Sinister Wisdom 123

Book excerpt: Sinister Wisdom 123: A Tribute to Conditions reaches back forty-three years to the beginnings of Conditions, "a [feminist] magazine of writing for women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians," founded by Elly Bulkin, Jan Clausen, Irena Klepfisz, and Rima Shore in 1977, a year later than the founding of Sinister Wisdom. So, we feel it fitting that Sinister Wisdom should produce this special issue to honor one of the signal publications of the late Women in Print Movement, a time of prodigious writing, organizing, and creating when women "seized the time" and the means for our own revolution in letters. This special issue pays tribute to Conditions as one of a number of US feminist publications that asserted, in the words of Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr, for thirteen years that "books could be revolutionary, that language could remake the world, and that writing mattered in a profound way."In the first half of the issue, members of the Conditions editorial collectives write their reflections about the journal. In the second half of the issue, seventeen mixed-generation writers and artists respond to one of the seventeen issues of Conditions. Writers took whatever creative bent struck their queer forms and fantasies bringing to the issue a collage of autobiography, theorizing, fiction-writing, poetry, criticism, and straight-up essay.