Gina

New Girl Talk email address & office hours

I am attempting to do that thing that I have heard people do, where I actually have work/life boundaries and do not do bizness emails at 11pm on a Thursday night or whatnot.

SOOO: If you need to get in touch with me about anything related to Girl Talk, please email me at GirlTalkTheShow@gmail.com, and NOT at my personal email address. Also, my “office hours” for Girl Talk are generally Tuesdays & Fridays from here on out, so if it is not a Tuesday or a Friday, please be patient.

Thanks all!

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“As far as I know (and I think I would) this is the first time a group of queer cis and trans women have gotten together for the express purpose of speaking about our shared experience publicly. Listening to the show, I was struck by how obvious and straightforward much of it seemed. I don’t mean that in a belittling way, but rather I think it is a testament to the brilliance of the women speaking. For those of you with little context for this, it might seem like you’re hearing just another group of women tell what they have to tell about themselves and the world around them. That’s exactly right, but at the same time, until this night these thoughts had very little public airing. These things were mostly spoken softly between friends.”

— I stumbled upon this review of Girl Talk’s first show (back in 2009) this morning. I’m kinda blushing & glowing now. D’awwwwww!

(To add to my d’awww, this was written by someone who has become one of my closest & dearest friends, but whom I barely knew at the time. I’m very lucky I get you in my corner, Doktor Meow. <3)

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Madison WI & Pioneer Valley MA & Boston/Somerville MA folks, take note! :)

MADISON, WI PEOPLES: I will be in your town from roughly March 4th-March 6th (I can extend this time if I get more gigs!) for a gig at UW-Madison on March 5th. I would LOVE info about picking up other gigs (teaching writing workshops, doing readings, etc) that week in March if at all possible. Also, I’d love to meet any Madison folks who wanna show me around.

PIONEER VALLEY, MA PEOPLES: I will be in Amherst, MA from roughly April 5th-April 7th (I can extend this time if I get more gigs!) for a gig at Hampshire (my alma mater!) on April 6th. I would LOVE info about picking up other gigs (teaching writing workshops, doing readings, etc) that week in April if at all possible. Also, I’d love to see any Valley folks who wanna say hi. :)

BOSTON, MA PEOPLES: If I came to visit for a bit in April either before/after my Hampshire gig, could we hang out? Also, could I pick up a gig or two (teaching, performing, etc)?

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Incredibly sweet profile of my work in the Golden Gate Xpress: "Graduate student Gina de Vries sparks queer activism through writing"

I feel a liiiiiittle funny posting an article about myself on tumblr. But this profile is hella sweet, and it is making me smile a lot. Enormous gratitude to Golden Gate Xpress reporter & SFSU journalism major Kirstie Haruta for your kind, thoughtful work. (Editor friends, take note: She graduates in May & is seeking assignments!)

Also, thank you so much to Julia Serano, Dodie Bellamy, & Marlene Hoeber for your kind words about me. I can’t stop blushing. Really!

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BAY AREA GIRL TALK FANS: Wanna help Girl Talk make lotsa $ for our 2013 show while also hanging out w/ perverts? Read on! :)

BAY AREA GIRL TALK FANS! Are you free next Sunday, September 23rd? Do you wanna help Girl Talk make lots of money for our 2013 show?

Consider volunteering on Girl Talk’s behalf at The Folsom Street Fair. Lots of leather & chaps & bears, oh my! More here: http://www.folsomstreetfair.com/

The Queer Cultural Center is looking for volunteers to help out during the Fair. And every Girl Talk-related volunteer for QCC at Folsom equals $100 for Girl Talk — which equals AWESOME, duh!

In exchange for your time, you’ll get access to the volunteer area throughout the day (including free food! water! clean port-a-potties! seating! shade! a clothes check! — like, srsly dudes, these are luxuries at Folsom when everyone is smooshed together like chap-sporting sardines in a leathery can). You will also get the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping Girl Talk & QCC continue to create amazing work!

There are a variety of volunteer jobs and shifts available starting as early as 5 AM and ending as late as 9 PM, usually for about 4 hours. If you’re interested, please email volunteer@queerculturalcenter.org with your first and last name, email, cell phone (Folsom St. Events asks for this info), general time frame you are available, and the name of the organization you’ll be representing (in this case, “GIRL TALK”).

If you can’t make it to the Fair, *please* consider forwarding this on to people who might want to volunteer.

Please DO NOT contact me, Julia, or Rose about this, as the lovely Kevin Seaman at QCC is the Empress of Everything Folsom Volunteer Related & he can answer yr questions way better than any of us could.

Bless you & thank you & PLEASE spread the word!

xox & grazie mille,
Gina de Vries, Girl Talk founder & co-curatrix

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BAY AREA GIRL TALK FANS! Free this Sunday? Wanna help Girl Talk make lots of money for our 2013 show?

BAY AREA GIRL TALK FANS! Are you free this Sunday? Do you wanna help Girl Talk make lots of money for our 2013 show?

Consider volunteering on Girl Talk’s behalf at Up Your Alley (aka The Dore Alley Street Fair). Lots of leather & chaps & bears, oh my! More here: http://www.folsomstreetfair.com/alley/

Every Girl Talk-related volunteer at Up Your Alley equals $100 for Girl Talk — which equals AWESOME, duh! Please contact Kevin Seaman at the Queer Cultural Center at kevin.l.seaman@gmail.com for more info. Say you are with GIRL TALK & that you wanna volunteer on our behalf. And if you can’t make it to the Fair, consider forwarding this on to people who might want to volunteer.

Please DO NOT contact me, Julia, or Rose about this, as 2/3 of us are out of town, and Kevin is in charge of everything Up Your Alley-fundraising-related & can answer yr questions way better than any of us, anyway.

Bless you & thank you & PLEASE spread the word! (Also, sorry for the late announcement — I have been on writing retreat in the Pacific Northwest & only found out about this opportunity today.)

xox & grazie mille,
Gina de Vries, Girl Talk founder & co-curatrix

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Girl Talk 2012: Gina de Vries, "Heroes"

My performance at Girl Talk this year! I was the opening act, so there was a bit going on before me. If you wanna skip right to Elena Rose’s intro, go to 5:20. If you wanna skip right to my performance, go to 8:50.

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The Girl Talk 2012 videos are up now! :)

Girl Talk fans, all the videos from the show last week are now up!

We’re working to get them better labelled & tagged this weekend — but in the meantime, yay, they’re up & very watchable.

Thanks again to Mark McBeth for his awesome videography!

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This is what community looks like. This is what sisterhood looks like. <3

Oh, my stars, grazie mille, all of you beautiful, beautiful people at last night’s Girl Talk. Blessings on my amazing co-curators & co-hosts, our wonderful performers, and last, but not least, you, gorgeous audience. I am full to the brim with love for all of you. This is what community looks like. This is what sisterhood looks like. <3

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Girl Talk is TONIGHT, good peoples! Mixer at 6pm, show at 7pm! Show up *right on the nose* at 6 if you want one of our few Standing Room Only tix. Love!

Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)

San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away!)
BUY TICKETS HERE - Brown Paper Tickets Link. We strongly recommend that you get tix in advance — we sold out very fast last year.

CONTACT: ginadevries.com

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

Curated & hosted by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, & Julia Serano.

FEATURING:
Charlie Anders
Dominika Bednarska
Gina de Vries
DavEnd
Thea Hillman
Nomy Lamm
Emily Manuel
Elena Rose
Julia Serrano
Jos Truitt
Pidge Vera

PERFORMER BIOS:

Charlie Anders hosts and organizes the award-winning Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, which was namechecked in Armistead Maupin’s latest Tales of the City novel. She’s had stories in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009 and 2011, and Tor.com. She co-founded other magazine: the magazine for people who defy categories, and currently blogs at io9. She won the 2010 Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

Dominika Bednarska is a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in English and Disability Studies. Her writing has appeared in Wordgathering, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Ghosting Atoms, and Cripping Femme. She is currently working on expanding and revising her solo show, My Body Love Story, that will be performed this spring and summer. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries founded and co-curates “Girl Talk” with Elena Rose and Julia Serano. She’s thrilled that the show is still going strong after 4 years. Gina has taught Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop since 2008, and you can find her work anthologized all over, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to Coming & Crying. A graduate of Hampshire College, Gina is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing and Master’s in English at San Francisco State University. The Record, her experimental fiction novel about sex, adolescence, music, San Francisco, and growing up queer, should be hitting bookstores in 2013. Find out a whole lot more at ginadevries.com.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, costume designing, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. Ms. End has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 5 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!,brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.

Thea Hillman is a mother, writer, and performer. Her book of poetry and fiction “Depending on the Light,” was published in 2001. Her Lambda award-winning memoir, “Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word” came out in 2008 and is taught at universities around the country.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, performance artist and voice teacher. Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything, including other musicians, artists, poets, puppeteers, spectators, and the moon. She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, creating musical dreamworld performance art about disability, sexuality and social justice. She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a collection of short stories called “515 Clues,” and writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine called “Dear Nomy.”

Emily Manuel is a Greek-Australian becoming-Jewish writer, blogger, editor, sometime academic, musician, partner, mother to four cats, and beekeeper. She found a bee and she kept it - that’s the first rule of beekeeping. She is editor-in-chief at Global Comment magazine, and her work has also appeared at Questioning Transphobia, Tiger Beatdown, Billboard magazine, Bitch magazine, and many others. She has a PhD in English from Murdoch University in Australia gathering dust in the corner.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since. In her second year co-curating “Girl Talk” and fourth as a performer, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the work of radical love, queer theology, and justice for those who live at the edges. Her work has turned up everywhere from college classrooms to bathroom mirrors to protest marches, in magazines including Aorta and Make/Shift, and on the acclaimed spoken-word album It Is Better to Speak! Rose is currently finishing her first book, Mountain of Myrrh, forthcoming from Dinah Press, and attends seminary in Northern California, where she resides with her wife and a small but well-loved pomegranate tree.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer and activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, and make/shift), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America. juliaserano.com.

Jos Truitt is a Boston native and recent transplant to San Francisco. She joined the team at Feministing.com in July 2009 and became an Editor in August 2011. Jos attended Hampshire College where she coordinated the school’s annual national reproductive justice conference. After college she worked in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements in Washington, DC. Jos has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute.

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Apparently, I am not above having “The Final Countdown” stuck in my head the day before a big show. Thanks, G.O.B. Thanks a lot.

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plz to advz?

Girl Talk audience members: Do you want me at my ranty bitchy scathing best, discussing Current Events? Or do you want some tenderheart memoir about late-90s queer & trans punk kids, one of my best friends in high school, all-night diners, and sneaking into the Anarchist Bookstore & Anubis Warpus to buy porn? I’d been planning on the former, but I’m kinda getting more excited about the latter. PLEASE TO ADVISE.

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Girl Talk audience, we’re throwing a mixer an hour before the show! Nom some food, buy some chapbooks, & connect! <3

Hey “Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue” ticket holders:

We (the co-curators of Girl Talk) are throwing a mixer just before the show! There will be food and drink, plus music provided by the amazing DJ CPI! There will be a merch table where you can check out (and perhaps even procure) books, CDs, zines, etc., by Girl Talk cast members.

But most importantly, this will be a chance for those of us who are committed to fostering community between queer trans women and queer cis women to meet one another, chat, and have a bit of fun before the event begins! The mixer takes place at 6pm (one hour before the show begins) in the lobby just outside of the Rainbow Room. In other words, just show up to the event an hour early, and we’ll be there having a blast!

Btw, please *spread the news about this mixer*! It wasn’t mentioned in the initial promotion for the show, so if you know you know anyone else who is also attending Girl Talk, be sure to encourage them to come out early for the mixer!

Hope you can make it!
Gina de Vries, Julia Serano, & Elena Rose

SHOW DETAILS:
Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
Mixer: 6pm
Show: 7pm-10pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)
WEB: http://queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/HealthyC/girlTalk12.html
Curated by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, and Julia Serano
Generously supported by the Queer Cultural Center Healthy Communities program.

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

A friendly note from your co-curators: While we cannot guarantee a scent-free public space, we are working to improve the accessibility of Girl Talk. Out of respect for those in our community with chemical sensitivities, please refrain from wearing perfumes and other scented products at the show where possible. We are aware that many folks are on a budget and aren’t ready to shift over wholly to going scent-free yet, but this is important. A scent-reduced space makes it more possible for valued friends and family to join us without becoming ill, and small courtesies add up to stronger communities. Thanks!

2012 CAST:
Charlie Anders
Dominika Bednarska
Gina de Vries
DavEnd
Thea Hillman
Nomy Lamm
Emily Manuel
Elena Rose
Julia Serano
Jos Truitt

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Holy holy holy WOW!

So! Girl Talk tickets with seats have COMPLETELY sold out online. Wow & huzzah!

If you were late about getting a ticket and are able to stand for a couple hours at a stretch, you should know that we will have 10 (ten!) Standing Room Only tickets available at the door the night of the show. Get there EARLY, though, kids, and keep in mind that you for realz will not have a seat and will have to stand or sit on the floor.

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