.
.
l
l

  

  

 

profile  

 

“[GIossy magazines] are fine, but the feminism has gone out of it.
Now it’s all about fashion, lifestyle, celebrities, parenting.

Maybe it’s because-we won, but I doubt it.”

 

Bv EUAN BEAR

n the quiet hills above Norwich,
Vermont, a small white cape-style
house sits on the lefi side of the
road, behind a birch tree holding a
small sign:_New Victoria Publishers.
It is an unassuming place for a pub-
lisher whose mission was originally
to revolutionize gender relationships
in the United States. But there it is.
Work and life partners Beth
Dingman and Claudia McKay have
44,000 books in the distribution
pipeline, in bookstores around the
country, and in storage in their
garage. Beth is short and wiry-tough,
with short iron gray hair, a practical

businesswoman. Claudia is tall, with .

short auburn curls and a medium
build, articulate and visionary.
Thcy’ve added a collection of les-
bian-oriented rentable videos to
broaden their cultural reach. But both
women admit that the press they’ve
spent 27 years of their professional

lives on is struggling.

It helps not one bit that
their primary distributor has gone
bankrupt — again — and that they
won’t receive payment for any of the
books the distributor has shipped out
or has in its own warehouse.

Another factor is that, as
Claudia says, “The culture has
changed, and wejust don’t get it.”
Beth continues, “Lesbian feminist
enterprises are going through a major
transfonnation and difiicult times,
especially publishers and book stores.
The current situation is not just a
slump — it isn’t going to get better.
The culture has changed and women
don’t need the affirmation of the
word lesbian in books: it’s so much
more available now.”

We commiserate over how
many women’s presses and book-
stores have gone out of business in
the last five years, and it’s a long list.
In part, the bookstores fell victim to
the same forces that have closed
independent bookstores across the

country: cutthroat competition by
large chains offering huge discounts.

But in part, “The agenda
has changed. Lesbianism is now
about assimilation. Feminism was
more radical, about changing the val-
ues of society so we’re notjust men
in high heels,” Beth suggests.

New Victoria began as a
print shop run by a feminist collec-
tive in Lebanon, New Hampshire in
1975. The group came together
through a women’s writing workshop
and included four women who had
been fired from another press.
Claudia had been arrested with a
group of Quakers demonstrating at
the White House some time before,
and was optimistically expecting a
$30,000 settlement orjudicial award
for false arrest. The settlement was
eventually pared down to $1500, all
of which went to the ACLU for legal
expenses. The group then applied to
the Haymarket People.’s Fund for
money to buy a printing press —
Haymarket declined to provide funds

Claudia McKay

directly, but did connect the women
with a donor who could provide a
press. They printed a lot of local
women’s, nonprofit, and leftist move-
ment fliers and posters.

The following year, New
Victoria Publishers was born as a
nonprofit organization. Claudia
remembers, “It really was a women’s
community effort. Beth, I think you
were the only lesbian in the collec-
tive at first.” Claudia reaches for a
file of old photographs of the original
women who worked on the print
shop. She flips it open and begins
listing names,.along with where the
women went when they left New
Victoria. Most simply moved on to
other projects.

The first year of publishing,
Beth got ajob teaching printing in
Bradford in order to support the
press. In 1976, the first edition of the
children’s book Brown Like Me (orig-
inally titled Noelle Lamperti is Brown
Book, it was reissued in 1999 with a
new introduction and afterword) was

published. And the next year, poetry
by Maine writer Miriam Dyak, who
named herself after a tribe in Borneo
(I met the poet a few years earlier,
and I had always thought she said it
was matriarchal, but I could find no
reference to matriarchal or matrilin-
eal traditions with regard to the Dyak
of Borneo). Dyak’s second book of
poems, Dying was embraced by
Marge Piercy, who called it, “an
extraordinary work  as real as a
lump of stone, as the palm of your
hand.” ' I
Then came Tilt, a collection
of northern New England women’s »
art and writing that included poetry
by Louise Erdrich, who was then a
student at Dartmouth, a member of
the first women’s class to matriculate
there. The publishers got a grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts
to print a collection of women’s spec-
ulative fiction called WomarzSpace,
that included a story by Joanna Russ,
author of The Female Man.
Eventually, the group had