That remembered fusion which opens everything, even minds

1. With one late-realized exception, Joanna Russ was not a writer who was very important to me. She was starting to be. I read How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) last year, I think mostly on someone else's couch. My cousins gave me To Write Like a Woman (1995) for Christmas. I had read The Female Man (1975) years ago and not so much bounced as not clicked, but I found at the beginning of this month that she was responsible for a story I loved so much since high school that I re-read it every few years, "The Mystery of the Young Gentleman" in Isaac Asimov's Speculations (1982). It upset my mother greatly to hear that she'd suffered strokes. So I can write about her, because she was not so deeply wound into me that I'd have to tease her out first, like some other writers I have lost, but I am not glad she's gone. I know there are new ones, always, because the wings of the Angel of Death are full of eyes that every moment open or close, but I am tired of losing lights from the world.

2. Speaking of the lost: I seem to have provided a name for a frequently haunting collection of photographs, Marc Haumann's splintered lens. It's quoting from my poem "Martyrology," which forms the epilogue to Jeannelle Ferreira's A Verse from Babylon (2005). Consider this very far up the list of things I didn't expect to find through self-Googling. Some of the images even fit the poem.

3. I wish I could remember where I read it before, but I love this poem.