God'sAGoodKisser's Blog

 

Hello, and thank you for your interest in my writing!

“I would dress more conservatively but I don’t have anything made of guns, torture, or homophobia.”

I’m a surrealist, transcendental, love poet/short story writer/film reviewer and I’ve got a Master of Arts in the Teaching of English Language Arts from Columbia University (4.0 GPA). I like to joke that my other advanced degree is from Psychedelic State.

One of my short stories is published in the Lammy-nominated literary anthology, Best Bi Short Stories, the first book of its kind, which, according to editor Sheela Lambert, “bring(s) together the very finest representations of bisexuality in literature.”

Here is the synopsis on the back cover of my first book, But I Digretch – Quirky Short Stories, published on September 29, 2022: 

Love is a wavy lullaby sung through broken stained glass;

Love is the sum of all our tries, the futures of hopes bypassed;

Love is what catches up to us when the moment went too fast;

Love is a sunrise dewdrop on a lonely blade of grass…

The anaphora of this stanza (from one of the author’s surrealist, transcendental love poems) emphasizes what remains in the wake of life’s brutal inevitability of loss; it reflects the indestructible force — of love — that redeems after life plays spin the bottle and administers its kiss of death on everyone and everything. Love is, love is, love is, love is, and never is not…

Enthralled by the glimmer that breathes under fresh ashes of burnt conversation;

uncontainably anxious to hang my sighs on the lines of your imagination…

Another line from the author’s poetry capturing the essence shibori-dyeing this collection of short stories: It may be invisible but there is an exuberant cord of life and love on which meaning and beauty hang, like bikinis and swimtrunks rinsed of seasalt when the sun goes down… the sun, a Nilla wafer dunked in the milky horizon line.

With figurative, tactile prose, toy train town, allegorical ruminations, Dadaesque, satirical spelunks into the human psyche, and twisted fairy tale plunges into chiaroscuro edges where obsession shadows longing, the author is on intimate terms with the struggle to decode joy, to craft an ideal of beauty, from the inexorability of impermanence. 

(end synopsis)

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I’m androgynous/gender-flexible (but also at home as a cis female), and I’m bi- or pansexual (though my neologism “ambisextrous” sounds more playfully intriguing and devoid of the politics of “what bi- or pansexuality means”); I sometimes use the nom de plume G. Astro Turner to keep the audience guessing as to my gender.

Some defining loves are my sadhana, being incorrigibly goofy, the ocean, playing drums and sports, dancing, writing, and being an identical twin.

Thank you, again, for taking the time to read my work. May the Schwartz be with everyone!

Cheerfully and with gratitude,

Gretchen Astro