Curious, Healing
Books about healing, business, and fun
Subtitle: A Novel
Recommended to me by: a friend
A wonderful multi-layered novel about a doctor, her poet-husband, and their five kids, the youngest of whom insists on wearing dresses. The family brims with love and wackiness as they struggle with the many dilemmas of being themselves. They shelter their youngest member as best they can from society’s dysfunctional responses to someone who does not slot neatly into the gender binary.
Highly recommended.
Translated from the Japanese by Anne Ishii
Recommended to me by: Yatima in the 50 books by POC community
Yatima found this graphic novel via its blurb by Alison Bechdel and recommended it enthusiastically. I loved it too.
Mike Flanagan, Canadian white guy, visits his dead husband’s brother and niece in Japan. They are both traditionally Japanese. Yaichi the brother has a lot of unexamined homophobia and buried emotions, but invites Mike to stay with them anyway. Kana the niece didn’t know that men could marry each other, but responds to Mike warmly.
The book handles relationships and emotions tenderly. Kana is adorable. This book is about the small things in life, meals and sleeping and showers, and the largest things, death and loss and love and relationships and coming out as gay.
The characters are kind to one another. There is something to be said for polite emotional reserve. Some drawings show what Yaichi is yelling inside his head, and the neutral things he says out loud.
As is traditional for Manga, the book reads right to left. I had to be careful to read the panels in the right order on each page. Apparently there are more volumes to come!
Highly recommended.
Recommended to me by: 2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award winner
Sensual language about food, aromas, colors, and landscapes that reminds me of “Like Water for Chocolate.” Wise, foolish, loving, cruel, growing, changing young people, sometimes with too much teen angst for my taste. Matter-of-fact bodies and sexuality, both cis and trans, gay and straight, without porn or objectification. The balance between taking action and waiting for the time to be right. Relationships, community, secrets, and revelations. Making art, being kind.
Highly recommended.
Subtitle: Celebrating 30 Years, An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing
Recommended to me by: gift from a friend
We’Moon, now in its 35th year, is an feminist astrological datebook that centers the moon cycles rather than the sun cycles. This anthology contains the extraordinary history of this project, as well as sample art and writing from each year’s calendar.
Musawa and others created the first multi-lingual We’Moon calendar in a women’s land collective, Kvindelandet, in Denmark. The first five editions were published from different European countries as Musawa moved around and found other women volunteers willing to help. We’Moon publishing moved to women’s land in Oregon after that, and has resided here ever since.
One woman’s inspiration and dedication has inspired and nourished many others with this ongoing celebration of women’s rhythms. While she generously credits everyone who stepped forward to support and contribute to the project, it is clear that it was her leadership that made it happen.
While I’ve occasionally owned We’Moon calendars, I didn’t realize that each year’s theme is based on the Tarot Major Arcana for that year.
This anthology is fun both to read sequentially, and to open randomly to see what message appears. Recommended!
Recommended to me by: s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’
This wild fantasy felt true to me, true to inner journeys and struggles and transformations. It has violence in it, but not a lot compared to the modern fashion, and deaths are grieved instead of being passed over without comment. Heroes, villains, and monsters alike are complex, whole people. Friendships are important enough to endure loss and hardship for.
Definitely worth spending an afternoon on the porch in the sun with this book!
Subtitle: Observations on Gender Identity
Recommended to me by: Reid Vanderburgh, MA, LMFT
Speaking as both a trans man and a psychotherapist, Vanderburgh provides a compassionate, detailed tour through all the aspects of gender transition, from contemplation to completion. Client vignettes provide real-world examples.
The book candidly addresses every question I had about gender transition as well as many I had never considered. It does leave lingering differences to grow up socialized as one gender and transition to another. Conscious resocialization is needed. People transitioning male to female learn about losing male privilege and taking up less conversational and physical space to fit in with other women.
People with DID (multiple personalities) can be transgender, and at the same time a history of abuse is a complicating factor. In abusive families, children may desire to be a different gender to feel less vulnerable or identify with a less abusive parent.
Throughout, the book emphasizes the physically dissonant aspects of having the wrong hormones for one’s gender identity.
If a person is capable of developing truly intimate, honest, fulfilling adult relationships in the gender assigned to them at birth—they’re probably not trans. Part of what it means to be trans is an inability to truly mature into adulthood in one’s birth gender assignment.
Vanderburgh advocates a slow, self-observant approach to hormone therapy to help adult clients confirm that they are on the right path. Some transgender children are certain of their identity from toddlerhood and should be fully supported in social and physical transition when they are ready.
Recommended for anyone who is interested in learning in more depth about what it means to be transgender and how to help make transition easier.
Vanderburgh recently announced the closure of his therapeutic practice to pursue teaching and writing opportunities.