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Once upon a time there was
a second-grade schoolteacher in upstate New York — right across the lake,
in Plattsburgh — who never dreamed that one day she’d be a published
writer. This is a true story. Better, it’s a story of success against the
odds.
Meet Bonnie Shimko, 61,
wife, mother, teacher and now author, whose first novel, Letters in the Attic, won this
year’s Lamda Literary Award for outstanding fiction in the Children and
Young Adult category. Lamda Awards are given annually by the Lamda Literary
Foundation, “the only national organization dedicated to the recognition
and promotion of gay and lesbian literature,” according to its promo. What
the Human Rights Campaign and Lamda Legal Defense are to gay life in
general, the Lamda Literary Award is to any aspiring homophile writer; you
can’t go any higher.
“It is our writers,” Lamda
says — “our poets, scholars, historians, humorists and storytellers of all
stripes — who give voice to our remarkable community. They create us in all
our wonderful colors, as they recount us both to ourselves and to the wide
world.”
The Foundation has
headquarters in Washington, D.C., and a roster of previous award winners
that reads like a Who’s Who of GLBT life and letters: Dorothy Allison,
Edmund White, Allan Gurganus, Adrienne Rich, Clive Barker, Paul Monette,
David Sedaris, Michael Cunningham, John Berendt, Tony Kushner, “Dykes to
Watch Out For” cartoonist Alison Bechdel and Marguerite Yourcenar, author
of Alexis and Memoirs of Hadrian and the only
woman ever elected to the Académie Française.
This is heavy company for
Bonnie Shimko, who describes herself as “old and a little shopworn,” and
protests that she’s “one of the biggest nobodies around.” Her natural
diffidence is both sunny and self-effacing. Before her retirement in 1999 —
after spending 33 years teaching children in Peru, New York, “how to tie
their shoes and use a Kleenex” — she “never even thought about writing,”
she says. “It never dawned on me.” Some years back, on a whim, Shimko
entered a limerick contest in the old Saturday
Evening Post. But “Someone else won my $100,” she reports, and the
sting of rejection was such that she put down her pen and didn’t pick it up
again for a decade.
Once retired, however,
Shimko found a new calling. It took her four years and at least one
abandoned manuscript to finish Letters
in the Attic, and she got it published the hard way, after receiving
multitudes of “those horrific, slap-in-the-face ‘Dear Author’ rejections.”
No one was more surprised than Shimko herself — “stunned” is the word she
uses — when she heard her name called at this year’s Lamda ceremony in Los
Angeles, where she shared the stage with Betty DeGeneres and Judy Shepard
(Matthew’s mother). She beat, among others, playwright Harvey Fierstein,
author of Torch Song Trilogy and
a veritable queen of gay lit.
And here’s the kicker:
Shimko isn’t gay, lesbian, “bi,” “transgendered,” “intersexed” or any of
the other rarefied labels people feel compelled to slap on themselves. Letters in the Attic was “written
from the heart,” Shimko insists. It’s “a mother/daughter
coming-of-age/coming-out story” inspired by the odyssey of her own
daughter, Sarah, who came out as a lesbian to her family in 1998, as Shimko
recently told Out in the Mountains.
“It’s a labor of love and
also an apology for acting less than kind when I heard the news. Since
then, I’ve come to my senses.”
Mainly, Shimko credits “the
wonderful members of the Burlington, Vermont, PFLAG [Parents, Families and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays] chapter” for “working magic” on her point of
view. But it takes more than “acceptance” and adjustment to the facts to
write a book as bright, funny and lovely as this.
Letters in the Attic is the story of Lizzy McMann, an
unusually intelligent 12-year-old, who lives with her mother, a faded piano
player, and her father, a shiftless jerk, in a run-down motel in Phoenix,
Arizona. It’s 1962, during the Kennedy-Camelot years, a point that wouldn’t
need mentioning if Lizzy’s mother, Veronica, weren’t so hopelessly romantic
and prone to self-delusion.
Mama’s a stickler for good hygiene,”
Lizzy explains, “and I have followed her lead… She bought me my own jar of
Tussy deodorant, so if my body shifts gear on me in the middle of any given
day, I will be prepared. She tells me that any time now I will turn from a
little girl into a woman, and when that happens, I will hold an odor if I’m
not careful. It’s better to be safe than sorry — that’s her motto.
‘Remember, Lizzy,’ she has told me a thousand times, ‘there is no reason
for anybody to go around with an offensive odor in this day and age — soap
and water are cheap.’”
With that, Shimko’s off,
chronicling the unexpected ways in which Lizzy does become a woman, bucking
up her mother when her father dumps her for a younger model — “the harlot,”
as Lizzy calls her, who “doesn’t hint around about her makeup” and does “a
good job matching the color of her eyelids to [her] dress…”
It’s lines like these that
give Letters its kick. Betrayed
and abandoned, Lizzy and Veronica head to “Ridge-wood,” New York — plainly,
a stand-in for Plattsburgh — where Veronica grew up and where Lizzy will
uncover a host of family, social and sexual secrets. It all works out in
the end, but this isn’t your ordinary adolescent fiction; it isn’t Pollyanna.
Lizzy’s wise, quiet,
Walton-like grandfather is balanced by a nasty, bitter, sadistic wife —
Veronica’s mother — whose redemption lies not in the changes she makes for
herself but in the understanding others will bring to her. There are
teachers, storekeepers, classmates, boyfriends: a whole raft of country, cornball
Our Town figures who nevertheless
surprise you with their independent bent. And, of course, there’s Eva, the
girl next door, who looks like Natalie Wood and becomes the object of
Lizzy’s still shapeless desire, “a riddle without any clues.” With luck,
being gay won’t show on her face.
“This is when you have to
believe that there are certain directions set out for just you to follow,
like in a dress pattern,” Lizzy reflects. “If you ignore them and try to
put your life together yourself, you will end up wrong.” On this, heroine
and author might agree.
“The day Anita Miller
called to say they wanted to publish my book validated me as a writer,”
Shimko discloses. Anita and Jordan Miller are the husband-and-wife brains
behind Academy Chicago, the small but prestigious Midwestern publishers who
gave Shimko her break. “The thought of people outside my immediate family
and circle of friends reading my words was a real thrill. You know how it
feels when you’re not expecting something completely amazing to happen in
your life and it does, so that you go around for the next week smiling
inside and out? That’s how it was.”
And, for now, for Shimko,
that’s how it is. “I can’t even stress how much fun I’ve been having,” she
tells me on the phone. Since she won her award, both her name and her sales
have been rising. She’s made the usual round of bookstores, done a lot of
her own promotion and is prepared to “speak to any group that will listen”
on gay and lesbian issues. Her daughter’s reception of Letters in the Attic
is “the greatest gift” she’s had.
Shimko says she tries “to
look like somebody who’s smart and clever enough to have written a book
worth spending money on.” She’s already started another novel, and admits
that most of her ideas still come to her “in the grocery store.” Which
leads to her sole piece of advice for aspiring writers:
“Well, everybody’s already
heard the stuff about joining a writers’ group,” Shimko says, “not giving
up, not letting rejection get you down, and reading as much as you can, so
I’ll mention one that’s even more important: Never leave home without a
pencil. A paper’s good, too, but a pencil is an absolute necessity.”
While you’re at it, tie
your shoes — you don’t want to trip when you’re just getting started.
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