This is the second installment of Meet the Blogger, a series of interviews with some of the bloggers I
admire most. Polly Pagenhart is the author of Lesbian Dad.
RR: Hi, Polly. Tell us a bit about yourself.
PP: My kids call me Baba, also Babi (I choose to mentally spell it that way, otherwise it's the
youngest kid from the Brady Bunch, and I wasn't prepared for that). In our familial bunch we have living: me, my partner, a daughter, a son, a kitty named Mrs. Mooney. (Do you know the musical Sweeny Todd?
"Mrs. Mooney had a pie shop" goes the first half of the line. Then
there's more ("popping pussies into pies" is another refrain. It's
kind of about reclaiming one's power.) In the ether, and always always
in my heart: Maxi, the dog that helped me back from the coldest place
I've known.
RR: In a good interview, readers find out things about you that they can't find out on your website. To that end,
I must ask: what's best snack ever?
PP: Hmm.
I'll have to think about that. A friend plops salsa in a bowl with
cottage cheese, and then scoops it up w/ tortilla chips. That works
pretty nicely. With more time, a quesadilla with just about anything
in it (in the cheese and vegetable dept) is always a hit. My mom made
a dip with cream cheese and chutney, and so that, scooped with Wheat
Thins, reminds me of her. Making it a heavy duty contender for "best."
RR: Could you talk about a few favorite books or authors?
PP: Gosh.
I've read so little since the kids came along that many of these will
be people I came to love before becoming a parent. Joan Didion got me
to fall in love with the sentence, the essay, the mind as it weaves
itself around the task of conveying essential truths with the written
word. Thereafter also, authors I love, in no particular order:
Virginia Woolf. Paule Marshall. Sarah Schulman. Audre Lorde.
Adrienne Rich. Pablo Neruda. Mary Oliver. David Gutterson. If I
started trying to name favorite books I'm afraid I'd get myself in
trouble. Though I do want to say that Adrienne Rich's "Women and
Honor: Some Notes on Lying" is an enormous gift. As is most of her
poetry. Audre Lorde's essays account for most of my proper awareness
of the world. Sarah Schulman, in Rat Bohemia, accomplished
something amazing. I think if every family member of every LGBTQ
person read it, lots would be different. Or could be. What can one
say about Didion? Except when poet Gary Soto asked me to read her Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a high school enrichment class, it changed my life.
RR: That's a wide ranging list of writers! Tell us about your academic and/or writing background?
PP: Dear
me. Too much of it, I fear. Or maybe just enough. In college (UC
Berkeley) I majored in English (minored in Ethnic Studies) and tutored
writing and led writing workshops. In grad school (Minnesota), I
taught composition as well as Women's Studies and American Studies.
The original idea was to get me a Ph.D. in American Studies (Feminist
Studies minor) and become a professor somewhere, but plans kind of
shifted (that's a whole interview in itself). I did leave with an M.A.
and a life partner, though. Not too shabby.
RR: When you first started the
blog Lesbian Dad what was your mission and how has it changed over time?
What do you hope to deliver to your audience?
PP: Great
question! Initially, I wanted to work out some ideas about what a
"lesbian fatherhood" might be, if indeed there was one. At the least,
I wanted to find company in the fairly specific parental place I felt I
existed: a lesbian co-parent who was socially & not biologically
connected to her kids (where the partner was bio), and one who chafed
at "mother," for a host of reasons, most of which gender
identity-related.
A
blog provided a venue in which to think out loud about these things
and gather people around me who knew better and could school me (and
anyone who listened). I actually first thought it would be a kind of a
discussion forum that I would merely moderate, but I soon discovered
that -- news to me -- it's fairly easy to launch a solo blog, and
people who wanted to talk a LOT about the subject of their parenthoods
tend start their own blogs. I didn't have the energy or the time at
the outset to begin as a group project, and that might have
made a difference, too. Also, I discovered that many other people
prefer to converse and comment in response to another's catalyst, and
are happy with that degree of contribution.
RR: How does blogging compare to other types of writing you've done in the past?
PP: Great
question! (I suspect I'll preface all my answers to these questions
this way.) It's like my epistolary voice (!), but public. Which makes
it some kind of cross between my most informal, breezy writing in
letters to friends and a polished essay. Probably both writerly voices
appear (formal and informal), depending on the subject matter.
Blogging is unusual, for certain, in the degree to which it is public,
instantaneously, and a dialog as well. I've written in some public venues (academic essays for journals or anthologies, op-ed pieces, a personal essay in Confessions),
but feedback on that stuff comes so slowly. And it's not even really
part of the form, that it anticipate dialog from readers. At most,
I'd bump into someone at an academic conference, say, and hear they
were using an essay of mine in a class. Or find, after the advent of
the World Wide Internet, that someone was referring to an essay.
But
of course with blogs, the impact is instant. Most exciting is that it
is for the most part supposed to be a conversation! A blog is a DIALOG,
not a MONOLOG. ALL CAPS, BABY. That is a thrill, and what so much
writing (tacitly) aspires to. Or rather, I'll say that I would always
want my own writing to spark some kind of dialog. It's a privilege to
be able to hear that dialog going on, and even be a part of it.
RR: What are your favorite children's books (yours and opposed to our kids')?
PP: Hmmm.
There's a crop of books that touched me as a kid, and then some that I
like as a parent. From my own childhood, I'd still say Winnie the Pooh
is a sentimental favorite. The kids aren't old enough for Harriet the
Spy yet, but I can't wait. A number of more obscure ones just happen
to touch cords of memory, like Tico and the Golden Wing, for example.
RR: What's the strangest thing that's happened to you since you became a parent? 
PP: Now
that's an interesting one. Mmmm. Well I'm not sure this is as strange
as it is interesting to me. I've realized that I am connected to so
very many very different people, by virtue of our common parenthood.
The simple fact that we both are parents to children provides a point
of contact that would never otherwise have been there. Experiencing
that has been really a phenomenal, fairly unexpected part of becoming a
parent. Totally didn't anticipate that, and -- other than the
incredible experience of witnessing the development/ self-realization
of two different human beings -- it may well be the best thing about
this gig.
RR: You've won a number of awards for Lesbian Dad. What do you think the blog offers its readers?
PP: Well!
I would have had a harder time answering this question if I'd have
responded before the results from my reader survey came rolling in, or
before I went to BlogHer and got a wider sense of women's communities
online. But now I can do more than speculate. I
would have initially thought that a blog like Lesbian Dad might keep people
like me company -- offering the betwixt/between gals an example of
someone else who was parenting from this gendered standpoint
(both/and) and doing just fine. I might have hoped that it would also
offer straight readers an opportunity to listen in on our
thoughts/feelings/conversations, and develop more understanding
and compassion. And I think that both these things are true. Or at
least I aspire to contribute in these areas.
But
I've been very pleasantly surprised that a lot of folks just like good
writing for its own sake. Great news, eh? For its own sake. Gives
us all something to strive for.
RR: Would you like to add a question that I haven't asked?
PP: What
fun! Gosh. Well, the first thing that occurs to me is a question that
I asked folks in the survey I did in a recent survey of readers,
which was essentially: What do you get from the online communities of
which you are a part? To which I'd answer: so much, and so much more
than I would have expected! I feel like I've had the opportunity to
learn how many commonalities there are across lesbian and lesbian
parenting experiences in different countries (in the UK at least, and
Australia).
Also,
I've come to consider that we really can help one another a great deal
using this medium. Being able to carry on a conversation across such
distances and so many differences, all mediated not by publishing
conglomerates, or limited by physical logistics (how long it takes to
get a letter from here to there, much less gather multiple voices into
it). We're still limited by human emotion -- the ease with which we
can misunderstand each other, peoples' tendencies to gather into clumps
of like groups. And online spaces are definitely communities, governed
by etiquette and expectations and so on. It's easy to only learn these
things after inadvertently stepping on toes. But what we can do with
and for each other in this realm is so worth it. I think the community
building you do is probably the best example of that.
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