A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet

by Judy Grahn

A Simple Revolution is a unique memoir and a dramatic narrative of Judy Grahn's working class roots, her army career and discharge for being lesbian, her education as one of the first whites to attend Howard University, and her life as a celebrated poet in the Bay Area during the tumultuous beginnings of the lesbian movement in the late '60s.

Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, writer, and social theorist. She grew up in a working-class home in New Mexico. Seeking options not available in her small-town community of origin, she broke away and joined the Air Force. She was given a "�blue discharge” (named for the blue paper on which these letters were printed) from the Air Force because she was a lesbian. This experience galvanized Grahn into public ownership of her lesbianism, into the writing of poetry, into lesbian activism, and into the project of publishing lesbian literature. She co-founded the Women's Press Collective in Oakland, California in 1969; using a barrel mimeograph machine, the WPC published the work of Grahn and other lesbians, including Pat Parker, Willyce Kim, and more. Grahn is the author of several poetry collections, including The Common Woman, A Woman is Talking to Death, and Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling. Aunt Lute Books published a collection of Grahn's work, The Judy Grahn Reader, in 2009. In addition to her poetry, Grahn has written several celebrated nonfiction works exploring woman-centered spirituality, gay history and culture, and lesbian writing.

Genres: LGBT, Memoir, Poetry, Lesbian, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2012

Reviews

[Carol Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grahn is fine poet. Her memoir of life as a lesbian feminist writer and activist moved me.

Her beginnings were difficult, to say the least. Her parents were poor. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother struggled with schizophrenia. Somehow Grahn managed to find herself as a person, a lesbian, and a writer.

She tells about her active involvement in the early days of the gay and lesbian movements.

Grahn lived much of that time in the San Francisco and Oakland area, which interested me a great deal because I am mostly familiar with the movement on the East Coast. She not only worked on her poetry but also founded a press that published other women writers, including her good friend, the poet Pat Parker.

Grahn's tolerance for chaos greatly exceeds mine, though I worked in a feminist collective for thirty-five years. Her living situations were always shared with a changing cast of movement people.

Continually struggling to have enough in material goods to survive, Grahn wrote beloved poems like her Common Woman poems and her She Who poems. She tells how she was inspired to write these and other works.

This book is an important movement chronicle as well as a moving story of personal struggles.

[Felice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first began hearing about Judy Grahn in the late '60's from the few women and the few poets who hung around New York City's Gay Firehouse, where dances were held every Saturday night. One friend finally brought me a mimeographed, purple and pink colored chap book held together with staples and a bit of tape. Inside were the poems Grahn would eventually publish as A Common Woman. Astounding poetry. Wide open. Unafraid. Incisive portraits of contemporary women who were anything but common. A few years later, her new chapbook, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, made it to my literary circle and it was equally amazing and this time out and lesbian at a time when very few people were writing this kind of stuff. By the time her large study of queer kinds of sexuality in myth and literaure came out--Another Mother Tongue--it was evident that Grahn was a major author. If you've not read these works, run do not walk to get copies. The poems are available with a stories and essays etc. in the Aunt Lute edition of The Judy Grahn Reader. Her books since then have held up the high standard. Now, with the publication of this memoir-autobiography Grahn puts it all into a personal and historical context. A Simple Revolution joins those few books that both tell and show what it meant to be a woman and feminist in the U.S. from the 1950's on through the end of the century. It joins texts by east coast writers like Audre Lorde, Kate Millet and especially Karla Jay's Tales of the the Lavendar Menace, with a twist. Judy was no academic, no middle class professor, she was a working class youth from the west and when she came out she was beaten up by men for wearing cowboy clothing. But she persisted and found the burgeoning west coast women's movement. Those little papers of poems I read? --I discovered in this memoir that they were done on an old printing press the women put together, repaired, and used daily for all their communication needs. It was inside a former laundromat in Berkeley. Grahn tells you every aspect of her life, and her friends and her relationships with her own inmitable style. This can be trenchant, it can be sly and very funny. It can be restrained for obvious tragedies and emotional when required. I'd picked up bits and pieces of all this info over the years at lit conferences and gatherings and events I did with Judy, but here it all is in detail, all the dots connected. This is absolutely required reading for anyone interested in the early GLBT movement and ditto for the women's movement.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful memoir by a great writer, capturing a huge amount of change in the author's life and in our society in the course of multiple revolutions that were far from simple. Highly recommended for those like me, who benefited (and still benefit) from the space Grahn and her friends were creating for themselves and for all of us. But also worth a read for those who like a good memoir, whether you are interested in the revolution or not.

It was a treat to learn that the author and I both attended Montgomery College without graduating (at different times, but still!), and her meandering path through the halls of higher learning fills me with admiration for a fellow adult learner trying to get something out of the academy on her own terms.

At the beginning of 2018, I made a reading challenge of 18 books by women that I planned to read this year, including this one. I managed to read half, so that gives me a nice project for next year. But meanwhile I made this my year of reading women, and by the end of the year next week, I hope to have read 52 books by women, one for each week (I just have one more to go!).

[Susanna Sturgis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big challenge in moving between worlds is that the household names in one can be totally unknown in the other. A couple years ago I made an International Women's Day poster that featured much-quoted lines from one of Judy Grahn's Common Woman poems: "the common woman is as common as the best of bread / and will rise". I'm a longtime bread baker and Judy Grahn has been high in my literary pantheon for more than 40 years, so the quote was perfect.

To my dismay, I had to explain over and over again, to feministically inclined women many of whom were of my generation, who Judy Grahn was.

More to the point, A Simple Revolution was published by Aunt Lute Books in 2012 and I only learned of it in January of this year, right here on Goodreads. I was shocked. Aunt Lute was a household name when I was a feminist bookseller in the 1980s, and the women in print movement continues to loom large in my memory -- I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't been part of it -- but clearly I had drifted farther from it than I realized.

Which isn't really all that surprising. Maybe it's a little like losing a language you once spoke fluently because no one around you speaks it or understands what you say in it.

The upside is that now I can point readers to A Simple Revolution to begin to learn what the 1960s, '70s, and '80s felt like to those of us who were caught up in the feminist and lesbian-feminist currents of the time. Grahn is a fabulous writer, equally adept at poetry and nonfiction, and since she's always been far more adventurous than I ever dreamed of being, she's led an amazing life. So her memoir is, surprise surprise, both personal and political, both individual and historical: it wonderfully conveys not only what happened but the spirit behind it.

Seriously. Take the saga of how the Women's Press Collective got started and grew, of determined women, writers and artists, teaching themselves the craft of printing and wrestling with a cranky old behemoth of a press. That is so what it was like: women who didn't know what they didn't know, throwing themselves into the task and learning.

Plenty of Grahn's early work is on my shelves, and unlike some of the books on my shelves, hers get taken down and opened often. Now I've got some catching up to do. If you're not familiar with Judy Grahn, or if like me you haven't kept up, go introduce yourself to her work at her website and by all means read this book.

[Sarah]

omfg judy grahn has a new book!!?!?!??!?!!!!

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need stories that speak to me as a lesbian. Judy Grahn is one of the heroines of the lesbian feminist movement, a moving and plain-spoken poet, one of the women I looked up to as I came out and began to write my own lesbian poetry. This book is both autobiography and movement herstory; though I knew much of the latter, it was still wonderful to read, and even more fascinating to know more about Grahn's life. My favorite parts of the book were Grahn describing where her poems came from, who inspired them and why she wrote them. If you haven't read her poetry, start there, and then read this book. If you've been inside the movement, it will validate you. If you haven't, it will undoubtedly educate you, and you may learn to understand the "Common Woman" of Grahn's poetry.

[Carolyn Lee Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lesbian feminist herstory at its best
The poet Judy Grahn is one of the most important and original lesbian feminist visionaries and activists during the 1970s burgeoning of lesbian feminist philosophy and institutions.

Her memoir of growing up as an outspoken young woman from a working class background, a lesbian before the word was even spoken, and a feminist before the second wave of feminism hit, is a compelling account of her growing into consciousness along with the newly forming lesbian feminist political awareness, community building and cultural expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1970s.

Grahn made a place for herself in the world as a poet and activist by committing to her lesbian sisters, lovers, and community members, and together they created cultural, social and economic institutions by and for women, providing safe and generative spaces for women to become the people they can be when they live outside patriarchy. A deeply personal story that also provides the larger historical context for this important moment in feminist and lesbian herstory that changed so many institutions and women's lives.

[Ocean · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book was a super-inspiring read of a wacky life, written by a working-class butchy poet with a penchant for clashing prints, whose imagination never fucking stopped, who co-founded a print collective that believed the books that they were bringing forth were so important that they guarded the warehouse with shotguns. i haven't loved a book in so long. this was it. bonus: a lot of it takes place in oakland, where i live, and she names specific street names. she writes about a street only a few blocks away from me and it's so fun and sad to imagine the possibilities going on there that i missed by a few short decades. i mean, i might have missed it anyway. i miss out on stuff a lot, because i am depressed and have low energy and also because i spend a lot of time reading books about unsafe lives rather than actually living one!

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir with much of the unwritten history of the early women's movement including Judy's struggles with gender and sexuality. Truly an important book. Never tooting her horn, Judy Grahn writes with a collective perspective--very much from those times and places in history. These are details and people you will not read about in mainstream books. Her writing is fine and clear, much like her inspiring poetry. Thank you Judy for your wonderful portrait of a time I sorely miss in history/ herstory. Life is truly amazing.