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Terry Wolverton


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Topics of conversation:

  • Social change movements
  • Tensions between generations during social change
  • Feminist movement of the 1970s
  • Current civil rights issue around same-sex marriage
  • Violence against women globally

Terry Wolverton is author of eight books: two prose novels, a novel in poems, a memoir, three collections of poetry and a self-published collection of short stories.  She has also edited fourteen literary anthologies. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing center in Los Angeles, where she teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.  She is also an Associate Faculty Mentor in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.  Her recent title is THE LABRYS REUNION, a novel that examines how two generations of women regard the feminist movement.

The Labrys Reunion

Terry Wolverton
Spinsters Ink (2009)
ISBN 9781935226024
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (08/10)

Read interview with author on ReaderViews.com

Read the review on ReaderViews.com


Synopsis: New York performance artist Gwen Kubacky thinks no one cares about feminist art anymore, until young art student Emma Firestein approaches her to become a mentor. Gwen agrees, hoping this legacy can be passed on to a new generation. As it happens, Emma's mother, Dana Firestein, is a woman who co-founded a legendary radical feminist school in the 1970s—Labrys—which Gwen attended.

Gwen's tutelage of Emma has barely begun when the young woman is raped and murdered during a night out clubbing. Dana's comrades rally from far and near, as do friends of Emma's, and they gather in the only possible space, Gwen's warehouse loft.

The young women disdain the judgmental old fossils they're cooped up with. And to the women of Labrys, this alien new generation, with its ignorance of its radical roots and birth in feminism, appears ungrateful if not worthless.

But heretical challenges to old beliefs surface among Dana's contemporaries, as do truths long held secret. And among the younger women are those who possess more than enough rage and radical belief to avenge Emma's murder.