Swinging On The Garden Gate

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Description

• Online campaign featuring social media images with blurbs and reviews of the book as well as designed graphics of selected excerpts.
• Early reviewer promotion through advance copies to encourage reader reviews and generate buzz.
• National review outreach to trade and print publications (PW, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, Foreword, New York Times) and online (NPR, Spirituality & Practice, Book Riot)
• Advertising in print publications (Sojourners, Poets and Writers) and online (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Sojo mail)
• Promotion on the publisher’s website (skinnerhouse.org), Twitter feed (@skinnerhouse), Instagram page (@skinnerhouse), Facebook page (/skinnerhouse), Tumblr page (@skinnerhousebooks), Pinterest (@skinnerhousebks) and publisher’s e-newsletter.
• Promotion during Pride Month, LGBTQ History Month, Bisexuality/Bi Visibility Day.
• Events virtual launch event with Bishop Karen Oliveto and various readings.

A stunning memoir of coming of age and coming out bisexual by award-winning writer and teacher Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew.

Every story begins with a word. As a young woman, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew carried a word within her so potent that it spread through her every artery and vein. She carried it in secret until she was shown a different way and the word inside her turned restless and eager.

Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality and Spirit describes a period of time in award-winning writer and teacher Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s life when she came to know bisexuality as an embodied manifestation of divinity. Andrew not only reconciles her United Methodist faith with her sexuality but realizes that her body is holy, her sexuality is holy, and the word she carried within her has always been holy.

The spark of spirit Andrew identifies in her body she also finds throughout the solid matter of life—in childhood, nature, creativity, loss, death, and especially the coming out process. Andrew brings a distinctly queer feminist lens to Christian teachings and answers the question innumerable young people have posed to her over the years: “Is it possible to be both queer and spiritual?” The act of bringing hidden, personal truths to light is transformative, and for Andrew, a universal calling.

This second edition includes a new note from Andrew as she looks back on its twenty-year history and a foreword by Bishop Karen Oliveto, the first openly lesbian bishop to be elected in the United Methodist Church.

Preface to the First Edition

Every story begins with a word: a daunting word, a word that mars the blank white page or inks the air.

A word has upright bones and sinews; it is created the way a body is created—from dirt and spit. It walks about relating to other words until it is a part of an extended thought or metaphor or entire narrative telling how the world began. The world began in chaos, like a rough draft. It began with the faith that creation is good.

Once I carried within me a word so potent that it spread through every artery and vein until my tongue swelled with silence. I carried it into the faculty lounge at a middle school where conversation ranged from marriage to the two-car garage. The word sat rock hard in my stomach, beside the cafeteria lunch I wolfed down in twenty-two minutes. I carried it with me through the corridors, where one student called another queer and sent me raging, dragging him into the classroom by his shirt sleeve. Angled against the blackboard, arms crossed, he defied me with his eyes. My red-faced fury didn’t go far; I forced down the real word and ranted instead about inappropriate behavior and put-downs. I carried it with me through three years of semester reviews with my principal, as we hassled over the inclusive range of paperbacks on my classroom shelves. She was always cordial. The books that passed muster were those that didn’t make any waves. Sitting before her wide desk, the boundaries of my body became retaining walls while inside raged the tidal wave of a word.

I carried my word into Sunday worship with a liberal congregation in the heart of Minneapolis. Adult education that morning was a panel discussion on bisexuality; should the church’s statement of intentional welcome include bisexuals alongside gays and lesbians? My eyes widened as several people described their experiences of being drawn to men and women and made a case for celebrating the expansive diversity of God’s creation. The word inside me turned restless and eager. I wanted to grow on my spiritual journey—to move forward after years of stasis—and I had a hunch that speaking my word would set me in motion.

I was terrified. Coming out in any form cracks the world open. When we come out, we take a buried truth, an inward reality residing near the soul, and pull it to the surface where it wreaks havoc on every perpetuated falsehood. We yank a piece of our essence out into the air, transforming in the process the self we thought we were as well as the community around us. I came out bisexual, claiming with pride God’s presence in the unique desires of my body. But as soon as I could recognize incarnation within my own skin, it was everywhere else as well—in my past, in the landscape, in each object, in the story itself. . . . The middle school where I taught seventh-grade English couldn’t accept my word, but (thank heavens!) my church did, and now the religious contingent marching in the Pride Parade is one person larger. Where the word is spoken, the huge creaking wheels of creation begin to turn.

What stuns me is how the word of God resides in each of us, carved into our very cells. I was taught to look for the word in the Bible, whose onionskin pages seem holier than those of a paperback novel and whose well-worn language we like to associate with the voice of God. After I came out, scripture stumbled down from the pulpit. It never belonged there in the first place: the word became flesh (not with Jesus, who simply reminds us of this fact, but in the very beginning) and it dwells among us, full of grace. When I sink into the sensual and relentless truths of my sexuality, and find there, hidden in the sticky recesses of my sex where I least expect it, holiness, it seems to me that all of creation’s bones and blood, vapor, soil, feathers, and solidity are infused with a sacred word. God is thoroughly, unabashedly incarnate. The spiritual journey is so physical that it makes me shiver. It sends me running barefoot on deer paths through the woods, and it shakes me awake during the blackest part of the night.

There are as many scriptures as there are stories told with integrity. The word of God inhabits our lived stories, the ordinary way our days unfold, and it inhabits the craft by which we give our stories form. What follows is my attempt to recognize that spark of spirit embedded in the solid matter of my life—in childhood, in coming out bisexual, in encounters with death and loss and wild growth—with the hope that my journey might be an invitation for others to do the same. The word comes alive when we claim what is sacred (life-giving, fundamental, charged with mystery, and frightfully beautiful) within our stories. This is how we become the word, moving about in the world. We breathe in deeply, down through the lungs and diaphragm to the core, and then release that intimate mingling of air and vibrating flesh into speech. We voice a truth. We create, and in so doing participate in our own creation.

I hunger to hear sacred stories. As a gift to encourage others, I offer my own.

Preface to New Edition

Preface to 1st Edition

Skirting the Garden

A Childhood

Unlocking the Garden

Dormancy

Woman in a Wilderness

Into the Garden

Digging with a Pointed Stick

A Queer, Pretty Place

The Fear of Growing Things

Simon Emanuel

Thinking Only of the Magic

On Fire

Swinging on the Garden Gate

Sujets

• Bisexual Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Personal Memoirs
• Social Science
• Literary Figures
• LGBTQ+
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Women
• Light (theology)
• Woman
• The Women

Informations

• Publié par: Skinner House Books
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781558968790
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait