“Heather Haley’s brash novel details the risky experiments that defined life in the subcultures of the late 1970s.” And 80s. And 90s, etcetera. I haven’t quit; stubborn that way.

I do wish they’d credited Gabor Gasztonyi for his lovely portrait of the author but thank you books editor Brian Lynch, and Connie Kuhns, for the review, I admire your writing. I will be sharing excerpts from the novel at the Storm Crow Reading Series, Thurs, June 18.

The Town Slut’s Daughter
 By Heather Haley. Howe Sound Publishing, 314 pp, softcover

A girl walks into a bar. Eventually, she gets out alive. This is the story of Fiona Larochelle, an emotionally abused teenager and runaway whose lost weekend begins in a filthy washroom in a Vancouver nightclub and ends years later on a Los Angeles freeway. Although the book is a work of fiction, the bit players are very real. When Fiona forms an all-female punk band, the Virgin Marries, she and her bandmates occupy the same historical space as D.O.A. and the Dishrags. It is the late 1970s. The Clash is coming to town. Everyone is spitting on one another.

Fiona and her friends look for independence in all the wrong places. Their world is violent and ignorant and they are handicapped further by drugs and exploitative sex. It is experimentation run amok and told in graphic detail. Everybody’s talking. They play music and argue politics. They play music and discuss art. They play music and talk dirty.

Author Heather Haley, a well-regarded poet, filmmaker, and former editor at LA Weekly, was in real life a musician and member of the Zellots, a groundbreaking Vancouver women’s punk band. Knowing she survived those difficult and dangerous times, it’s hard to resist making Fiona her avatar. The Town Slut’s Daughter reads (to me) as a recollection, as if Fiona is skimming over her life, trying to get it down before it is forgotten, trying to remember every single thing. There are images, lengthy diatribes, and famous people coming and going. We follow Fiona to New York, Las Vegas, and finally Los Angeles. She is running and constantly transforming.

When Fiona finally succumbs, a deeper story begins and Haley’s writing is powerful. Her depictions of Fiona’s drug-saturated sexual and emotional abuse and her final battle out of darkness are as disturbing and realistic as anything in a Marianne Faithfull autobiography.

One of my first literary ventures, expressions, was a zine, published in America of all places. Edgy of course, Rattler, edited along with ex-husband filmmaker, writer and musician Peter Haskell, featured a significant number of now established Los Angeles poets, authors and artists. Despite brutal economic times and evolving technology, true to their nature, alternative presses persevere; Poetry Is Dead, subTerrain, McSweeney‘s, Event, CV2, Broken Pencil, to name a few. In that spirit check out this new book on the subject, The Little Magazine In Contemporary America and an eclectic list of submission calls at Aerogramme Writer’s Studio.

Not certain I’ll ever find enough time to pen another novel but I continue to carve hours out of each week to write verse, which to many is an utter waste of time. I am not so foolish as to waste my breath convincing anyone of its merit. I know why I write poetry. Poetry is where I take risks, indulge my quirks, alter my old order, find inspiration. It sustains me.

SALOON

Home away from home
To maul his favourite barfly,
The one who’s heard it all.
Meek dick taker. Instant co-spiralee.

No-guff companion, quickly enamored
Of her salient recycled mate.
Faithful ego extension, she waits
Patiently, fourth in line.

It’s the reckless man
That underestimates her pale grip,
Courts the highly functioning
Simpering angel face, dressed up

To impersonate a pure silk purse.
He orders a beer. “Have a cup of cyanide,”
Says the proprietor, “it goes down quicker,
Delivers a merciful fate.”

“Haley has the gift of writing to suit her subject in all its raddled variety, from wired and jarring to lyrical and tragic. The lyricism is seductive in a way which reflects her heroine’s suicidal spiral into depravity.”

Review by George Payerle in the Vancouver Sun. FYI, the story ends in LA, during the riots, not in San Francisco.

This is a tough one. I may not act my age but there’s no denying that I’m getting older, running out of time, moving inexorably toward the day of my departure. Human consciousness makes life bittersweet, living with our mortality. Living with death. Or despite it? For we live despite it all; every fear, challenge, setback. We exult in life. Joie de vivre. So I will celebrate having survived one more orbit round the sun. The boyfriend is hosting a party in Vancouver and I will get to see friends I don’t get to see enough. A la vida!

Not sure exactly how to celebrate International Women’s Day when “feminist” has become a dirty word and women are still so oppressed. The majority of the Like generation doesn’t appear to give a fuck. But it’s unfair to single them out. They aren’t the only people that don’t care.

Women’s rights are human rights. And as I said to a young man recently, I can understand your loathing of feminists. I don’t like zealots, but not all feminists are loud mouthed, obnoxious extremists. I love being a woman and I love men, but there will always be a gender gap. Our experiences on this earth cannot compare. Women are not the enemy. Seems obvious to me that the male and female of the species are designed to complement one another, work together. Be partners, therefore equal. A team. We are not the same. Vive le difference! Like the life force, women persist and humanity will prevail.