I visited a senior seminar on gay & lesbian literature at Siena College today to read some poetry and talk about being a queer poet/journalist. Remembering some of the questions that I had felt unprepared to answer last time I did this, several years ago, I actually prepared some thoughts about different types of poems that may be influenced by the sexuality of the writer such as: response/political poems, outing/explaining poems, and poems where you want to write about something else and the gender of the person you were marrying/dating/fucking is incidental but likely to come up and you have to think about whether it's going to distract your reader from your other point and whether you care.

After some conversation, prompted by the professor, about that latter point, the class proceeded to illustrate it amusingly by asking me only questions about my family and related issues, and practically nothing about writing. What did I expect? It was a group of students at a Catholic college, whose professor partially teaches this class so there is a space to talk about queer issues at all, and they'd just heard about their first poly family.

Luckily, I'm just as happy to talk about that as I am to talk about poetry. Their questions were intelligent, and interestingly quite different from the ones that my peers inevitably ask. Not a single question about either jealousy or who sleeps where. Lots of questions about parenting, legal custody, marriage, and biphobia. (And the exclusivity as a triad question, which is rarer than you might think.) Good on them.

Of course I was also probably inadvertently mean. In the context of talking (very briefly) about our restricted level of openness, I wrapped up by noting that a party like the one referenced in the poem that had raised the question would probably be fine, but that we didn't have so much access to that anymore, not being on a college campus any longer.  It was clear from the looks, and the not-long-later question about where I went to college, that if Siena is having those parties, which seems doubtful, no one told these folks about them. See above. Catholic college, even if a fairly tolerant one. Not Oberlin. Duh, Miriam.

But that was a side note. Overall, I got to read some stuff that I hadn't dusted off in a long time (including one that I had revised largely based on the class of hers I visited last time being confused by an earlier draft), have a good conversation, and get out of the house into the beautiful weather. Good times.