Featured Ky Photographer, Sarah Lyon

"Jessica" by Sarah Lyon

About the photo:
When I asked Jessica if I could make an informal portrait of her, she suggested we go to Tink’s because she had heard of it but had never been there. Tink’s Pub is the only lesbian bar in Louisville; offering dancing, drag shows, live music, and pool tables. Low-ceilings with a mismatched decor that changes occasionally but never seem to make sense; the smoky neighborhood bar is what one might call a “dive”. It is one of the more diverse gay bars in town, attracting a wide age range of lesbians, gay men, and working class people from its surrounding Germantown neighborhood. Often it is almost empty; other times it gets so packed, you have to wait for 20 minutes or more in line for one of three bathroom stalls. Tink’s is a poignant place for me because while growing up in Louisville I did not have many people I could relate with about my sexuality. The only way I could get information as a teenager about gay culture was through (usually bad) lesbian movies and music. On the jukebox at Tink’s, there are so many of the songs that I listened to during that time. To hang out there is to revel in that nostalgia. There is something about going to a place where you have at least one thing in common with most people there, even if that is the only thing. It feels safe. I suspect that gay people who move to Louisville, from more rural areas of Kentucky, may feel similarly about having access to clubs and bars like Tink’s. The simple portrait of Jessica, who actually does not identify as a lesbian, does not directly address her sexuality. For me it is more about her comfortable relationship with the photographer and my delight in sharing this slightly odd yet meaningful place with her in the middle of the day.

Sarah's Bio
Sarah Lyon is an artist living in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate from Miami University of Ohio with her BFA in 2000, her work has been shown in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and internationally. She began her series of Louisville Portraits and Spaces since returning to her hometown in 2001. Her work also includes documentation of a local seafood restaurant chain, called “Shooting Moby Dick at Night: Searching for the Great White Whale.” Sarah produces the Female Mechanics Calendar, a wall calendar that features real women mechanics working in their environments, traveling to them around the country on her vintage motorcycle. She has received grant support for various projects from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and The Kentucky Arts Council. An adjunct professor of Photography at Bellarmine University in from 2006-2007, Sarah works as a freelance photographer and represented by Zephyr Gallery in Louisville.

www.sarahlyon.com

Feature KY Writer, Megan Riggle

Gestation
by Megan Riggle
For Ashleigh


The patios of August heat cannot hold us in,
Nor your last month of pregnancy.
A Mediterranean salad with hearts of palm
Brought by the Mediterranean waiter
Whose language you speak.
He is much more to our tastes
than this pretense of food.
Indecent sisters, we stare at him.
The salt-blue eyes,
Black curls on his head,
A ringed finger.
We still have shameless little girls in us,
Ruthless, toying things too willing not to play.
He is lighter than that ring,
And the white sea-foam that birthed you,
So easy to drag along.
And who denies our sex, especially yours
Swollen just now with the full moon of a child,
Taut belly protruding to the sun?

Featured KY Author, Nickole Brown

Christmas
by Nickole Brown

I know I didn’t come home
again this year, but I did come
close, came all the way out to the place
that sells trees in the parking lot
between the fast food joint and super store.
You know the one, a fence strung up
with bare bulbs the size of fists, all the trees
roped sloppy, their starless tops pointing
every direction but up, a semi truck
with an open gate selling
mottled oranges, unshelled peanuts, peppermint
poles, jogging pants.

The woman who stepped out
of the sleeper cab was another one of those
could-be-pretties, rubbed raw by wind, and
her hair, dyed three shades
too light, floated two inches above brown
root, the white tips disappearing into winter
sky. She says, I’ll give you
that tree there for thirty.

These trees are thirty dollars? I ask.
No, I said I’d give YOU
that THERE tree for thirty, her voice gritted
with hate—to her, I am a snot, a faux
fur, an artsy-fartsy Holly Hobby from
Bardstown Road. I can sell some trees now
for cheap, she says, Do you hear?
For cheap. I feel poverty’s

contagion come over me,
like I’ll catch something
if I stay too long, that I’ll turn
again into a kid clutching
a doll that does nothing special
but close her eyes
when you lay her back.
I start to leave when
I’m stopped—a reindeer head
dressed in baseball cap and tie, hung
on a wall plaque. What’s more, he’s
animated, singing "My Old Kentucky Home," and
under him a woman propped
in a wheelchair
laughing and singing along. Her skull
comes up through her face
fierce like a spring bulb, she is green, almost
gray, her complexion the shade
of just a few weeks left.

Sister, I am ashamed to say it
but I was frightened—not of death
but resignation, the acceptance
of enough, gifts wrapped under a tree
with its bad side pushed
to the wall, the holiday
jar of hard candy
stuck in one multi-colored lump.

Nickole's Bio
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, published by Red Hen in September 2007. She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Diagram Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Mammoth Books' Sudden Stories anthology, and Starcherone Press anthology PP / FF. She also co-edited the anthology, Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight. She has served as the National Publicity Consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and as the Program Coordinator for the Union Institute & University writing residency in Slovenia. Nickole has worked at a nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books for eight years. She currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.


www.nickolebrown.com

Featured KY Photographer, Annie Langan

Cigar Box, 2007

Statement of Purpose
Inspired by minimal compositions and visually lush environments, my images appear silent, heightening the subjects’ existence within the frame. The women throughout my photographs express a quiet solitude of yearning for something that is unknown. Here, landscapes become scenarios of life growing up in lush Kentucky countrysides, forests, and sweeping fields.
Through visual isolation, I am creating interactions that accentuate the individual, either in mental contemplation, distraction, or gazing outward to an on-looking viewer. This experiential representation envelops the audience in a reading of each image that is its own absorbed entity in time.

www.annielangan.com

Featured KY Photographer, Jessica Woolard

"You will Stunt your Growth" by Jessica Woolard

Artist Statement
I was born in Stockton, California, but I am from Kentucky. My family and I moved to the suburbs of Louisville in December of 1990. Prior to the move, the extent of cold weather I had known was the day I woke up to find a puddle with a thin layer of ice. I believe we had on winter coats that day… Arriving in Kentucky during winter was rather shocking. I had never been in a place that seemed so grey, dismal and dirty. Sometime passed, and something happened that I had never experienced, the seasons changed. Everything was green and lovely. From then on, each day was spent in the creek behind my backyard. I had fallen in love with Kentucky, and the scenic changes it had to offer.

Naturally, when I heard about this project, I wanted to recreate my time spent in those woods. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the uncomplicated years behind the fence really didn’t have anything to do with growing up female in Kentucky. It was years after that, when I was forced to realize that there is a difference between girls and boys, other than hair styles.

This is the time I began growing up. My “tom-boy” personality became physically noticeable, due to my delayed development. It did not help that I spent most of my time hanging out with the older kids, my body seemed light years behind. Our suburban community was no different than any. There was nothing to do besides drink, smoke and have sex. Fortunately, because of my boyish figure, I was stuck with the first two options. That was growing up for me. Sitting on the side lines, feeling insecure with some cigarettes, and whatever alcohol I could collect.


Jessica's Bio
My name is Jessica Woolard and I am currently 24 years old. I grew up winning every coloring contest I entered. Once I got a little too old for that, I had to wait until my fourth year of school at the University of Louisville to take my first photography class. There, I began developing (no pun intended) my take on art. I received my BFA from U of L with a concentration in 2d art in the spring of 2006. I now spend my time taking pictures of my friends with their clothes off.

Featured KY Author, Marian Silliman

Miss What?
Written by Marian Silliman
Performed on stage at Actors Theater on September 14th, 2007 for the Kentucky Girlhood Project.

It started with a smile. Her mother first noticed it and thought something must be done. From ear to ear, with teeth aligned, a thrust out chin and sheepish eyes, Amy smiled and her mother saw an opportunity. “Come here, Amy, I want to show you something.”
Amy ran from the kitchen still laughing at a joke after hanging up the phone when her mother’s eager voice stopped her. “Show me what?” she called from the other room.
“You need to come here to see it.”
“See what?” Amy said her back still to the door.
“You’ll have to see it for me to show it to you,” her mother said teasingly but with an exasperation that after another whiny what-for! she just got angry. “Come here this minute, young lady.”
Amy sighed. She could not stand being called ‘young lady,’ it sounded so old the way it dripped off her mother’s tongue. Then there was something else to it, as if she were responsible for something, as if there were expectations of her, when all Amy really thought of herself as a 13 year old kid without boobs and social studies homework due and a pimple that just changed places on her face.
Her mother waited, arms crossed, as Amy popped her head through the door. “What?” Amy said. She was going to have to do something about that attitude, she thought, but it might just work. “What do you want?”
“I want you to drop the attitude.” Her mother eyeballed her. “And look at this.”
Amy stepped cautiously in the room weary of her mother’s chastising attention and sudden appraising eye. Her mother slide a piece of paper across the table and said, “I think you should do it,” with an enthusiasm that made Amy decide not to before picking up the pamphlet to read, “Be the Belle of the Ball.”
“What is this?”
A picture of a smiling girl in a turquoise dress with off the shoulder ruffles, puffed up hair and a mask of make-up starred at her. Amy starred back. “What am I to do with this?” Amy looked in confusion at her mother whose way too eager plastered on smile was way too similar to the girl’s in the turquoise dress.
“Apply,” her mother said forcefully through the smile.
“To what?”
“To the Ms. Kentucky contest, silly. I know you can read.” She shook her head as if to say, Really!
Her mother had decided days ago that Amy would win, given how talented and pretty her daughter was— even though Amy couldn’t sing or play the piano or any instrument for that matter, and had only taken a year of ballet when young and couldn’t possibly form a dance routine from it, let alone remember which foot went where in a plait. Neither could she, though she tried, having once given herself a concussion, twirl about and throw batons, or whistle if anything a full tune. She was athletic and loved basketball, and was the best on the girls’ team at recess with kickball, and outran any of the boys in her class, but none of those things brought out her more feminine charms. She was well-spoken when not shy, but around even those people her family knew, she clammed-up. She helped her mother in the kitchen but since her mother couldn’t cook and hand no desire to learn, Amy didn’t know how either. She read well, quickly and with a passion for the story, but to watch someone on stage no matter how easy on the eyes go through a copy of Moby Dick, had to be anything but exciting.
And that was the thing, the girl was smart, wanted, needed to be smart, for her own reasons, if only to navigate safer waters, and though she was pretty having taken her mother’s features, there was nothing of an exhibitionist about her. She preferred being behind the curtains to standing center stage, though her mother knew well enough she wasn’t an audience.
“Well, what do you think?”
“What do you think I think?”
“I think you can win.”
“And I think it doesn’t matter.”
“But Amy people respond to you.”
“Yeah, when I ask them questions.” Amy had a hope of being witty when she was older. Her mother frowned.
“Come on, Amy, this is important.” The only response her mother got was the ticking of the coo-coo clock, the only response Amy thought necessary.
This was uncomfortable, like the time her friend dared her to ask her father what 69 meant and she had called up the stairs, Stacey laughing on the phone until she heard a gruff voice, “It’s a sexual term, don’t use it,” and hung up. Amy hoped that Stacey thought she was joking, home alone with no one to hear, but by the time she made it to school the next day, Stacey told everyone that she asked everyone obscene questions and didn’t know what 69 meant at her age and ‘of all the girls’ in the class. That was what hurt the most, whatever that ‘of all’ meant.
“Well I thought you’d be interested,” her mother said in disappointment and again Amy felt like she wasn’t let in on something, how to be, what to do, what she should want. Her mother having dismissed her for the dishes, Amy felt let down, or that she let her mother down which left her down. No matter the reason, Amy suddenly agreed. “Okay, mom, if you think—”
Her mother didn’t let her finish. In excitement, she clapped her hands and, giving her a quick hug, ran past her to the phone leaving Amy shell-shocked and feeling as if she had just sold her soul. Amy walked outside and sat down in a slump on the stoop. Her mother’s voice in her head— “You’re smile’s contagious, people respond to you.”— she thought for a brief moment her mother might be right. She smiled at her neighbor next door, a plastic glued on grin in mimic of the girl in the picture, but he just looked confused and after a quick look around went back to his gardening. She turned to the old lady walking down the street, her expression unchanged, but the woman grimaced and grumbled, “What are you up to?” before moving away as if her contagiousness was a deadly disease rather than a motivating happiness. This wasn’t working. Amy needed to prepare.
She had watched the Ms. America contest a few years back at her babysitter’s request and knew some sort of talent, speech and prancing about the stage was needed to win. The speech with her studious mind and persistent desire to learn that her classmates’ nicknamed ‘brown-nosing’ would be the easiest of the three and Amy set about brainstorming a good topic. While it seemed everyone had talked about saving the rain forests, plants and trees they have never seen in far off places most will never vacate, she thought of horses and their local value, their gleaming coats and wild eyes, gentile nah’s and bulging muscles, and decided that if she were to prepare a speech she would entitle it, “How Glue Is Not For You.”
Motivated, Amy went upstairs determined to prance. She put on her favorite black one piece a favorite since she was nine with three large strips across the middle: pink, purple and turquoise, and posed in the mirror, her belly round and protruding, her flat chest looking even flatter above the stomach. She knew she shouldn’t have eaten that cake with the extra whip cream after dinner gorging her face in front of the television screen, but she couldn’t watch television without eating, a family tradition of hers and her brother that started in the afternoon with four pieces of toast and a bowl of fruity pebbles to chips, popcorn and dessert at night since television watching was what their mother called what they did best and their only extracurricular activity. It did however nothing for her figure.
She hopped around her room in front of the mirror, belly shaking, until she decided to go to her dad’s tool shed for some duct tape. She had seen this on an after school special once, and sucking in her breath started wrapping duct tape tightly around her middle. She’d hope that the air in her chest would form breasts but realized that though puffed up she needed definition and went to the bathroom for some toilet paper. She stuffed the balled up paper on each side to form two distorted and squishy lumps that only looked right from the side.
This was sad. No matter how she smiled or posed, at whatever angle, Amy did not feel right and not just physically. She knew she’d used glue to make her look like a woman, a stupid one at that. She thought about speaking of the rain forest and the cutting down of trees for useless products when the toilet paper for breasts made her think otherwise.
She’d have to settle with her natural attributes, or lack thereof, and hope to out win the audience with talent, but as for the performance Amy had no clue. Nothing of her skill could be set on stage without causing physical injury. She had once played piano when she was little but all she could remember was Mary Had a Little Lamb and the first few notes of Clementine, nothing compared to the Bach and Beethoven the other girls had no doubt practiced to perfection. Her chorus teacher once told her that she had a fine voice, but with 80 years on her and no doubt a hearing aid, Amy wasn’t so sure.
Amy decided she’d put her singing to the test and asked a boy who worked check out at the local super market if she could sing there. Though he could not promise the intercom, there would definitely be a crowd and Amy set about singing at the front entrance. She sang in a high falsetto too uncomfortable for the ears a rendition of “On Eagle’s Wings,” until an elderly lady adjusting her ears and blinking through the noise, put her hand on her arm and asked, should she call for help, had someone tried to hurt her? to which Amy already crimson matched the bright red savings sign behind her. Her friend, after the manger came to see what the noise was about, acted as if he didn’t know her and asked as did the manager for her to leave the premises immediately. The long walk across the parking lot felt worse than dead man’s walking since Amy was to live another day now with this embarrassment and still without a talent to show.
Arriving home, blessed that no one had yet heard of her operatic catastrophe, Amy found a deck of cards and tried to shuffle like they did on TV. A card shark, that’s what she’d be, a regular Ace, but Amy was all thumbs. Her brother witnessing the misguided hand laughed out loud and asked if she was playing a solo game of 52 card pick up, followed by his favorite insult, “Retard.”
“Shut-up!”
Amy gave up. She tried teaching the dog to jump through hoops, thinking if she didn’t have talent, the dog would, but every time tail wagging Snuffles ran around the side for the biscuit no matter how much she yelled or cooed or petted. Amy was in tears.
Unloved and useless, Amy paced her room gathering the courage to tell her mom she wouldn’t be able to win even if she tried. She was talentless, boobless and at this point, with no confidence and very little patience, speechless. Amy starred in the mirror hating what starred back in myopic what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it, and she knew, nothing could be done. She was who she was and she wasn’t Ms. Kentucky, but when Amy found her mother in the kitchen and muttered, um, about the contest, her mother gave her a quick pat on the arm and said not to worry, she’d do just great, her daughter she knew was second to none.
“But I have some unfortunate news,” her mother said wiping her hands on a dishcloth and kneeling down to Amy’s eye level. “Now, don’t get angry, but your mother made a mistake.” Amy starred. “I waited too long to tell you, and when I saw how eager you were, I just didn’t have the heart. We’re only human, right?” And Amy didn’t know what to say. “We missed the application deadline, honey, I’m sorry.”
Amy though mortified, heaved a huge sigh of relief. Her soul intact, she felt her spirits lifting.
“There’s always next year,” her mother said standing, giving her a wink, but Amy knew other wise. She glimpsed a knowing smile through her mother’s disappointed expression decideding not to question it. She did however decide having witnessed her mother’s fevered enthusiasm that one day she’d make her mother proud and that no matter what she’d find her talent and do a little prance.
Happy Birthday, Mom, I made it on stage.


Marian's Bio

Marian Sillman graduated from Boston College, phi beta kappa with an English Literature degree. A member of the New York Writer's Room, she has been hard at work on a novel and a series of short stories. Of her upcoming novel she says, "The plot runs a little like Jack Kerouac in an age with very little beat, more like loud clashes surrounded by some deafening silences, but definitely an on the road type. It has the feel of a memoir but is very much first person fiction, set in the present with memories interrupting and juxtaposing time frames and context." Marian currently resides in New York City.

Featured Ky Visual Artist, Letitia Quesenberry

"After H" Graphite on Plaster


"After H" (Detailed View)
Artist Statement
The majority of my favorite childhood moments involved wandering, usually resulting in long visits with the neighborhood animals. I had the great fortune to grow up with plenty of space to roam, yet surrounded by an ever-changing cast of dogs, kittens and cows– all of which provided endless circumstances to ponder. The process of absorbing these girlhood experiences has continually informed how I see and what I make– mainly, subdued artwork that explores ideas concerning historical memory and the opposition of individual versus collective experience. Drawing, for me, is an attempt to locate and reconvert moments of perceptual disjunction.



Letitia's Bio
Letitia Quesenberry graduated in 1993 with a bachelors degree in fine art from the University of Cincinnati. She has exhibited work at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY and in numerous group shows including “Potential Images of the World” at the Speed Art Museum and the “2007 DePauw Biennial" at DePauw University. Ms. Quesenberry has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Pace Trust, as well as an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She recently participated in a collaborative film project entitled MULTIPLY by the DOZENZ which was shown at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her work has been published in NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS and PITCH MAGAZINE. She was born in 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky, where she lives and works.