print! 'You've got MacIntoshes for heaven's sake!' It surprises me that it doesn't happen more often, considering how easy it is."

At the conference, Pratt will read from a book of poems called Walking Back Up Depot Street. She has been working on this book for many years. "In fact, when I did my first little chapbook of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, it says in the back that I'm working on a second book of poetry--this was 1981. I kept thinking I'd finish them, and I kept writing other books instead. I realized recently that of course it took me this long, because by having a transformation happen to the person in the poems, I was having to go through it myself. This book-length narrative poem is about the shift from the 19th into the 20th century, from a monolithic way of looking at the world to a very complicated multi-vocal multi-faceted way of looking the world. Out of segregation into hearing all the other voices that were suppressed."

The questions Pratt raises are deep and complex: "What does it mean to use your imagination as an artist, when, just like language, imagination has totally been shaped by the historical circumstance you're growing up in the middle of? How do we liberate our imagination? How do you transform your consciousness from one that is limited in what you see in the world around you? When we screen out the complexity of the world, how do we go from that screening process to being able to experience the world in very multilayered way?

"My imagination was historically shaped along with everything else about me. And I don't want to be captured by history. I want to use it as a tool, not be caught in it."

The protagonist of Depot Street is a lesbian, and is making "a journey that a lot of gay people make out of the isolation of rural life to urban life. But it's not just about achieving a gay identity; it's about living in the world instead of living in opposition to people, in isolated identity, but rather coming to connection to other people while claiming your own identity."

Pratt will read from her works at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17 at the Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. April Sinclair (Coffee Will Make You Black) will also read. Pratt will deliver the conference's keynote speech Oct 18. at 10:30 a.m. at Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan. Other writers at the conference include Sharon Solwitz, Maureen Seaton, Nina Barrett, Batya Goldman Hernandez, Karen Lee Osborne, M. Eliza Hamilton, and Jorjet Harper. For information, call (773) 907-2189.

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