An advocate of women-only spaces and places, a linguist, a thinker, and educator, and a visionary, Penelope leaves a vibrant literary and political legacy. Penelope was a prodigious writer, thinker and theorist in the lesbian community. June Arnold died in 1981 today Roberta and Fairfax are working to ensure that their mother’s work remains and continues to influence new generations of lesbians. Roberta and Fairfax Arnold remember their mother, June Arnold, novelist, publisher, organizer, and all around firebrand. Two other special features are remembrances of lesbians whose work helped to create the world that we live in today. Both interviews capture the vibrancy of lesbian creativity and express the intensity of production of lesbian and feminist culture. In this interview, Gage and Crouch discuss Crouch’s oeuvre, including her most recent work. Crouch does not recoil from controversy or from asking hard questions. Crouch is a beloved filmmaker, translating lesbian life into provocative and important films. Playwright and activist Carolyn Gage interviews filmmaker Catherine Crouch. Larkin is a poet at the heights of her powers. Larkin just won two important awards, a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for 2011 and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Poet Sandra Tarlin interviews Joan Larkin, a poet with a long and storied career. Sinister Wisdom 89: Once and Later includes four special features for your reading and thinking pleasure.

This issue evokes all three of these processes simultaneously. All we can do is remember what once was, celebrate what is today, and agitate for what we want to be later.

We can never go back to a past that is over, nor can we fully imagine or understand the future that we are trying to create. This simultaneous, mind-bending thinking about once and later is a yogic challenge for our minds and our bodies. By mashing these two phrases together, by remixing the ideas about time in each, I invite you to think simultaneously about what once was and what later might be. This theme combines two temporal designations: once and again with now and later. The theme for this issue, Sinister Wisdom 89, is Once and Later. Intensely Personal, Intensely Political: Interview with Lesbian-Feminist Filmmaker Catherine Crouch Lucky number 7 (or indications that i’d be a lesbian) The obelisco de buenos aires and the washington monument are similar Then we’d have to have a hamburger and then we’d break up again Soul Survival: A Conversation with Joan Larkin

Sinister Wisdom 77 by Diane Foster