Passing Along a Passion for the Written Word

Brenda Redding moved from Detroit to Los Angeles two decades ago to reinvent herself as Bryn, a perpetually busy writer and teacher known for her dark-themed poetry and fiction. Then an automobile accident threw her into a deep coma and her hard-won self-definition was lost to her, overlaid by the perspectives of artist Djuna (her lover of four years), her mother and her friends.

Author Terry Wolverton, Bryn’s creator, came to Los Angeles from Detroit in 1976 to participate in activities at the downtown Woman’s Building, melding her political and artistic interests as a performance artist, writer, teacher, administrator and feminist activist. She published a collection of poetry, “Black Slip” (Clothespin Fever Press), in 1992.

Last fall, Faber & Faber released “Bailey’s Beads,” her first novel, which tells the stories of Bryn, her mother and Djuna. She will read from “Bailey’s Beads” tonight at 6:30 at Book Soup in West Hollywood.

In writing the novel, she borrowed considerably from her own life, “although I have never been in a coma,” Wolverton said, smiling sweetly.

“I tell my writing students that in storytelling, the space between truth and invention is a spectrum, and there’s no such thing as pure truth and there’s no such thing as pure invention; you’re always somewhere in that spectrum,” she said.

These days, Wolverton, 42, lives in a 1925 Atwater Village house with three cats and her partner of nine years, artist and graphic designer Susan Silton. An overloaded orange tree by the front door seems a metaphor for all the fruitful activity going on inside, as the writer parcels out her time between creating new work, editing anthologies, providing management consulting to small companies and teaching five writing workshops each week.

Gone is the short, spiky haircut depicted in the author photograph on her book jacket; Wolverton now wears her dyed blond hair shoulder length and softly curling. Green-rimmed glasses frame eyes that seem to alertly and benignly assess whoever passes before them.

Her novel has drawn mixed reviews. The Los Angeles Times found it to be composed of “incomprehensible fragments.” But Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and Buzz have given it relatively positive short reviews.

Impetus for the novel came from her observations of her grandfather after he suffered a stroke in the early 1980s. “He was a really intelligent and vibrant man [who lost] all his ability to communicate. I wondered what was going on in his brain. That question tormented me for years,” she said.

She was also concerned with questions of “identity and how we construct it, how we project it and then how other people receive and interpret it. And whether that has to do with us at all and whether that has to do with them.”

She began writing the novel in early 1993, finishing it two years later. “The book was very insistent, and in that way it was easy to write. It really knew what it wanted to be,” said Wolverton, who frequently refers to poems and stories as if they lead lives separate from hers.

The novel closes with many questions about Bryn’s future unanswered. “Any time you have a hospital situation, you run the risk of writing a movie of the week, and I didn’t want to do that,” Wolverton said. “It seemed like that ambiguity was perfect in terms of the issues I was exploring. To end with certainty would be false.”

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The road to “Bailey’s Beads” began with Wolverton’s decision, at age 8, to become a writer.

“I wrote a lot when I was a kid,” she said. “I was really inspired by my grandmother, who had been a teacher and who used to read to me. She really awakened my love for the written word.”

In high school and college, she studied theater intensively and soon became immersed in experimental theater in western Michigan and Toronto. She found, however, that “the feminist and the lesbian community had no understanding of my deep need to be connected to the arts, and artists [there] had no understanding of my feminist-lesbian politics.”

When she heard of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, where art and politics were combined, “I just said, ‘I have to be there.’ I was waitressing, and every day I’d put a certain amount of tip money in a jar, and I tried to live on the rest. I was hellbent to get here.”

At the Woman’s Building, she studied writing with authors Deena Metzger and Eloise Klein Healy, and she became very involved in performance art. In 1977, she started teaching classes at the building, and she held a number of administrative positions there as well, finally serving as executive director from 1988-’89. (The building closed in 1991.)

While working more than full time at the Woman’s Building, she trained herself to focus intensely on her writing for just half an hour each day. Using this discipline, in only six months she wrote the first draft of a novel that preceded “Bailey’s Beads.”

She’s presently rewriting that earlier novel, “The Labrys Reunion,” and she’s completing a poem cycle, “The Marie Poems.” She now sets aside one or two 90-minute blocks each day to intensely focus on whatever writing project is before her.

“I try to make [writing] the top priority each day, to say ‘OK, before I commit to anything else, where is the writing going to come in?’ ” she said. Writing “is the reason for doing everything else, so it doesn’t make sense to let that take the back seat.”

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In recent years, she has also co-edited, with literary agent and fiction writer Robert Drake, several anthologies of gay fiction, including a two-book volume called “His” and “Hers,” first published by Faber & Faber in 1995, with a new volume due out this May.

An artist residency funded by the California Arts Council and the city of Los Angeles allows Wolverton to teach four free writing workshops each week at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood. She also teaches a weekly private writing workshop in her home.

From 1988-’96, Wolverton taught a writing workshop for HIV-positive individuals, and with Silton she created a literary imprint, Silverton Books, to publish two volumes of “Blood Whispers: L.A. Writers on AIDS” and one individual collection of poems, “Stone Made Flesh” by Michael Niemoller, a student who died of complications of AIDS and hepatitis in 1994.

“She has certainly put in her time in the trenches,” said Healy, Wolverton’s former teacher at the Woman’s Building.

Wolverton’s contribution to the community is gigantic, Healy said, “in terms of mentoring and working with people who are just coming into writing, and also in terms of working with people in pretty extreme states.”

Robin Podolsky of Silver Lake, a freelance writer whose “Queer Cosmopolis” is forthcoming from New York University Press, has participated in Wolverton’s workshops for 10 years.

She calls Wolverton “one of the few truly gifted writers I know who’s also a truly gifted teacher,” one who gently but firmly insists on quality of craft.

“Within the lesbian and gay community, Terry has been a force for extending the reach of really good writing and making it a part of the gay / queer culture,” Podolsky said.

For her part, Wolverton would like to see gay and lesbian writing attract more heterosexual readers.

If homosexual themes are part of one’s work, “there’s a tendency of publishers to sort of market you into that readership niche,” of gay literature, she said.

“It’s great to be able to publish, but I feel like there’s still this other level of discrimination,” Wolverton said. “I want to address all kinds of people.”