340. Lesbian Relevant Sexuality in History: An Interview with Heather Rose Jones

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Howdy, and welcome to episode number 340 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. This is Sarah; I’m from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; and with me today is Heather Rose Jones. I need to issue a deep nerd-diving alert: we are going to take a very nerdy deep dive into lesbian-relevant sexuality in history, so grab your pressure-resistant diving pod and some snacks, ‘cause here we go.

Heather Rose Jones is an author of historical fiction and fantasy, a massive history geek, a blogger and podcaster, and an individual deeply interested in researching lesbian-relevant sexuality in history. She has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Medieval Welsh prepositions, and she loves spreadsheets and databases. So basically this whole interview is the two of us squeeing at each other; it’s so much fun. Heather’s blog, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, focuses on historical research on gender and sexuality. As she puts it, “It consists of summaries of historical research, both on gender and sexuality topics and on themes and tropes popular in lesbian historical fiction. Her podcast, the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, rotates between historical essays, author interviews, book squee discussions, roundups of new f/f historical fiction or thematic lists of past publications, and, as of this year, she’s doing a series of original fiction in audio format. Don’t worry; if any of this interests you, I have links to all of these things in the podcast show notes. Heather began her blog by wanting to create a lesbian character in the middle ages for the Society for Creative Anachronism, and her research just kept on going. Looking at sexuality in history is a very complicated enterprise, and her multifaceted approach is really fascinating. She shares some of her research, her creation of a database of lesbian-relevant historical fiction, tips on writing history in a way that is relevant to modern readers, and also discusses the potentially problematic elements of writing cross-dressing lesbian characters in historical settings. There are also two words that I think might make many of you very happy, and those two words are: lesbian pirates. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did, and like I said, I will have links to all of the things that Heather does, ‘cause they’re fascinating, in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

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This week’s podcast transcript will be compiled, like all of our transcripts, by garlicknitter. Hi, garlicknitter! Thank you! [You’re welcome! – gk] This week’s transcript is brought to you by the Patreon community supporting the show. Thanks, y’all! If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, thank you! You’re helping me make sure that every episode has a transcript and that every episode is accessible to everyone. You are also part of the Patreon community, which, as you already know, has a lot of fun stuff.

If you would like to join the Patreon community, it would be most excellent if you did. Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar a month, and that community helps me develop questions, helps suggest guests, and helps me pick the quarterly book club pick, so have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches, and thank you to the Patreon community for helping produce this week’s transcript.

I will have information at the end of the show as to the music that you’re listening to, I’ll have a preview as to what’s coming up on SmartBitches, and of course I will have a terrible, terrible joke. I will also have links to all of the things that we talk about in this episode and all of the books that are mentioned – Heather has so many great recommendations – and of course I will have links to her website and her podcast, so should you wish to add another podcast to your listening queue – because why not, right? That’s part of the fun of podcasts; you get to curate your own talk radio station, and none of it is men yelling at themselves, unless that’s what you like, in which case, you go ahead and do you!

But without any further delay, let’s start this interview! On with the podcast.

[music]

Heather Rose Jones: Hi! I’m Heather Rose Jones. Most relevant for this podcast is that I am an author of fantasy, of historical fiction, of historic fantasy. I am a massive history geek, and I have a –

Sarah: Yay!

Heather: – blog and podcast about researching sexuality in history, especially lesbian-relevant sexuality. My academic background is not actually in history; it’s in Linguistics. I did my Ph.D. on semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions, and none of that has anything to, to do with my day job, which is in biotech pharmaceuticals.

Sarah: You do all the things!

Heather: I do.

Sarah: Like, you are a walking Humanities degree.

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: You do the science, and you do the linguistics, and you do the history, and you do the sexuality, and you do the gender, and this is, this is kind of amazing!

Heather: I, I would, my, my line is always that, I tell people I would be a Renaissance woman, except I’m actually much more fond of the medieval era.

Sarah: Okay, sure! But you, you are probably a one-person trivia team.

Heather: That, fair cop, fair cop.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So you told me that your blog is all about historical research on gender and sexuality and focused specifically lesbian historical fiction, especially the tropes within it. Now, I’m all about romance and his-, and historical fiction and tropes, and increasing the awareness of lesbian romance. What led you to start this blog?

Heather: So it, really, it all starts when I was ten years old and my family lived in Prague for a year, and I fell in love with history, especially European history? And it, it led me down so many rabbit holes it’s not funny. I ended up, in my college years, joining the Society for Creative Anachronism and becoming deeply immersed in medieval history – also classical history – and especially the lives of ordinary people, the –

Sarah: Yeah.

Heather: – material culture of every day, how people interacted with each other. And as a lesbian myself, you, in the Society for Creative Anachronism you develop a persona, a character that you’re using to interpret what, what you’re researching and how you’re interacting with people, and I wanted to know how could I develop a lesbian character in the Middle Ages that would both fit with history as I understood it and would be enjoyable for me to use as a lens for my research, and that started me out down the path of saying, well, what do we know about non-normative sexuality in history? That was back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and there wasn’t a lot of available information at the time. But getting on into the ‘90s, I had started collecting up research books, articles, that started to touch on looking at sexuality in history, and my big epiphany was – I think it was in 1999, but I could be off by a year or two – I went to a conference in New York City called The Queer Middle Ages and listened to Judith Bennett give a speech in which she stood up at the front of the room and said, “Hi, I’m Judith Bennett; I like to count things,” and I fell in love with her at that point.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: And then she gave a talk that was the basis of her research, her, her research concept of lesbian-like contexts in history. So not saying, I’m trying to find individual human beings that I can say, this person was a lesbian, but finding the spaces in history where women who loved women could have existed, where they could have lived their lives and expressed their love, even if the specific people you’re researching did not, and that hit me as the perfect way to approach not only creating, you know, this persona for the SCA, but approaching the idea of writing historical fiction with lesbian characters, where I’m not trying to find, was this particular historic person queer, but –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – what are the spaces, what are the ways of being, the, the ideas, the concepts that left space for having a lesbian in this particular historic setting? So round about the late ‘90s, you started getting an explosion of more academic research on the history of sexuality, and I collected an enormous library and journal articles and whatnot with the idea that I would at some point use this as research for my fiction, and a few years ago I said, you know, this is doing me no good just sitting on my library shelves. I need to actually read a whole bunch of this stuff, and I need an excuse to do that, and I want to share it with people, not just, you know, keep it to myself, and that was when I started my blog. So the blog is essentially an annotated bibliography – just as if I was doing it for a Ph.D. – where I read through these books and articles and summarize them and comment on them and discuss how they help build a picture of lesbian-relevant contexts in history. After I’d been doing the blog for a few years I started thinking of other ways to present it to people, and as a podcast listener myself – I, I have a commute that is often up to an hour and a half a day – I –

Sarah: Ugh!

Heather: [Laughs] Oh, but podcasts make it not, not merely bearable, but enjoyable.

Sarah: I know; aren’t they wonderful?

Heather: And I was thinking of, of putting together a podcast, and just at that same time, Sheena from The Lesbian Talk Show, who also runs The Lesbian Review website, contacted me and said, Heather, have you ever thought about doing a podcast? And I said, well, funny thing, I was about to email you.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: Or, or maybe, maybe I emailed her first, and she said she was about to email me. It was, it was like that instantaneous, and I started it out as a monthly show where I would just do some sort of essay on a historic figure or a historic topic, and after a year of that, Sheena had been urging me to go to weekly, because she wanted, you know, to, to fill up more slots in the show so that she had, you know, one show every day, and it would really help if I did a weekly show. That was when I cast about and said, I need something other than writing essays, ‘cause I cannot write four essays a month, and I added –

Sarah: That’s a lot.

Heather: – I added interviews, I added thematic book shows, I added a once-a-month show that talks about new releases, and it just kind of grew from there. Last year I added a fiction series. So last year I published in audio four original lesbian historical short stories, and I’m doing that again this year.

Sarah: If anyone who’s listening to this is thinking, I want to listen to them right now, please do not worry; I will have all the links.

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: So, okay, that’s, that’s awesome and amazing, and I have so many questions now. [Laughs] Like, as you were speaking, I was, like, writing down all these ideas. What are some of the circumstances in which you and other researchers have said, okay, this is a space in which lesbians could have existed very happily? Is there, like, a code or a set of elements that you look at and go, okay, I think I have found where the queers were?

Heather: Well, the, the real secret is – you know, this is going to be the cliché, but we were everywhere and every when. The question is –

Sarah: Oh, of course!

Heather: – how did we understand ourselves? And that’s one of the biggest things that I had to process through in doing my research, and it’s one of the hardest things to communicate to people, that it’s not a matter of finding somebody who was just like us in history, somebody who has the same self-identity, the same understanding of our sexuality, but it, you, you can find the building blocks. I mean, you find, you know, women who fell in love with women; you find women who had sex with women; you find women who shared their lives with women; you find women who, whose relationships with women were treated as if they were marriages. And you may not find all of those in the same place, and one of the things that is hardest to find, although far from impossible, is contexts where women could opt out of the heterosexual marriage economy.

Sarah: Right.

Heather: And yet it happened all the time. There were lots of contexts. I, I found, there’s a fascinating field of historic research, the, the study of single women – so women who never married or who, having been married, are now single – and there were statistics for various places and times in Europe. In 15th century Switzerland, there were cities where fifty percent of the adult women had never married, and you think about that, and obviously fifty percent of the women were not lesbians, but in a context like that, if a woman were disinclined to share her life with a man, it wouldn’t stand out as unusual! And that’s –

Sarah: I can’t close my mouth right now. I’m like, wait, seriously?! Fifty percent of the population was unmarried women? Oh my God, it’s Crone Island! You found Crone Island! I’m so excited!

Heather: That was when I decided a character in a, a story I have yet to write was going to be from that city, because –

Sarah: Holy smokes! Have you seen the meta-, the MetaFilter thread that talks about emotional labor? And there’s all these women who are like, that’s it: if it’s, if it’s Virgin and Mother and Crone, I’m heading right to Crone, and we’re going to set an island up just for us, and fuck all this; I’m out? Like, you have found it in history! I cannot even sit in my chair right now. Okay, I am shutting up; please continue.

Heather: [Laughs] So as I said, the, it’s not a problem finding lesbian-friendly contexts. What’s a problem sometimes if finding contexts where multiple factors come together that a modern reader or a modern writer would recognize as, this is something I would be happy with.

Sarah: Ohhh!

Heather: And that’s always the problem in historical fiction, of course, is, how much do you cater to what the reader expects out of life in terms of happy endings, in terms of types of relationships, and how much do you –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – try to find the types of historical settings that you can bend a little bit, where, where you can make it work? So for, for lesbian – I, I, I call it lesbian-relevant characters, because I don’t want to try to label people in history, but –

Sarah: Of course!

Heather: – but the focus of my research, the focus of my writing is those characters who, however they identified, have a connection, feel, make a connection for lesbian readers today. The, one of the hardest things is dancing around the fact that lesbian-relevant people in history did not have the same preoccupations, the same emotional requirements. So, for example, the most utterly normal context in which a woman would have an ongoing romantic and sexual relationship with another woman is in the context of being married to a man and having the social and economic standing to be able to do what she pleased.

Sarah: Right.

Heather: Now, the average modern lesbian romance reader is not going to be happy with a plot that involves that. As I say, the, the problem is not finding contexts for lesbian stories; the problem is tailoring them into stories that a modern reader will connect with and enjoy.

Sarah: Right. I’m, I imagine that your background in linguistics comes in very handy when doing this research, because there’s, you’re going to be looking for concepts that weren’t defined by words that we use now.

Heather: Absolutely. In fact, I, I just yesterday recorded a podcast in which I do this elaborate metaphoric relating the semantics of prepositions, which was doctoral research, to the way concepts of gender and sexuality are structured internally, so the way different little meaning bits get put together in different combinations, and they don’t translate from one culture to another directly.

Sarah: Oh wow. So we have history nerdery, language nerdery, lesbian romance nerdery in one – wow, this, this is going to be a really popular episode! I’m so excited! [Laughs] My brain is like Jiffy Pop – [popping noises]. So what are – one of the things that you mentioned is that you focus on tropes in lesbian historical fiction – and not all lesbian historical fiction is romance, correct?

Heather: Absolutely, although it’s certainly the easiest to sell. But the, the historical fiction that I have read that is not romance-focused tends to be much more in the traditional historic fiction line, often focusing on actual historic figures. So, for example, Emma Donoghue’s books, like Life Mask or – oh God, what’s the other one I’ve read? – The Sealed Letter!

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Heather: So Emma Donoghue’s books, like Life Mask or The Sealed Letter, which are basically biographical studies of specific historical individuals who had sexual relationships with women, or, or who were rumored to have had them, and in her stories they really did –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – but they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called romance novels, even though in, in some cases, they do have what would be considered a classic happy ending, but –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – she write, she is very much writing historical novels with lots of social information and politics. I mean, my God, Life Mask told me more about British politics of the late 18th century than I had ever wanted to know.

Sarah: Wow. But the courtship is not the primary story.

Heather: Yeah, the courtship is not the primary story, although the, the emotional relationships of the women is a major thread. It just is not –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – even necessarily the dominant thread.

Sarah: Right.

Heather: But romance is queen, and so if you’re going to successfully write lesbian historicals, you are primarily going to be focusing on writing romances.

Sarah: So what are the popular tropes in lesbian historical romances? And lesbian historical fiction as well?

Heather: So I’m going to display another side of my utter nerdery, which is that I love –

Sarah: Please do, because it’s making me so happy – oh my God.

Heather: I love spreadsheets and databases. I honest- –

Sarah: Oh my God! We, how have we not met until now?! Please, yes! Okay, I’m holding up a lighter and shut-, shutting the hell up.

Heather: [Laughs] Databases are my favorite computer game, and –

Sarah: Yes!

Heather: – I have started putting together a database of lesbian-relevant historical fiction. It’s kind of spotty; it’s only really the near thing, nearest thing I can get to complete for the last several years when I’ve been doing my new releases episode on the podcast. Like all databases, it is going to eat my brain trying to do subject tags and do all the coding so that it’s ready to turn into something searchable for people to use –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – and I’ve only got about four hundred titles in it right now, and I know that it’s missing a lot of the earlier stuff. I haven’t, for example, I haven’t had a chance to find a historic list of all the Naiad Press publications, and I know that they did a lot of historicals. But the idea is, I want it to have a sense of what’s out there, and when people asked for recommendations – like, just yesterday I had somebody ask, where are the f/f cowboy romances? And I said, well, here is a list of lesbian romances with settings in the second half of the nineteenth century set in the American West, with a little bit of filtering for obvious things that don’t belong, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Heather: – I think I sent her a list of about thirty titles. So that was part of the idea, was to be able to say what’s out there, and when people want recommendations, be able to give them, but also to get a sense of just what is the field? So –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Heather: – when people say, ah, well, you know, there is no lesbian historical romance, or, you can’t sell lesbian historical romance, I can pull it up and say, well, here is hundreds of titles that have, in fact, been published.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: You might like some of them. So given that, I can actually do a statistical analysis of what’s in my database – not necessarily what’s out there, but what’s in my database –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Heather: – and some of the themes that are really popular – now, there’s a massive focus on settings in the 19th and 20th century in the USA or the United Kingdom, and that’s completely unsurprising for English-language literature.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: Within that, there’s a, a small package of Regency era; a lot of them are much more on the erotica side than the romance side. Lots of Victorian settings in Britain; a lot of those have fantasy elements, so steampunk or paranormal.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: Lots and lots of World War I, World War II settings. People see the World Wars as an opportunity for the fabric of society to be disrupted and for women to have a chance to –

Sarah: Yes!

Heather: – get away from the, the Big Brother, as it were, and be able to live their own lives –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: – and of course that was also an era when lesbian culture in England and the United States did begin turning into a subculture. It did begin having regular social networks, so it’s a, it’s a natural setting for this kind of story.

Sarah: Right.

Heather: Really popular is Wild West settings: so frontier, pioneers – not so much cowboys as such – lots of outlaws. A lot of those involve a cross-dressing woman who is passing as a man, and –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – that’s a trope where there’s a certain amount of problematic-ness, because the lesbians writing the cross-dressing characters are seeing them as, well, of course this is a lesbian; of course, you know, she knows she is a woman who loves women, and that’s how I’m going to write it. But a lot of them kind of skip over the possibility that, you know, many of the, know, assigned-female persons who, who lived as men would fit better into a trans narrative, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – that often is not even acknowledged as a possibility. But skipping over that, one of the really big themes – not so much a trope, but a theme in lesbian historicals – is what I call the cross-time group. So this is stories –

Sarah: Ooh.

Heather: – where you’re connecting up the modern era with the past in some way. So maybe it’s actual time travel; maybe it’s more of a, a fantastic time-slip type situation where somebody’s got a psychic connection with the past or a past-life memory. A lot of them are research-based. So you have a modern character researching something in history and stumbling across lesbian lives in history and making connections with their own personal life, and I think that that’s popular as a, a structure – I won’t call it even a theme or a mote, a trope, but a structure – because the writers are sort of recapitulating their own experience of, this is how I learned about people in the past. I was, you know, I found out about the biography of this person, and oh my God! She lived with a woman and, for all of her life, and they wrote romantic letters to each other! And it helps both the writer and the reader to engage with the past when they aren’t really on solid ground about how the past actually worked, and I, I don’t mean that to sound negative? But it’s a way of exploring history, in essence saying, I don’t know much about this. I want to find out about this, and I’m going to tell you what I know from my modern point of view. So I think, I think that’s one of the reasons why the cross-time stories are particularly popular.

Other than that, you’ve got a really solid cluster of stories set in classical Greece and Rome, usually with fantastic elements. Often it’s a, a sort of a mythic past, rather than a historic past? And I think –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – a lot of those, if they aren’t directly coming out of Xena fanfiction, they are certainly influenced by it.

Sarah: [Laughs] I was going to say, I, I smell Shades of Xena.

[Laughter]

Heather: There is a startling number of lesbian pirate stories. They are more Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-type pirates, rather than historical pirates, but it’s a really popular theme. I keep thinking I should do a specialty podcast just on lesbian pirate stories.

Sarah: Oh, I definitely think you should. And it makes sense, though, because if you’re isolated on a ship, you’re recreating a community; you’re creating a found family; you’re isolating yourself from the, sort of the Big Brother social ex-, expectations of the patriarchy; and you’re, you’re, you’re basically removing all of those things that hold expected behavior together.

Heather: I think it’s much more simple than that: I think it’s, you’re wearing pants and swinging a sword.

Sarah: You know what? You’re totally right! I didn’t need all that thinking.

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: This is pants and a sword! Of course! Like, duh! Wow! Yeah, pants – I’m, I’m with you: pants and a sword sound great!

Heather: One of the things that come out of, came out of my database, which is, is sometimes the surprising settings that you wouldn’t expect to be that popular. There is an entire subgenre of lesbian romances set during the San Francisco earthquake. Who knew?

Sarah: What, seriously?

Heather: Okay, so maybe there’s six of them –

Sarah: Wow!

Heather: – but, but that’s a very specific setting –

Sarah: Hey –

Heather: – for that many stories.

Sarah: – listen, a trend on Twitter is two, so six is, like, a whole subgenre –

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: – no question! San Francisco earthquake lesbian historical.

Heather: Yep.

Sarah: Wow!

Heather: Again –

Sarah: Is this just like, we’re going to rupture everything; this is as good a rupture as any?

Heather: Again, so I could speculate. I mean, and, and this is just me making up stories in my head, which I’m very good at; I’m an author! – but if I speculated on why that, it’s just at the beginning of the modern era, so there’s a sense that, you know, the characters are going to be, you know, psychologically similar to us?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: Earthquakes, certainly, any time you’ve got a massive dis-, physical disruption like that, people get thrown together, suddenly, oh my God, we’re sharing a tent together in the middle of, you know, the, the, the park, and, you know, the, the regular rules get thrown out. Women end up doing jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: And, of course, San Francisco is a gay Mecca, you know, so gay, San Francisco itself is iconic in queer history, and so the opportunity to put the historic event together with San Francisco as this iconic location and the social and physical disruption in the wake of the quake, I think it’s, I think that would be enough to explain why the setting.

Sarah: Yes, definitely. That makes a lot of sense.

Heather: I don’t know. I, I think that pretty much covers the ones that have jumped out at me. I –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – I’m still doing a lot of the, the, the content tagging in the database, so there may be –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – other things that’ll pop up. I, I think the things that have popped up haven’t necessarily surprised me. The extreme commonness of the cross-dressing plots, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – this is something that, that came up once when I was in a Facebook group and asking people, so, you know, if you don’t, if you think you don’t like lesbian historical fiction, what is it that you think you don’t like about it? And one of the –

Sarah: That’s a good question.

Heather: – one of the big things – and this is in a lesbian group, mind you, a, a group of lesbian readers – one of the big things that people said was, if you wanted to be a lesbian, you had to pretend to be a man, and I don’t want to read stories like that. And yet, I don’t know if that’s coming out of – so I don’t know if all of the cross-dressing stories are coming out of people’s belief that that was what you had to do to be in a lesbian relationship, that one of you had to be passing as a man, or whether –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – people’s impression that that was what history was like is coming out of how many stories there are written that way. Now, of course, women passing as men is a historic thing. They weren’t all interested in women sexually, although many of them, even, even the ones who were heterosexual would, would flirt with women as part of their disguise; they might end up, you know, marrying someone as part of the disguise; and of course many of them did end up having romantic and sexual relationships with the non-disguised woman, and it may be that some of them did the cross-dressing in order to engage in those relationships. But it’s a lot more complicated than that because – and, and now I’m going to go off into, into the historical geekery – because there were times and places where the structure of people’s understanding of sexuality said, if you desire a woman, that is a masculine thing. So if you desire a woman –

Sarah: Oh!

Heather: – you must be a man. So it was sort of an imposed transgender identity, where –

Sarah: Whoa.

Heather: – it, it, it gets really complicated, and unfortunately, it ends up putting lesbian interpretations and trans interpretations in conflict with each other, when, in fact, my sense is that we’re just thinking with the wrong sets of categories entirely. But –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – as I say, you know, people assigned as female who are living as men and ending up in relationships with women is a historic thing, and it is certainly a, a very valid context for writing lesbian romance, but it is far from the only context, and people don’t –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – make enough use of the context in which, you know, two women living as women could have relationships, you know, even sometimes perfectly out in the open, because people didn’t consider what they were doing to be sex, which is one of the big parts.

Sarah: Yes, and that, that remains.

Heather: Yes.

Sarah: As you’ve been adding books to your database and tagging them, one of the things that I love doing is, is discovering my own and helping readers discover their reading catnip, the thing that makes them go –

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: – oh, I want to read that right now! Have you discovered any new tropes or themes or character archetypes, any of your own catnip as you’ve been cataloguing books and been like, oh, oh! This is exactly what I wanted!?

Heather: Well, so my catnip is anything that makes me feel the way Georgette Heyer makes me feel. Now, I, I will acknowledge some of the, the, you know, sociopolitical issues that, that people today have with some of Georgette Heyer’s themes, but in terms of the structure of romances, I love what she does. I love all of the different plots and all of the different character types and how she basically said, I don’t care who you are or where you are in society; you can end up with a happy romance. And I love the Regency era because, hey, who doesn’t? So when I come across a lesbian Regency that makes me feel that way, I’m just all gooey inside. I’m totally, I want to write one of those someday. Someday I will.

Sarah: What are some of the things about Heyer’s writing and Regency romances that work for you, that give you that feeling?

Heather: One of the things is that the romance is never the entire story. That it isn’t just, I’m going to move these people around on the chessboard so that they meet each other, and then they have problems, and then they get together. There was always something else going on that was the backbone of the plot that the romance danced around, but the other thing I liked –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – and this is more about her male characters – is, it was never a single type of character who got to be the protagonist. You had the stories where the, you know, the sporty, jock duke got to be the hero; you had the stories where the very considerate, very polite, socially knowledgeable man got to be the hero; you had the stories where the, you know, the rough-mannered northerner got to be the hero; you got the stories where the, you know, the dark, morose character got to be the hero. I liked that it wasn’t all cookie-cutter. It wasn’t all the same people being put through new paces.

Sarah: And that there were an equal number of internal and external conflicts that were working in the context of the story.

Heather: Yes, absolutely! In my own writing, I have a hard time not layering in all of the plots? It’s like, oh! –

Sarah: Yeah.

Heather: – this could use a murder mystery on top of the romance and the espionage and the caper –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: – and the, and the, and the lost heir, and the, this, that, and the other thing.

Sarah: Don’t forget pants and swords! You need pants and swords!

Heather: Yes, and pants and swords! Has to have pants and swords.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: So, so I like stories that do that, where, you know, all the parts of my brain are engaged at the same time, and, and she does that really well.

Sarah: When you emailed me, you mentioned that, that distinct reading communities of lesbian historical have been sort of siloed into different groups, and they all want different things from historical romance, and I’ve also noticed this happens in romance itself as well. [Laughs] And as I said when I emailed you, I’d really love to hear your perspective –

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: – so just talk as long as you want. Go ahead! What are some of the things that you’ve noticed about communities and how they interact with the books that you’re talking about?

Heather: So I’m going to do some vast generalizations here, and this is based on seeing how people talk about books in different types of social media. I’m, I’m very active on Twitter, and I have friends across a lot of different communities on Twitter? I’m more or less active on Facebook; that tends to be – in terms of book communities on, on Twitter, I’m mostly involved with the, the lesfic groups, and I am a longtime science fiction/fantasy fan. I’ve been going to science fiction/fantasy conventions since my college days, and to a large extent, that is what I consider my, my home, my, my literary home.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: And so based on hearing people talk about stories in all those different communities, here are some generalizations that I’m seeing. And one of the things when I say “siloing” is communication structure. So who do you hear about books from? Who hears about your books? Who’s talking about your work? How does your work get known by people who don’t already read it? And the, when I say the lesfic community, I’m talking about, to some extent, the readers and writers who have historically come out of the women’s presses, the lesbian presses. Naiad –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – today, Bella Books, Bold Strokes Books, Ylva –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – where they’re focusing on stories about lesbians, primarily for lesbian readers. That is, in many ways, a very closed community. And I don’t mean that in the deliberately exclusive sense, but people who write those books and people who write, read those books don’t necessarily tend to be aware of anything outside that circle, so if you ask someone who is a lesfic reader, you know, what are their favorite books? What are their favorite books with particular types of themes? They are probably going to give you only books that would fall in the category of lesfic publishing. If you look at what types of stories a lesfic publisher or a lesfic author writes, they’re going to be primarily stories that are assuming a lesbian readership, and you don’t get a lot of crossover in terms of publicity, so when you look – so my publisher is Bella Books, and when you look at where they have publicized my books, which are historic fantasy, romantic adventure, so very crossover-y, they, they have not publicized them outside of the lesfic reading community. Everything that has been publicized outside of that has been me getting out there and talking to my science fiction/fantasy friends and talking to my SCA friends and getting the, the word out there through my personal connections, rather than through the communication channels that exist for the genre. Now, similarly, you’ve got people writing lesbian characters in historic fantasy in the mainstream presses, so one of the places where lesbian characters, or queer characters in general, in historic settings, although not strict history, have gotten a big foothold is in the mainstream fantasy presses, and so, so some of my favorite books that I fit into, the, the lesbian historicals, have those fantasy elements and are coming out from mainstream presses like, well, like Elizabeth Bear’s steampunk pair of stories, Karen Memory and Stone Mad. One of the books I’m going to mention when you ask me what I’ve read recently that I really enjoyed was Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper. Stories like that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – where there’s a, definitely a lesbian relationship in the book, it’s got a historic setting, it has fantasy elements, and it is being published as if it were just like any other book and getting a lot of traction for, for queer stories in that way. So that’s another reading community where the people who are reading those books, the people in the science fiction/fantasy community who are reading those books who then say, I want more queer fantasy; I want more lesbian historical settings, they don’t know about the lesfic books. They may not know about the independent writers, who’s the next group I’m going to talk about, and they’re –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – they’re looking for things and thinking they don’t exist because they are not in the communication channels for those books. Now, the third community, and this is, this one is hard to give a label to. I sometimes call it, you know, the Tumblr reading community, but that, but I’m not a Tumblr person, so I may be mislabeling it. This tends to come out of people who are very integrated in fanfiction communities, people who are doing their self-publishing, people who are very focused on intersectional identities. One of the key features of this writing and reading community is, when you finish reading the book blurb, you know every single identity that the characters are representing. You may not know what the plot is, but you know what all their intersectional identities are. I, I, I once came up with this, this theory of, there, there are three ways of communicating queer content in a book, and for the lesfic community it’s what I call the doughnut shop phenomenon, which is you just walked into a doughnut shop, you’re there to buy doughnuts, you know they’re going to sell you doughnuts. You don’t have to say, hi, I want a doughnut; you just point.

Sarah: [Laughs] Okay. Yeah, all right, I’m with you.

Heather: And in the, the mainstream – so not just the, the, you know, fantasy historicals that are coming out of the science fiction/fantasy community, but often this will come out in mainstream YA books that have queer historical settings – that is the, if you really want to know, you’ll figure out how to find out about it. So, so that’s the books where you could read the entire cover copy and have no clue that there are queer characters in there, and the publishers don’t care because they know the whisper network will let you know that this is a book you want to read, and they can rely on other readers to publicize the queer content, and they don’t have to scare off the, the non-queer readers by actually mentioning it in the book’s publicity. And, and then as I say, the third method is the, the laundry list, where, you know, the book’s publicity is going to tell you explicitly, here are all of the identities and orientations and so forth and types of relationships that these characters have, and if this is what you’re looking for, then this is what you’re looking for.

So, so you were asking me earlier about, in terms of the different communities, what are they looking for in a book?

Sarah: Yes.

Heather: And let’s get back to that. So –

Sarah: Yes, please!

Heather: So these, these distinct communities – and there’s probably more than three, but it makes it easier just to talk about, you know, those three as sort of organizing concepts – they tend to be looking for different content in a book. So to completely over-generalize, as I said, the, the lesfic community has come out of the lesbian presses; they have come out of the, you know, the world is ignoring us, so like the little red hen we’re going to plant our seeds and grow our wheat and, and bake our bread, and it’s going to be the bread that we want to eat, damn it. So it tends to be very focused on specifically lesbian stories, lesbian stories that exclude the possibility of happy bisexuality, for example. That’s, that’s beginning to change a little bit –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – but if you read a book that is coming out of the lesfic publishing community, you’re not going to discover one of your protagonists suddenly in bed with a man on page fifty, because –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – that, that would be death to your brand name in that reading community. You know, as I say, there has been an unfortunate tradition in the lesfic publishing community of biphobia, where a character can have had relationships with men in the past, as long as it is clear that that is totally in the past, it’s never going to happen again, and it was not happy! That’s, it’s an over-generalization –

Sarah: Oy.

Heather: – but – now, you can imagine that people who are not there for that brand might be very turned off by that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – type of constraint on the type of stories that are being told, and as I mentioned earlier, within lesfic publishing, any character who appears to be a woman in love with a woman is going to be interpreted as lesbian and not as potentially questioning on the edge between, you know, am I a lesbian or am I a trans man? That’s, that’s not going to show up, and –

Sarah: Hmm.

Heather: – it can come across either as simply erasure, or sometimes it can come across as hostility. So that is one of the barriers, in terms of what content are people looking for, that can prevent people from crossing over and saying, hey, I want to read more lesbian historical fiction; let me look at these ones from the lesbian presses. You hit one title that suddenly slaps you in the face and now it’s like, well, I’m never reading anything from that press again. There is also – and, and this is where I’m going to get onto some really delicate thin ice – the –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – lesfic publishing and reading community has always had this very strong sense of, we are a mutually supportive, one-big-happy-family community, and you never say anything bad about a book. Now, I know that that happens –

Sarah: Yeah.

Heather: – in other communities as well –

Sarah: Not a fan. [Laughs]

Heather: – but one of the things I hear time and time again from people who are looking for lesbian historicals is, I have no idea who to trust. I have no idea which ones are good and which ones aren’t. I don’t know where to look. Nobody is reviewing things honestly; everybody says things are wonderful. I pick up a book that has fifty five-star reviews, and oh my God, this hasn’t even been edited! You know, I, I give up; I’m not going to read any of them, because I can’t tell what I’m getting. And that is a real problems in terms of book quality, and it’s a real problem in terms of encouraging the market, because without a reliable way of identifying quality books, well written books, books with good solid plots and characterization, and good research when it comes to historicals, without a way of identifying those and, and rewarding them with sales and publicity and word of mouth, it’s very hard for somebody to get started in the field. It’s very hard for somebody who is writing good lesbian historicals to become known as that, because it’s not allowed to say that the other ones are bad, and I have read some very bad ones.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yeah, I know. I know this problem. I know this problem very well. [Laughs]

Heather: So I am, to some extent, very focused on the crossover between lesfic and, and sort of everything else, so I’m less distinguishing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – outside of that, but more, you know, how can I, as a reader and writer of historical fiction, help build those bridges? How can I help point out the books that I think are worth being read outside the lesfic community? How can I bring in examples of well written historical fiction that have the queer characters into the lesfic historical reading community and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – and, and give people models and saying, you know, this is a thing you can write. This is a thing that, that will cross over, that will do well. Think about this! And that, that’s my primary goal. That, that’s one of the reasons why I was happy to expand the podcast into including, you know, author interviews and, you know, new book releases and whatnot, because I wanted to try to help build that bridge to, to create a context where I’m saying, we’re talking just about lesbian historicals here, and I’m going to be honest in a polite and kind way.

Sarah: I think that any effort to make books visible to readers, knowing that whatever doesn’t appeal to you might be exactly what someone else is, is looking for –

Heather: Oh yes, absolutely.

Sarah: – is, it, it’s, it’s both easier now and harder now, because there’s more channels with which to reach people across boundaries of geography and time –

Heather: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – but then there’s also, you know, more, more books.

Heather: Yes.

Sarah: Just, there’s so many more pieces of literature to talk about. It’s both a wonderful opportunity and an overwhelming enterprise.

Heather: Yes. More books means more signal, but it also means a lot more noise.

Sarah: Oh goodness, yes. So you are also a writer, and you have mentioned this a couple of times –

Heather: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I do not want to miss the opportunity to ask you: tell me about what you’re working on right now and some of the titles that you’ve released that have been reader favorites!

Heather: So my big project is a historic fantasy series, the Alpennia series, which is a Regency-era, Ruritanian, romantic adventure series. They are not romances structurally, but they all have very strong romantic subplots, and, and my publisher tries to market them as romances, which sometimes backfires. The idea is that this is basically Europe; I’ve invented a country somewhere on the border of France, Switzerland, and Italy because I need my own country to play with. Young women who are coming of age and have certain amount of magical talent – we’ve got, you know, unexpected heiresses; we’ve got lost heirs; we’ve got magical plots and treason against the crown and all sorts of fun adventures. And it’s a, it, it started out as a standalone, standalone novel, Daughter of Mystery, which was, it was young first love, it was a coming-of-age story, and it established the world, and it was meant to be a standalone. And –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – at the, pretty much at the point when I shipped it off to the publisher, I said, so which of my characters needs her own story? And then that came to be the, the second novel, The Mystic Marriage, but it’s not one of these series where each book focuses entirely on a new couple. It’s much more an ensemble series, where as the series goes along I’m adding more and more viewpoint characters. So you’ve got all of the pre-existing viewpoint characters still being very heavily involved in the plot, and, and sometimes I get pushback for that, saying it’s like, what are these, these previous characters doing taking up page time when I want to hear about the new ones? But that’s, that’s, that’s not what the books are; the books are an ensemble series.

So The Mystic Marriage is all about alchemy and, and redeeming your family name after the, the, the stain of treason and all that, and then the third book, Mother of Souls, is, again, expanding the, the scope and adding in more politics and a sorcerous threat to all of Europe and setting up, to some extent, the conflicts for the rest of the series. Now, the current book I’m working on is the fourth book, which is called Floodtide, and this is an, an entire redirection of the format, because rather than doing the ensemble of viewpoints with, you know, tight third person point of view, now I’m doing a single first-person point of view from a younger character of the working class, and I’m calling it an independent onramp to the series? I decided I needed a book that a brand-new reader could pick up and enjoy and say, wow, I love this; I want more of this. Oh my God, you mean there’s a whole series? And not feel like they’re having to read three books to get caught up.

So Floodtide is about a young laundress and dressmaker’s apprentice who gets peripherally tangled up in all the magical politics of the larger story and has a best friend who is learning how to be a charm wife. She’s learning how to do small magical charms as a sideline for her dressmaking business, and the two of them end up playing a major part when the river floods and there is a plague in the city and everything is awful. But it’s a, it’s a smaller story; it’s a more intimate story.

I write ordinary historicals. I’ve got a couple of novelettes or short stories that are, they pretty much fall in the category of real people fic. So one’s set in Renaissance Italy, and one set at the end of the 17th century which manages to combine playwright Aphra Behn and the courtesan Hortense Mancini and the swordswoman and actress, opera singer Julie d’Aubigny and a couple other actual historical characters and tie them all up together and let them go on a caper together, and I, I love doing things like that. I love picking out the fascinating women who are actual real people and writing a story where I have to put in footnotes to explain that I didn’t make this part up.

Sarah: Yeah!

Heather: Another thing I love doing is writing in historic literary modes, so I have a short story series –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – that is, it, it’s half completed – I’ve, I’ve published two of the stories – which is basically saying the Medieval Welsh Mabinogion needed more lesbians, and so I’ve written two stories that –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Heather: – that pick up the themes and motifs and to some extent the narrative style of the Mabinogion and just, you know, put a, a romance between two women as the heart of it, and as it’s going along I’m, I’m using more motifs. I’m going to add in, you know, a number of other queer themes into it in the third and fourth stories, but trying to say, you know, this is the story that I would have wanted to have available if I were, you know, a medieval Welsh person listening to people telling tales, and because – so I, I don’t think I mentioned it when I mentioned my, my linguistics, but my, my research was specifically on Medieval Welsh, and so I am as fluent in Medieval Welsh as any modern person could be, probably, and, in fact, the opening paragraph of each of these Mabinogi stories is written in Medieval Welsh and then translated into English, and then the rest of the story goes on in English, so I have a lot of fun with just doing that sort of pastiche.

Sarah: What are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Heather: So the embarrassing thing is right now I am rereading my series, because I’m getting a run up to starting the next book? [Laughs]

Sarah: There is no shame in that!

Heather: But I, I did go back and look over my reading log so I could have something fun to talk about. So in terms of what I’ve read in, like, the last half year that I really, really enjoyed, Molly Tanzer has a series that started out with Creatures of Will and Temper. Now, this is set in the late 19th century; it’s decadent artists and aesthetes, and it’s a sort of a reinterpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, except with women as the main characters, and there is a lesbian romance that is a main part of the plot thread that is not revealed at all in any of the book’s publicity, and it took me over a year to read this book because I’d pick it up and I’d say, oh, well, I liked stuff that Tanzer’s written before and this looks fun, but you know, I’ve got to prioritize stuff that I’m reading for, you know, the, the lesbian historical stuff. And finally a friend of mine said –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – no, no, no, no! There’s a lesbian romance in it! It’s like, oh my God! Why did nobody tell me this?! I have a, I have a major grudge –

Sarah: Oh my God.

Heather: – against publishers who don’t give me that information. But anyway, so I loved the book. It is an absolutely fabulous book. It is about two sisters who have this very fraught relationship with each other, and the sister, in fact, who is the, the, the fencing aficionado is not the one with the lesbian relationship, which was so much fun! that, that you’re, you’re, she’s breaking the tropes that way, and, and, oh, and there are demons. There are demons; that’s the other part of it. That’s what makes it a fantasy book. So Molly Tanzer writes lovely books, fan-, historic fantasy, and as far as I can tell pretty much always with some sort of queer characters in them.

Now the other book that I read in the last half year that I have just been squeeing about because it’s so fabulous – and this is one I have had on my shelves for a couple of decades – is, it’s nonfiction: Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar by Betty T. Bennett, and if you want to know all the details about it, I have a couple of blogs – not, not just one summarizing the book, but one talking about it and the contents. Mary Diana Dods was a contemporary of Mary Shelley who began trying to have a literary career under a couple of different male pennames, and somewhere in the context of this Mary Shelley had a very close friend who had a, who was pregnant out of wedlock, and they decided that Dods would become Walter Sholto Douglas and her husband, and they all trooped off to Paris together, where these two women, one of whom was, you know, presenting as a man, became part of Parisian literary society. And all of this came out of Bennett’s research into, trying to fill in all the footnotes for a book on Mary Shelley’s correspondence, and she found these two people mentioned – there’s Walter Sholto Douglas, and then the other one was another penname that, that Dods used – that she couldn’t track down. She couldn’t figure out who these people were; she couldn’t find any biographical references to them except for this one mention that, that Douglas had married Isabella What’s-Her-Name and, and was the father of this other person. And, and so it started out as this academic mystery, and just digging through records, looking, going off to archives, tracing down the correspondence that, of, of the various pennames that Dods was using, and she turned up this story that would be completely unbelievable as a romance novel. You know, you’ve got the cross-dressing; you’ve got the, the, you know, marriage between two women; you’ve got the, the I-must-marry-you-because-you’re-pregnant; you’ve got, you know, having, having a secret identity as this aspiring author; and, and you’ve got Mary Shelley in the middle of all of this, probably being the mastermind –

Sarah: Right.

Heather: – between arranging the marriage. And it’s just –

Sarah: Wow.

Heather: – oh my God, where has this book been? Oh, right, it was on my shelf waiting for me to discover how wonderful it was.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, I have that adventure too.

Heather: Now, in terms of things that are coming up that I’m looking forward to reading, one of the books in the, the historic fantasy field that I am really excited about is Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett, which is a Shakespeare takeoff. So this is Miranda from The Tempest after her father brings her back to Milan, and all sorts of mysterious things, and she ends up in a, some sort of romantic relationship with her maid, who is a woman of color, and I, I mean, that’s just sort of the essential basis of why I find this book on my, top of my to-be-read stack. It’s coming out in March, and I am really looking forward to that; I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

And the other book that –

Sarah: Wow.

Heather: – I would love to be reading right now – except it is only out on Kindle, and I have this weird philosophical, political aversion to supporting the Amazon monopoly, so while I will buy things from Amazon, I try to avoid buying things that are only on Amazon, ‘cause I don’t want to support their monopolistic tendencies – but because a number of my friends who like lesbian historicals have been absolutely raving about how wonderful this book is, I will mention it. It’s A Lady’s Desire by Lily Maxton, and I fully anticipate that if I break down my political objections and actually shell out the money for the Kindle that I will love it. But I, I haven’t, I haven’t gotten to that point yet; I keep hoping that the author will decide to release it more widely.

Sarah: Thank you so much for those recommendations! Is there anything else you wanted to add?

Heather: I guess what, the, the one thing I would like to add for the listeners is, there is lesbian historical fiction; there is good lesbian historical fiction. It is perhaps sometimes hard to find, but there won’t be more unless it gets support, and this is one topic that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Heather: – we didn’t really get to, but the question of why is there this, this absence in the market? What, what is, what’s the problem? Well, there’re all these people who say they want to read it, and, and where are the books? And there’re a lot of – again, that, there’s a lot of structural problems in the, in the pipeline that creates that apparent lack, and it’s not just communication. There is a fact that people are not writing the books, and what I would like to do is say, you know, let’s all work together and, and write the books and get them out there and communicate about the ones, the authors who are worth supporting, the authors who are doing great research and writing it into fascinating stories, and let them know that it’s okay for them to keep doing this, because we will support them with our money!

Sarah: Thank you for that!

Heather: Well, thank you for having me on the show!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I want to thank Heather Rose Jones for emailing me and hanging out with me for an hour and talking about all of the things that she does. If you would like to find out more, I will have links to all of the things that she does online at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. You can find her at her website alpennia.com, that’s A-L-P-E-N-N-I-A dot com, and you can find her on Twitter @heatherosejones.

And if you want to email me or you have questions or thoughts or ideas or you want to just tell me a bad joke, please do that! You can email me at [email protected], or you can leave a message at 1-201-371-3272. I love hearing from you, and I love hearing what you think of the show, so thank you in advance for contacting me!

This week’s podcast is brought to you by Tempt Me with Diamonds by Jane Feather. He knows your deepest desire, what you crave, how that velvet box and a bit of sparkle will light up your eyes, but dare he tempt you with diamonds? From New York Times bestselling author Jane Feather comes a sumptuous turn-of-the-20th-century tale of one man’s mission to win back the woman he loves against the backdrop of glittering London society, with the help of a perfect set of exquisite diamonds. Those diamonds could be yours. Will you be able to resist? Tempt Me with Diamonds by Jane Feather is now available everywhere books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by the Patreon community supporting the show. Thank you, guys! You’re awesome! If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, you are helping me keep the show going, and you help commission transcripts so that every episode is accessible to everyone.

And if you would like to join the Patreon community, I would be delighted if you did. Monthly pledges begin at one dollar a month, and that makes you part of the community that helps develop questions, makes guest idea suggestions, and helps us pick our quarterly book club title. We just picked the first one, and it is really cool, ‘cause I’ve never read science fiction romance so much before. So you can join the Patreon community at patreon.com/SmartBitches, and thank you for having supported the show!

The music you are listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. I think she produced this whole album. This is the Peatbog Faeries, this is Blackhouse, and this track is called “Angus and Joyce Mackay.” I actually shortened the track a little bit, because the beginning is a lot of – I know there’s a better word for this, but, like – the bagpipe sort of low note, kind of like a drone noise? And I was like, that’s going to really irritate the hell out of somebody as the start of a podcast, so I’ve edited this track. It’s actually longer, and it’s really lovely. The whole album is good. You can find the Peatbog Faeries at their website, and you can find this album on Amazon or iTunes or wherever you buy your funky music.

Coming up on Smart Bitches, it is the start of the month, which means it’s time for Hide Your Wallet, where we talk about what books are arriving this month that we really want to read, and then you tell us about what you’re excited about, and then we all buy more books, because that’s how this works. We also have a pair of fun posts this weekend that I’m pretty excited about. We have a new edition of Adventures in BigStock, wherein I see what reading and snacks looks like in stock image land, and then on Sunday, March 3rd, I want to know what is your favorite reading snack? Tell me all about it. I’m hungry. I’m always hungry, but I really, really like to know what you eat while you’re reading, ‘cause I’m nosy like that. Next week we have new reviews, we have Cover Snark, a new Rec League, and – oh boy – two-part Bachelor that Elyse has told me is going to be completely ridiculous if the spoilers are correct, so we have two Bachelor recaps next week. Poor Elyse. Poor Elyse’s liver. Lucky all of us. Plus, of course, we have Help a Bitch Out and Books on Sale, so come on by and hang out with us. It is lovely when you do!

I will have links to the things we talked about, all of the books that Heather recommended and mentioned during the podcast, and some of the television shows as well.

And as always, I end with a terrible joke, and this is really bad. This is specifically for all of the people who work in accounting, for whom this month and next are terrible. You ready? Okay. [Clears throat]

Why is there an H&R Block in the ocean?

Give up? Why is there an H&R Block in the ocean?

For tax porpoises.

[Laughs] Porpoises! Tax porpoises! Now I want a whole cartoon about tax porpoises who, like, you know, walk around and (FLAG discuss? 1:06:28) things with actuaries and probably have, like, really big notebooks and are super stressed. [Still laughing] Tax porpoises! [Clears throat] All right, that joke is by way of Reddit from /OhYasureyoubetcha, which is also a great user name. And remember, if you have bad jokes you want to tell me, it is so delightful when I get a new one, so you can email me at [email protected]. I love bad jokes; they’re super fun!

But until next week, on behalf of Heather Rose Jones and everyone who’s here, including Wilbur, who’s taking up, like, two-thirds of my desk – how do, how do cats turn into, like, Shetland ponies at night and when they’re sleeping? It’s really weird! I, I know people on the internet think that cats are liquid, and, and they might be! But anyway, on behalf of Orville and Wilbur, who’s on my desk, and Heather and me and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend. We’ll see you here next week.

[sweet music]