Dorothy Allison

8 November 2024: When I read this morning of Dorothy Allison's death, my eyes filled with tears. This amazing woman made the world a better place and to lose her this week of all weeks seems particularly cruel. But we have her writing to help us know what we need to do in the days ahead. 

I've written about her a bunch, as you can see here. This post captures a moment I still think about with a kind of swoony awe.

Fourteen hours since this morning and I am tearing up again. Rest in peace, Dorothy, and thank you for everything. 

Dorothy Allison on Titanic

18 March 2021: "I think of the movie Titanic. All the people who good and really had fun on the ship were working-class people. They all drowned, but they had a good time before they drowned. I remember the good Irish working-class mother who pulled the blanket up to the neck of her child as the water rises up to the kid's ears. I was thinking, 'Oh, God, bitch, don't die and let your kid die! Shoot somebody!'" --Dorothy Allison, talking about how we romanticized working-class lives. 

I am back at work on my Dorothy Allison essay, expanding it to journal-article length. The passage above, which made me laugh and made me nod my head, reminded me of how much I love her voice.

Work Cited

Tokarczyk, Michelle M. Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison. Susquehanna UP, 2008.

Virtual SAMLA

14 November 2020: SAMLA is totally online this year, which is--of course!--very smart and necessary. But it sure is strange. I am sitting here listen to very smart people talk about their work, the typical conference experience. But Wesley sleeps behind me on the chair, the dryer ends its cycle and I fold the laundry. I am wearing gym shorts and no shoes while the robot vacuum whooshes by. 

I deliver my own paper tomorrow morning, but I'll be sure to be on campus (better internet) and dressed professionally--at least from the waist up. 

"A good story..."

24 September 2020: “A good story…widens your world, pulls you in, and shows you who you can be.” --Dorothy Allison, in her keynote address tonight. 

Authenticity

23 September 2020: "I am as authentic as sin." --Dorothy Allison speaking at tonight's AHWIR event. Lord, she is amazing.

Today has been really rough: every story in the news, including the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor, just devastates me. But hearing Allison talk about the value of writing and the work it can do helps a bit. 

Career highlight???

21 September 2020: Gave a presentation about Dorothy Allison today. She watched it on Youtube live. And she left some comments. 

Swoon!

"damn the consequences and shame your mama"

13 September 2020: "With story, and with poetry, you can hang language and revelation on a few details and a lies. I believe that a good lie is a fine way to get to the truth. You have to think about why you are tempted to lie, what you are hiding and what you fear. Then damn the consequences and shame your mama." --Dorothy Allison, in this great interview

I can't say enough how much I've gotten out of these past few months of thinking about Allison's writing. What a gift she is to the world. 

"trusting her arm and her love..."

12 September 2020: “When Raylene came to me, I let her touch my shoulder, let my head tilt to lean against her, trusting her arm and her love. I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman. I wrapped my fingers in Raylene’s and watched the night close in around us” (309).

The words above, from the closing of Bastard Out of Carolina, are in the presentation I am giving on September 21. I've practiced it the whole way through a few times and every time I feel myself getting choked up as I read them. 

Absolutely riveted...

6 September 2020: Just read a complete draft of my presentation on Dorothy Allison for the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence program to Veronica. Clearly she found it riveting.

Bing was also in the audience, but in my defense, he's deaf.

Some good (admittedly a bit boring) things from today...

1) A committee I've been on turned in some major documents today and we can see the light at the end of a tunnel that has taken up way too much of our time this summer. I don't feel elated--too resentful of how much time it took--but I do feel pretty good and quite relieved.

2) I finished a pretty decent draft of the Dorothy Allison paper I am presenting at SAMLA (to be held online) in November. I gave myself an August 12 deadline for this, so I am early and that feels pretty darn good.

3) I think I just wrote a pretty darn good recommendation for a colleague's P&T application. This is so minor--very little rests on what I say--but I sometimes really love writing these for those moments when I remember a specific anecdote that illustrates how awesome I think the person is. It is such a pleasure to write those little stories and make the "facts" personal and clear. They make the letter more lively and real and I love being able to do that. 

So: three good (if boring) things. Here's hoping for a few more for tomorrow. It's helps with the pushing through...

Writing, writing, writing...

27 July 2020: Got a decent bit of writing done today, working on a conference paper about Dorothy Allison's "River of Names." Felt good to be productive and working on "normal" things.

Two or Three Things...

14 July 2020: "Aunt Dot was the one who said it. She said, 'Lord, girl, there's only two or three things I know for sure.' She put her head back, grinned, and made a small impatient noise. Her eyes glittered as bright as sun reflecting off the scales of a cottonmouth's back. She spat once and shrugged. 'Only two or three things. That's right,' she said. 'Of course it's never the same two things, and I'm never as sure as I'd like to be.'" --Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Skin

10 July 2020: "Literature is the lie that tells the truth, that shows us human beings in pain and makes us love them, and does so in a spirit of honest revelation." --Dorothy Allison, Skin

Working my way through Dorothy Allison's collection of essays. It's quite eclectic and provides interesting insights literature, writing, class, sex, and feminism (including its relationship to the lesbian/queer community in the 70s-90s). Those last couple of topics feel like a history lesson--one that I didn't know that much about.

What continues to be so significant to me is Allison's faith in literature and writing; her belief that they open doors to understanding, empathy equality, and empowerment.

"Better go with the limerick..."

28 June 2020: "There’s a pace and a rhythm between grief and humor. And one of the things I try to show in working-class families is that a lot of the joking and the humorous set-ups are a way to process what you can’t stand—you’ll make a joke of it. I find that a lot and I think it’s a problem in most of Southern writing, because you shift into that headset in which everything instead of being tragic is being funny. The problem is if you take it too far it’s more of a source of contempt and self-hatred—you’ve got to be careful. But it makes the whole difference. And I think that’s true of queers, and I think it’s true of everybody who lives on the edge . . . that slightly canted vision of how the world works: you could cry, you could shoot yourself in the head, or you could turn it into a really nasty limerick. Better to go with the limerick, you know? It’s a survival strategy. And it makes a better writing. Deeper." --Dorothy Allison

I read two really great interviews with Allison today, including the one quoted above and cited below.

Grué, Mélanie. “‘Great Writing Always Sings’: Dorothy Allison Speaks.” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, vol. 53, no. 2, 2016, pp. 131–145. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/soq.2016.0016.

Cavedweller

23 June 2020: "Oh, baby, more has been ruined by hot and stupid than people ever want to admit." --Delia, in Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller

I finished this novel tonight, as thunderstorms roll in and out. Lots on my mind, but this little moment of wisdom made me chuckle.

"Preface: Deciding to Live"

19 May 2020: "I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not being to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself...That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn't know it." --Dorothy Allison, "Preface: Deciding to Live," the opening piece in Trash

Started reading Trash today. I have only read parts of it before, so I am looking forward to moving through the whole thing. Allison's words above--about how writing was part of her decision to live--is useful for me as I wade through her often painful work (that is, work filled with pain). Writing is a kind of push against the darkness, a reminder that telling painful stories can be a way to celebrate (perhaps quietly) enduring and surviving. 

Raylene...

18 May 2020: "I like my life the way it is, little girl. I made my life, the same way it looks like you're going to make yours--out of pride and stubborness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard." --Raylene in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina

Finished rereading this book today and it's just as gutting as the first time. Actually, more so, since I am 20+ years older and it seems even more realistic and important than it did when I was 22. As I said earlier, in September I'm supposed to give a talk on Allison and diversity in Appalachian literature. On this read-through, Raylene, Bone's queer aunt, stood out to me. She cares for Bone in the end when her mother leaves her. She's not a fairy godmother who makes everything better, but she's fierce, flawed, and powerful. Her queerness in a broad sense gestures towards some kind of hope for the child at the center of the book. Really interesting...

Bastard Out of Carolina

13 May 2020: Re-reading this book for the first time since grad school in preparation for a talk I am supposed to give on campus in September (hard to imagine it happening in person, but who knows?). It's kind of amazing how much of it I remember over twenty years later. I could pick any number of passages to illustrate Allison's powerful prose, but here's just one, a description of her mother:

"There was only one way to fight off the pity and hatefulness. Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt. She got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant. No one knew that she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit-crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger, that more than anything else in the world she wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls."