Join us in NYC for an April 7th Celebration: Soils of Sisterhood!
A Sister Death book event celebrating kinships, collaborations, and germination
RSVP to “Soils of Sisterhood” on April 7th
Writing is among the loneliest of activities. At its best, it’s a practice that takes place in solitude. But there are many days when my writing practice just feels lonely. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have Krista Dragomer as a friend and creative collaborator for more than ten years. We’ve made things together, but sometimes we’ve just helped one another stay inspired and motivated enough to keep making beautiful things in (and for) a difficult world. There have been periods of time where this sisterhood has been one of the only things that’s kept giving me creative energy, when so many other things are draining it.
Having Krista’s artwork featured in my book Sister Death was one of the great unplanned surprises of the publication process. It was also such a gift. I’m so accustomed to weathering publication processes all alone. Having Krista there to share news with, and to be excited with, was much more fun. Next week we are going to have an event to celebrate the book (and sisterhoods, collaborations, and the life of spring that’s rising from the decay of fall and winter!) in NYC. If you’re in the area, please come and join us! I like the way Krista phrased the invitation on her Substack: to “worshippers of the weird and witchy and appreciators of intense women! Mark your calendars” and bring your “theological curiosities & inner goth!”
The event will be hosted at Risen Division, which is the shop of Andrea Lauer. She makes and designs these extraordinary jumpsuits for polymaths and adventurers. The doors open at 6:30 and the event - which will consist of a Q & A with conversation - will be at 7. You will have a chance to see the art featured in the book. We will also host a little ritual. Please RSVP, to help us plan and to be sure that we can keep you updated with details. The event is free, of course.
RSVP to “Soils of Sisterhood” via eventbrite.
After a talk I recently gave, about Sister Death, someone asked me a great question which was, “why sisterhood”? Why did I want to celebrate sisterhood, in a book about life and death? It’s always the simple and straightforward questions that are the most difficult to answer well. I tried to answer the question as best I could, at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it since then.
There’s the obvious answer, of course, which is that I’m just borrowing the figure of Sister Death from Francis of Assisi! But the less obvious answers are more true.
One of the reasons is that in the history of western theology and philosophy there are countless examples of powers and forces being gendered male. God, or forces and aspects of nature that are deemed vital and active have been gendered male. If there are any dimensions of the more than human world that are gendered female, they tend to be considered passive. This is even true for Francis, who genders God, the wind, and the sun male while he genders the elements typically considered passive (the moon, water, and death) female. In my book I wanted to resist and confound this symbolism. So not only am I speaking symbolically and biomythically about death as a sister, but life as well.
I was already receiving critiques about my use of sisterhood, in the revision stages of the book writing process. There’s an academic argument to be made that this symbolic and biomythical reversal is just a problematic reversion of patriarchal symbolic imagery that doesn’t resist it so much as continue to repeat its gender bifurcations. There’s a whole 20th century history of feminist theological reversals that gender the divine feminine, as a way to resist the symbolic power of patriarchy. And look at where we are now, socially and politically; even deeper in the violent heteropatriarchal socio-political morass than ever, it sometimes seems. But I’m not actually trying to make the argument that life and death are women, or even feminine! I’m just trying to make a comment on the symbolic dimensions of their engagement. And I want to stress the relational dynamic: sisterhoods.
Simone de Beauvoir argued, in The Second Sex, that patriarchal philosophical conflations of the womb and the tomb were an illumination of the conflation of women and death. Men have been horrified by the fact that they have to die, she observed. And it’s the women who give birth, and therefore produce this mortality, who’ve been blamed for this conundrum. Women have been blamed for condemning the human to death and finitude. This is why, she wrote, “women mourn the dead, because death is their work.” I recognize that it’s not just women who do the care labor that is death work. But all of the death doulas that I know are women. A woman started the hospice movement. And many of the people I know who are engaged with end-of-life care work are women. Part of why I speak about death and sisterhood together in my book is because I want to recognize and honor the thousands of generations of women who have sat with their kin and loved ones on the threshold and helped them to become ancestors.
In the end what I have to say about sisterhood is mostly poetic. I want to help write the poetry of sisterhood. As Audre Lorde put it poetics are a way to map out another form of feeling our way through things. Poetry is “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives,” and how “we pursue our magic and make it realized.” For Lorde, poetically speaking, sisterhood can be ambivalent. Sisters can be both “unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous” to one another. But there is also, in sisterhood, a way of knowing oneself through knowing another. Sisters speak in “different combinations of the same borrowed sounds.” This is as true of life and death as it is of me and all those I think of as sisters.
I hope that you can come and celebrate that rich resonance with us!
By the way, you won’ t likely hear from me next week! I set myself the goal of posting here once a week, during my sabbatical. I’ve been enjoying the process so much that it’s actually been easy. But I’ve decided to give myself next week off so that I can enjoy the trip to New York! See some of you soon, and others a bit later.