Cherry Potts, Writer

Category: Lesbian

  • LGBT History Month events

    LGBT History month is keeping me busy this year. As well as Lewisham Library, I am also involved in events all over London, mainly reading from Mosaic of Air, but also from new work. The Story Sessions, Queer Tales, 19th February 7.45 at the Ivy House SE15 3BE – Me, Cath Blackfeather, Anny Knight, Rebecca…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 5th January

    No convenient birthday for 5th January so the first of the ‘who knows?’ BIERIS (Biatritz) DE ROMANS Thirteenth Century Trobairitz (Female Troubadour – writer of songs) from Romans-Sur-Isère. Writing from around 1200-1235. Probably nobility since she could read and write. The tune does not survive.  During and following the Albigensian Crusade, troubadours were treated with…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party January 4th

    The matchless Orinda – Katherine Phillips. Her birthday is actually 1st January 1631 but she deserved a really class party so I’ve waited til now. She was also known as the English Sappho. (So were lots of women poets, it didn’t mean what we think it would mean now, just that she was a poet,…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party January 3rd

    Today’s birthday girl is Henry Handel Richardson (don’t you love a male nom-de-plume?) known to her family as Ethel Robertson. Born 3rd January 1870 HH wrote the lovely and semi-autobiographical coming of age novel The Getting of Wisdom about Laura, a young Australian girl sent away to school where she finds it hard to fit…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea party 2nd January

    The second in my celebrations of women from history who stuck up for themselves and each other, and this one rather more likely to be a lesbian than dear Maria E. M. Carey Thomas, born 2nd January 1857 in th USA, prefered to be known as Carey rather than her given name of Martha (another…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 1st January

    So: YEARS ago, pre the internet, A and I used to go to the Lesbian History Group at the London Women’s Centre, and for a while we had this plan to produce a birthday book with a lesbian from history for every day of the year, complete with a good quotation for every week. It…

  • Inspirations – Dancing in the Darkroom

    Getting a book ready for publication (Typesetting, proofreading) even second time round and twenty years later, does send me back to the roots of the stories, and with so many of the stories in Mosaic of Air I can remember exactly where and when the idea first stuck its claws into me. Ladies Pleasure, the…

  • Inspirations – claustrophobia in the closet

    To celebrate HM the Queen’s royal assent on Gay Marriage, some thoughts about what it used to be like when I was first coming out in 1982… when I wrote Trying to Tell You… A story about coming out,  not to straight colleagues or family, but to the only Visible Lesbian ( this is my…

  • Inspirations – Marvell and computers

    The short story Mosaic of Air, (title story of my first collection and republished this coming September)  began life in a computer literacy class in the late 1980’s. I was bored, the class was going slowly, and I’d been given some BASIC code to play with.  I started to imagine what would happen if the…

  • LGBT History Month

    February is LGBT History Month, and I’ve had it drawn to my attention how few new UK Lesbian voices are getting published, which sent me off to peruse my shelves. Now, I think of myself as having a fairly comprehensive collection, but actually there isn’t a vast swathe of stuff there, and most of it…