Seed & Spark: Unearthing Buried Voices with ‘The Ladies Almanack’

This guest post written by  Daviel Shy.

I was drawn to my research for The Ladies Almanack because of the rich interplay between the singular artist and her creative community. For the past four and a half years, I have run a semi-private event in my living room each month called L.M.N.O.P., or, Lesbian Movie Night Ongoing Project. The community that gathers for this event varies month to month, but the centrality of women’s voices and lesbians on-screen provides a context in which to gather. There is still something very powerful about coming together in a real room.

When I found the story of Natalie Clifford Barney hidden in the words of Djuna Barnes, I recognized that what Barney created in her Parisian home at 20 rue Jacob contributed to my commitment to L.M.N.O.P. While each artist featured in the film is a complex and prolific creator in her own right, Barney’s salon supplied a gathering place for their entanglement. My film, an adaptation of Barnes’ roman à clef, is a glimpse into that entanglement.

The excitement of the movie isn’t just based on Barney’s lesbianism: she was also a self-proclaimed pagan and anti-monogamist. She was a radical who lived her message. She made friends the center of her life and supported the work of other women both financially and through her connections. This is a virtue we can learn from today.

When Djuna Barnes approached the most prominent people in publishing about her unconventional book, Ladies Almanack, she was rejected. Never mind that the influential Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beech, and Gertrude Stein happened to be lesbians themselves: they were all deeply entrenched in supporting and furthering the works of the men around them. Not Barney. She began L’Académie des Femmes, to honor women authors and always put women first.

Systematized omission of women, gender non-comforming persons, queers, and people of color from history is still rampant in the arts, literature, and other fields of cultural production. I make The Ladies Almanack in response to this erasure and in service of the hunger I feel for these buried voices.

I’m part of a big family and my siblings keep me connected to the rest of the world. Without them I’d likely disappear into dusty archives, cult-cinema obscurity and D.I.Y. underground arts. My sisters, who are not artists (and not lesbians), are how I gauge what savvy and thoughtful mainstream women in society are into. Thus, a few years ago when my sister Yael tells me about this show called Orange Is the New Black, and then my sister Trysa raves to me about Transparent, I am excited and thankful. I wonder at how great it is that the mainstream is discovering that lesbian stories are not just for lesbians. These shows are opening doors for my work. Our culture is waking up to the fact that we need all of our voices.

The multiplicity of truth is evident when we listen to more than one monocultural voice. Women appear in each others’ fiction where they become mythologized and multiple; competing versions of events exist simultaneously. In my film work, I try to honor that complicated reality.

My work relies on a tireless belief in our collective ability to reclaim and rename our history and, in doing so, our future. The recruitment at the center of my practice is not participation, but initiation. I aim to turn the outsider in. Coming together, we acknowledge the singularity of this present, this temporary configuration that is equally as powerful as the pasts I research and reconstruct. And I believe that if we turn our attention to one another, we can realize our full potential as world-makers. My journey with The Ladies Almanack, and our current crowdfunding campaign on Seed & Spark, is a step in that direction.

Daviel Shy has written and directed nine short films. Her writing has been published by Taylor & Francis (UK) and University of Chicago Press. Her forthcoming chapbook, Grammar Rulse, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in July. The Ladies Almanack is her first feature film. www.davielshy.com