11 Questions: Martha Moody by Susan Stinson

“She flew. She spoke with angels. She played Jesus in the Bible. She carved a canyon with her tireless hands. She shook and brought forth waters. She sang whales into the ocean. She ploughed the ground with her knee while she rode a ridge and stroked her hands along the surfaces of grasses in the fields.”

Susan Stinson writes about sex as if it’s religious experience and vice versa. I first encountered her miraculous sentences when I was asked to review her extraordinary novel about Jonathan Edwards and the world around him, Spider in a Tree. Lately I’ve been immersed in her recently reissued classic Martha Moody, a lesbian love story for the ages. Lambda Literary calls it “substantial and delicious” and Time Out London describes it as “so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.” It is set in the fiery days of Carrie Nation and the radical temperance movement, and features an angelic cow.

Describe your book in three adjectives!

Buttery. Corporal. Reverent.

What is one of your favorite sentences from the book?

I became the earth, her instrument – smoothed and dug and brought forth – but I wrote her powers into her, and played her every night.

Name a book or writer that inspired or guided you as you wrote.

Audre Lorde’s great essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” And maybe the C.S. Narnia series, for Aslan, only here Azreal is a flying cow.

What is something you discovered in the process of writing this book?

I wrote the book more than twenty-five years ago – it’s being reissued – but I remember being so drawn to the impulse to romanticize fat lesbians, to make them (us) mythic, but arriving at the mess and complexity of honest human lives as more compelling.

What was challenging about the process?

I didn’t want to write about fat hatred or internal struggles around body size, so that was one of the things that moved me out of the twentieth century.

What was sustaining about it?

This book came out of a period when I was deeply in love and had just had a series of aesthetic, political, intellectual, and geographic revelations. I had been to my first locker room full of fat dykes and read Melville and moved to the woods. It was a love song that practically sang itself (in memory, anyway).

What’s a song that would be on the book’s soundtrack?

“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen came to mind, so I’m going with that. That’s such a great song.

Who are some of the people you wrote this book for?

For my longtime beloved, who prefers to be private. For Walt Whitman, Dorothy Allison, and all of the poets and writers whose work had awakened my love of language, for grassroots feminists, strong-willed lesbians, my family, and everyone who grew up in my corner of Colorado.

What are some of the communities that shaped it?

See above, plus fat activists; spirited queer and lesbian writing groups; and the literary worlds of Northampton the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. I mean, it’s set in the west, where I grew up, but the book was written here.

What kinds of work do you want your book to do in the world? What are your hopes for its afterlife?

I’ve just learned that it is going to be a text in a Fat Studies class next semester. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing as Fat Studies when I wrote it, so that’s one thing. But I’ve also have always wanted to be Shakespeare, so I want the book to keep offering up stories, myths, and adventures over time. For everyone. That’s my dream.

What are you doing next? (Does not have to be a writing project!)

I am writing a novel about mothers, daughters, and lampreys in seventeenth century Connecticut, inspired by the life of Jonathan Edwards’s wild grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle. But first I’m going to bed.

Susan Stinson’s novel Martha Moody was re-issued recently by Small Beer Press, twenty-five years after it was first published. She is also the author of the novels Spider in a Tree, Venus of Chalk, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Born in Texas, raised in Colorado, she now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

You can buy Martha Moody here.