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In this post, Fay and Karelia Stetz-Waters share the benefits of exploring characters through the lens of Sapphic romance, including how to Venn diagram your way to more interesting characters and a few Sapphic romance book recommendations. Karelia & Fay Stetz-Waters In our household someone has to hand roll the butternut squash ravioli and brown the butter for the sage sauce. S omeone has to get the snakes off the patio before the cook-out guests arrive. In our household there are no pink jobs or blue jobs. Our household tasks usually fall neatly into our hobbies and habits. Karelia has loved snakes since she put them in her dollhouse (sadly without gaining their consent). I haven’t worn a dress since I was eight, but put me in the kitchen and I am the lesbian Martha Stewart (minus the obstruction of justice charges). ( 10 LGBTQ+ Books to Read Now or Later .) In our sapphic relationship we are Fay and Karelia, two halves of a real life opposites attract Sapphic romance. One of the vows we made to ourselves 25 years ago was to always remember that we came to each other, and we remain unique individuals. Karelia’s been writing Sapphic romance for years and I’ve recently joined as co-author of Second Night Stand , a romance novel about a Black ballerina and a White burlesque performer who fall in love on a reality TV show. (The term Sapphic romance replaces the more limited term lesbian romance .) In many ways, Second Night Stand reads like a heterosexual romance. We’ve got the meet-cute, the forced-proximity tropes, the third-act breakup, and the happily-ever-after. But one important thing distinguishes Sapphic romance from its heterosexual cousin: flexibility around gender roles. No one is immune to gender expectations. They’re omnipresent and normalized. But when we put two women together, we have to challenge those expectations. Just acknowledging that society has expectations around patio snakes and browned butter loosens the stranglehold gender “norms” have on our culture. Karelia teaches creative writing. In one exercise, she has her students develop their characters using a Venn […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
