I am taking a deep breath. My pulse is racing. I can tell it's time to use my ordinary human voice, although I'm not sure if it's a good moment to do that here. Going out for another walk might be a better idea. But, for a moment or two, I'm going to try.

My fatness has been one of the defining elements of my life. Being fat was one of the first subject I found as a writer. I didn't try it when I was taking writing classes as an undergrad in the early 80s. But lesbian feminist journals led me to find others who were exploring it.

I wrote three novels that centered the complex live of fat lesbians. @smallbeerpress is going to re-release one of them, Martha Moody, as an e-book before too long.

My first book was a chapbook of poems and lyric essays called "Belly Songs: in celebration of fat women." Two other writers and I published a chapbook by each of us and one anthology of work by the Valley Lesbian Writers Group we were part of.

(Oh, that wasn't meant to be a publication announcement. Nothing is nailed down — I just started talking — if it turns out to be wiser, I might take that down.)

For some years, I was writing and talking about fatness a lot. I did it everytime I gave a reading. I gave workshops. I've written hear before about all of the people who whispered in my ears about their experiences with fatness, with an emphasis on pain and dread.

One thing all of those conversations made very clear to me is that fat hatred is social control that works, not only on fat people, but on anyone who worries that they might cross some line and become fat.

Fat hatred can be used to mask or amplify other kinds of hatred. In and of itself, it does tremendous damage.

I am not going to testify about my personal experiences with that right now. I could, though.

I've been writing about things other than fatness lately. Part of that has been about following my aesthetic and intellectual instincts. Writing about fatness, thinking about attitudes towards the body, really did take me to Jonathan Edwards and eighteenth century Calvinism.

I wrote just a little bit about that recently in response to a question from the @MCWConf here. (Note that writing about fatness isn't the same as writing about body image.) http://mcwc.org/blog/2020/4/26/join-susan-stinson-at-mcwc-2020-online

In addition to my writerly interests though, I got so tired of having to represent fatness all of the time. Tired of having my fatness be so loud that the lyrical and mind-centered gifts of my stories were almost never commented on. Because fatness was there, fatness was all.

There is some powerful organizing going on among fat, disabled, and fat and disabled people right now. See @FatRoseAction and other groups for more.

And, still, if I even simply say the word "fat" to describe myself, calmly and clearly, it can set off an intense series of reactions. It surprises me sometimes. I forget.

I never say "morbidly obese" to describe myself. To say that is to call myself death. That's not who I am. My body is not that.

I can't remember if I've told the story here about what happened after I got asked to write an op ed about the turn of the century for Springfield paper, and wrote about 20th century attittudes towards fatness. I got a terrible fat-hating letter that shut me down for a while.

That silenced response was so awful to me in myself, that a few of us organized a speak-out against fat hatred in response. I needed to get my voice back, and to — to what — to encourage others to speak. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. People did.

I guess I just want to be sure that you know — if you didn't already — that learning how to speak explicitly and directly in support of fat people in face of fat-hating language and actions is an important thing to do. Even if it's complicated. Or embarrassing. Or hard.

It's hard a lot.

I know that I'm risking attack or stigma by writing about fatness here.

I don't have to take that risk. Friends and people I've never encountered before, though, I want to say this: there was a tightness in my entire body as I saw what was trending today. I hold the anger and tension of fat hatred in my muscles and skin if I don't speak back to it.

Now I feel a little exposed, but I am breathing more deeply. I

If you are fat yourself, I am wishing you strong community, self knowledge that keeps getting deeper — well, every kind of knowledge that keeps getting deeper. I'm wishing you places to go with the tensions when the fullness of your humanity is disregarded in service to hatred.

For everyone, I am wishing you the strange, necessary experience of working to be as honest, compassionate, tough and honorable as you can be, as we can be, in this benighted moment.

One of my poems in Belly Songs starts out like this: Fat so, so fat, fat so fat so, fat, so fat fat fat. Or something like that.

It's an evocation. It's a game. It's a moment to say the word fat so often that I — even me, as fat as I am — might then be allowed to talk about something else. To have a summer walk down the street be about something else.

so so so fat so fat so fat so so fat It's a love poem, too.