Today on the site we’ve got an excerpt from Greetings From Janeland, the sequel to Dear John, I Love Jane, a collection of essays from women writing about leaving men for other women. Check it out:
In an increasingly common phenomenon, women who once identified as straight are leaving men for women?and they have fascinating stories to tell.
In this sequel to Lambda Literary Finalist Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women, writers who come from a diverse array of perspectives open up and bare their souls. Essays on subjects such as repercussions, both bad and good; exes, both furious and supportive; bewildered and loyal family and friends; mind-blowing sexual and emotional awakenings; falling in the deepest of love; and finding a sense of community fill the pages of this anthology. One story is as different from the next as one person is from another.
With a foreword by former Editor-in-Chief of AfterEllen and Trish Bendix, and essays by acclaimed writers including BK Loren, Louise A. Blum, and Leah Lax, relax, sit back and take a journey into Janeland–a very special place where women search for, discover, and live their own personal truths.
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Excerpt from “The Dealer’s Gift”
I said good-bye in a coffee shop on an appropriately bitter Iowa December night. He took my hands and held them in his own, warmed them with his breath. It was the kind of detail he’d been good at: the small comfort gestures—the cut flower, the rolled joint, the proffered mug of coffee, black. It felt so good to break it off, a clean, solid break, the kind that renders the bone twice as strong as it was before. He kissed my hands, and then, with a single phrase he determined the course of the rest of my life. If you don’t want me, he told me, softly, then you must be a lesbian. His breath on my palms chilled my skin. His reasoning was, to him, readily apparent: I’d have to be a lesbian not to want a guy as “sensitive” as him.
I left him there, sauntered out into the starlit sky. I tried to laugh it off, but the black Midwestern winter wind stole the sound from my throat before it could leave my lips. I walked home alone in the pale light of a distant constellation, fighting the chill that settled in my bones, his words seeding themselves deep within my brain, where they lingered like a curse. Then you must be a lesbian. Somewhere deep inside, I had the nagging desire to prove him wrong. But if I had learned anything from that relationship, it was that I would rather be single for the rest of my life than settle for less than I deserved.
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Candace Walsh is the author of Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards winner and the editor of Dear John, I Love Jane, and Ask Me About My Divorce. Her writing has appeared in numerous national and local publications, including Newsday, Travel + Leisure, Sunset, Mademoiselle, New York magazine, and New Mexico Magazine. Her essays have been published in the anthologies Here Come the Brides!, Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage, Blended, and Spent, and she is currently editor in chief of El Palacio Magazine. She lives in Santa Fe with her wife Laura André, their two children, and two dogs.
Barbara Straus Lodge is an essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Motherlode blog and the “LA Affairs” section of the Los Angeles Times. An essay under her pseudonym, Leigh Stuart, was published in the anthology Dear John, I Love Jane. Her work has also appeared in Parabola Magazine, The Rumpus, Literary Mama and a variety of anthologies.
