Pod: Rural Spaces and Queer Women

With Catharine Wright and Estela González:

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As residents of a small Vermont town, writers Catharine Wright and Estela González often turn their attention to how queer women experience both living and writing in rural spaces. In this 60-minute Pod they will discuss how a small town in Vermont and a port town in Mexico inspired their recent fiction projects (one a novel under contract) as well as explore dynamics of class, race, sexuality and culture in their writing. They will discuss the Pearls they will share at the festival, and how other lesbian writers have informed their work.

Estela González writes in English and Spanish about the liminal lives of LGBT individuals, sea turtles, monarch butterflies, and those whose cultures are seen as less. Her novel Arribada, slated to appear in April 2022 with Cynren Press, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether award in 2019. Estela’s work appears in magazines and anthologies such as Barcelona Review, Coal Hill Review, La Colmena, Cobalt, Cronopio, Feminine Rising, Flash Frontier, Flyway, Label me Latina, Letralia, Luvina, Resonancias, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea, Sinister Wisdom, Solstice, and Under the Volcano. Estela divides her time between Mazatlán, México, and Vermont, where she teaches Latin American literature and culture. She is now finishing a collection of stories titled The Age of Aquarius. Her new project is a novel of ghosts in the Mexican Pacific coast. For more information about this author and to view book purchase information, visit the Authors page.

Catharine Wright is an eighth generation Vermonter who teaches courses such as Outlaw Women and Writing Gender and Sexuality at Middlebury College. She has earned several writing prizes and published fiction and poems in magazines such as The Feminist Wire, Blue Mesa Review, Negative Capability, Pleiades, Hurricane Alice, and Narrative Northeast. She has collaboratively written and edited two nonfiction books, Vermonters At Their Craft, and Social Justice Education. She just completed a novel about a town clerk and lesbian mother who leaves her civil union partner to find new love in a small town. For more information about this author and to view book purchase information, visit the Authors page.