The box wasn’t very heavy but it was bigger than me: seven feet by three but only two or three inches deep, therefore awkward to carry. I was walking home and there were hills and traffic lights on the way.

I struggled with the box a few metres outside the building, trying to carry it under my arm and on my back, but nothing worked. Other people were around and some offered to help but I knew they couldn’t.

Eventually I decided to open the box and see if it would be easier to carry the contents on their own. Using a small crowbar, I pried one of the broad sides off.

Inside were a few little items rattling around and a lot of dust and matted old spiderwebs. I saw that there wasn’t anything I needed.

I left the box behind and went home lightly and alone.

The URLs are pretty hilarious. There’s goisrael.com, pilgrimtours.com, followtherabbi.com, sonoflifeclassic.com, and walkwherejesuswalked.com.

I guess it’s a pretty big niche market in a religious country like the USA.

Coincidentally, the people I’ve been staying with the last two weeks have these books:

I’m leaving tomorrow so I guess I have a lot of reading to do today.

Image by Sarah

Like a lot of people, I was skeptical of the impact of changing one’s Facebook profile image to show support of a cause.

Yesterday I read this article about the latest George Takei-led Facebook thing of changing your profile image to the Human Rights Commission‘s equal-sign logo to show your support of marriage equality while the US Supreme Court talks about it.

While it acknowledges that ‘[u]ltimately, we all know that Antonin Scalia gives zero craps what your avatar is’, it also quotes a young woman saying this:

There is something so incredibly moving and overwhelming when you open your FB page, and you see friends from all over the country, indeed the world — straight, gay, left, right — taking the time to swap out their mugs for the HRC symbol in solidarity, so that your entire newsfeed is one big same-sex marriage rally.

So I changed mine purely in the hope of giving my non-straight friends and family that lovely feeling you get when something important inside you relaxes because someone else stands up and says they care about who you really are.

It’s really fun seeing the different ways people are playing with the image to make it theirs. Check out some of the ones I’ve come across. My personal favourite is Lady Liberty and Lady Justice getting it on.

Activism can be fun and playful!

Apparently women who like to have a lot of sex want to be able to be called sluts and call themselves sluts without it being an insult or put down.

They want SlutWalk to be both an anti-victim blaming protest and a promiscuity pride parade. While these are both important feminist issues, I’m convinced that they are so disparate that one event cannot be about both.

You can read the rest here.

1. When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Saviour had spoken with her.

2. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, ‘Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Saviour said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.’

3. Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things.

‘Magdalen with the Smoking Flame’
Georges de La Tour, c1640

5. Then Mary wept and said to Peter, ‘My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Saviour?’

6. Levi answered and said to Peter, ‘Peter you have always been hot tempered.

7. ‘Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries.

8. ‘But if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well.

9. ‘That is why He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Saviour said.’

10. And when they heard this they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach.

Image credit

‘Aunty Sarah, come play outside with me.’

‘OK, but let’s put our jackets on first.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s cold and you’ve just been sick.’

‘But I’m hot from running.’

‘But the air outside is cold so it’ll make you cold.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the air doesn’t have much heat in it so it’s going to take the heat from your body and then you’ll get cold.’

‘Why?’

‘Because heat likes to be spread out all even between the air and your skin.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of heat transfer.’

‘Oh, OK.’

[Two minutes go by.]

‘Aunty Sarah I want to unzip my jacket.’

‘No, keep it zipped.’

‘Why?’

‘Remember before when we were talking about thermodynamics?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Hey, you know, I was reading about this girl in Albuquerque who made millions self-publishing her book. You should do that.’

‘Oh yeah, where did you read about that?’

‘In the paper.’

‘The newspaper?’

‘Well. Yeah.’

‘You know what they write about in the newspaper?’

‘Um…’

‘News.’

‘Yeah…’

‘You know what the definition of “news” is?’

‘Uh…’

‘”Things that are unusual, that don’t happen very often, even things that hardly ever happen.” Someone making millions self-publishing a book without already being Stephen King or JK Rowling comes under that category.’

‘Interesting.’

‘So I don’t think I will do that. I’ll leave the publishing to the people who actually work in publishing. And they’ll leave the writing to me. Most of it, at least.’

Image credit

And I loved it. Reading it was a beautiful experience: from the contained poetry of the title and the delicately brutal cover art, the sweet and shocking opening scene, all the way to the horrifying final realisation of the young protagonist.

Her name is Ruth and her world is made of blood and ice, tradition and secrets, love and jealousy. The beat of the natural world throbs beneath her experiences like water under ice:

In my mind’s eye, I can see shaggy wolves—grey, silver and some near to black—pawing the ice for that meat froze deep in the water. Hunters crouching in the scrub, sitting in a hide on the lakeshore, can fire on them without slipping on the ice or even being close enough to smell the damp fur. I don’t so much like the idea of all that dark blood spread out on the ice and snow. But I do know I don’t ever want to meet those yellow eyes out on the woods alone.

And for her, the natural world includes humans, and God:

Folks stay busy talking about flesh falling into sin, who and what’s under the blood, and their prayer life and spiritual walk. All that is more about women and men, than God. But women and men is where God is.

Thick with Biblical allusions and hymnal rhythms, the story has a satisfying complexity, with ever more layers of meaning to be discovered hidden within the understated prose. Plus, I was brought up in a religious family, so I recognised most of the references which made me feel pretty clever.

Anyway. Go read it!

It is the story of how some of the ancient Semitic peoples became Jewish. Throughout the book, the god of the Hebrews reveals himself to Noah and Abraham and some of their relatives through various draconian catastrophes. It also chronicles the efforts of Abraham and his descendants to convert the rest of the Middle East to monotheism, and scamming various monarchs.

When it was that new, Judaism had very few rules. All it really insisted on was that there was only one god (or at least that theirs was better than and/or the boss of all the other gods); and that boys had to be circumcised as a blood offering to that god.

There were no kosher rules, no marriage laws, no prohibition of ‘sodomy’, no funeral rites. Most of the customs that punctuated people’s lives were those of various Eurasian polytheisms and Semitic traditions, where most people recognised an endless pantheon: household gods and totems, goddesses of childbirth and menstruation, and deities of both genders who were connected with trees, rock formations, bodies of water, and places.

The women of Genesis are important because stories involving them are the basis of how our culture views and positions women now. Their stories have also been used to justify millennia of devaluing, disempowering and even dehumanising women.

I was inspired to explore Genesis as source material for fiction by American writer and scholar Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. It tells the story of an important yet silent female character in Genesis: Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob (later renamed Israel) and the great‑granddaughter of patriarch and matriarch Abraham and Sarah.

Genesis 34 says that Dinah was kidnapped and raped by the prince of Shechem who then wanted to marry her. Her brothers decided they wouldn’t stand for their sister to be dishonoured and lured the king of Shechem into a trap. They told him that they couldn’t allow Dinah to marry his son unless all the men in his city were circumcised. He agreed and while all the men and boys and male infants were recovering from their surgery, Dinah’s brothers rampaged around the city axe-murdering them all.

The Bible never mentions Dinah again.

Her story caught my attention when I was a teenager. I wanted to know how she felt about being the excuse for her brothers to commit genocide. I wanted to know how she would have felt about being engaged to someone who had attacked her. I wondered if she had seen her brothers chopping up any of Shechem’s men or children. I wanted to ask her if she was really raped or if her brothers were just being territorial dicks.

So of course I was ecstatic to find that Diamant’s novel fitted an idea that I had long toyed with: that Dinah wasn’t raped at all and that her brothers had betrayed her as they later betrayed their brother Joseph.

Early last year, I started working on a story based on Chapter 19 of Genesis. The Bible’s protagonist here is Lot, Abraham’s nephew. My protagonist is Lot’s youngest daughter, the one who is completely silent in the original text. Her elder sister gets to say one thing, and it is horrifying. I’ve just finished the first draft and, at ten thousand words, it is the longest story I’ve written.

Genesis 19 tells the story of Lot, who lives in the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah on the plains near the Dead Sea. There are too many men in the cities having sex with each other so god decides to destroy the place. Because of Lot’s family connections and because he only has sex with women, god sends a couple of angel men to warn him. Before they have to leave, some horny guys come banging on the door wanting to have sex with the angels. Lot tries to convince them to save their souls by raping his two virgin daughters instead. The guys aren’t interested in women and keeping threatening to bash the door down. Luckily god throws a thunderbolt or something, which sends the horny guys blind and they leave unsatisfied.

Pretty soon, God rains down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot gets out of town just in time, along with his two daughters, but his wife can’t resist looking back to see her home burn and is punished by being transmogrified into a pillar of salt. Lot and the girls end up living in a cave in the middle of nowhere because Lot’s all paranoid that everyone hates him and god’s going to come back and rain down some more burning sulphur.

One day, the elder daughter says to her sister, ‘We’re never going to find husbands living like this. We should get our father drunk and have sex with him so we can carry on his family line.’

That’s the only time any of the three women in the stories speaks. (None of them are ever named.) It must have sounded like a really good idea to the younger daughter because they do have sex with their father and they both conceive sons who go on to father nations that the Israelites hated. The text absolves Lot of any wrong-doing by emphasising that he was so drunk that he knew nothing about what happened. (Which raises some interesting physiological questions.)

I’ve just finished the first draft of his silent daughter’s version of the story. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my writing life. At ten thousand words it is also the longest story I’ve ever written. I hope to continue delving into Biblical women’s stories and create a collection. The women on my list are: Lilith and Eve, Noah’s daughters-in-law, Sarah and Hagar, and Tamar.

There are a couple of things that I’m acutely aware of with this project. First, I’m writing from within the culture I’m criticising, and would like to avoid the trap of devaluing that culture in the process. I believe my culture can stand up to being criticised and that through criticism and self‑reflection, it can continue becoming one that values all people equally.

The second challenge is that I’m coming at these stories from a position that is profoundly more powerful than that of my protagonists. To ensure the project is meaningful, I desperately want to avoid two things: patronising my deeply oppressed protagonists, thereby further disempowering them; or going in the opposite direction and making them into twenty-first-century-style feminists dropped into ancient settings.

Ten thousand years ago, no culture produced feminists like me and mine. I am exploring how my ancient ancestors might have approached their world, not how I would approach it.

I hope that by imagining what their lives might have been like and putting myself into their places, I will gather up some sort of understanding about how and why women all those centuries ago made their decisions. I hope that I will be able to write these stories to touch people in ways that lead to greater understanding of our world and what we want to make of it.

I will be looking for people to read and critique the stories as I produce them, preferably people who are familiar with Genesis. Please let me know if you would like to help!

Image credit

‘Are there paedophiles in your neighbourhood?’

And I think

‘If I was raising kids in my neighbourhood they wouldn’t be running around the streets of inner city Melbourne without me until they were old enough to know better than to talk to strangers and anyway if they were going to be attacked by a sexual predator that predator would likely be someone I had invited to spend time with us myself so whether or not there are paedophiles in my neighbourhood is pretty moot you stupid fear-mongering spaminator.’

So then because they’ve pissed me off I click on the email because when someone pisses me off I like to engage with them further just make sure they have more chances to piss me off. And the email says

BUT. Above the image there’s a line of hyperlinked text saying

‘Is your arrest public?’

And I’m like

WAY TO HEDGE YOUR BETS YOU EVIL FEAR-MONGERING-ON-BOTH-SIDES-OF-THIS-ISSUE BASTARDS.

Get the hell out of my internet.

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