Bare Bones Press Blog

Hi Bare Bones friends! A lot has happened since our last post. You’re due for some updates! Here’s what’s happened in the past several months:

• One half of Bare Bones Press moved to Kansas and then on to New Mexico.
• The other half of Bare Bones Press is now in Utah.
• We didn’t receive enough responses to move forward with the Queer Youth Reader, but plans are in place to transform that project to something else.

A whole lot else happened, but those three items are the basics. Bare Bones has always been a labor of love for both Twig and Erin and as good as our intentions are with what we want Bare Bones to do and be, it’s often fallen short of our ambitions. A fact that’s due, in no small part, to the lack of time and attention we’re able to consistently devote to Bare Bones pursuits.

However, we’ve always enjoyed the moral, social, and financial support of the Bare Bones fans.  We continue to march forward on our mission, no matter how many set-backs we face, or how far apart our fearless leaders are. (cue inspiring music) As long as there’s a need for honest observation, assessment, and conversation about the representation of the queer experience, we’ll be here to participate in that dialogue.

Diversity Minute

In elementary school, I recall taking part in some Diversity Day activities. Maybe it was Diversity Week. Month? I can’t exactly remember, but whatever it was, was fleeting. The notion of diversity was represented by large colorful paper dolls strung around the hallways of school, depicting children from all over the world in their traditional garb.

There was the brown-skinned kid wearing a dress with zigzag lines of orange and yellow, and wearing a kind of pillbox hat in the same pattern: Africa (any particular country in Africa? No. Just “Africa.”)

There was a kid with diagonal eyes and pale skin, wearing a colorful bathrobe and wearing wooden shoes up on stilts: Japan.

More wooden shoes, but chunky clogs this time–a girl in a white, sweeping-winged hat, and wearing an apron: Denmark.

And on and on, more pictures of smiling children from these exciting other countries. I felt both bored and dismayed that the North American kid was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. Yawn.

Since the best that could be done to express the cultural identity of my country’s culture was the kid with the most plain clothes of the lot, I began to yearn for the differences I saw expressed by the other countries’ paper dolls. It’s not that I saw the American kid as boring because I was used to those clothes; rather, they were boring because they lacked any representation of anything.

This is the part where I get woo-woo on you…

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