Review: Honey & Vinegar: Recipe for an Outlaw by Sossity Chiricuzio

A Word from the Author

Research

I love libraries. Rooms full of books, made just for books, with answers just waiting to be found. Stories and legends and science and magic. Love and sorrow and laughter and mystery. Safety. There’s no shouting or pushing or competing allowed. No little kids yelling, no grownups too busy to talk. Just helpful librarians and other people reading. Just the world I pick. Like a coloring book in my mind, I fill in the details, and the hero can look like me.

The smell of books, the hidden alcoves at the end of rows, the formed plastic chairs like a cupped hand. My legs going numb from dangling over the hard lip of the seat, my shoulders and head all curved into the world between those covers. Squinting in the light when it flickered, automatically, all attention inward. Almost locked in more than once, so that the librarians learned to check for me in the depths of physical sciences or psychology, any books nobody tends to read, before leaving.

I read the entire Alice in Wonderland series, not just the first part that they made all soft for Disney, the real story. The conflict and the angst and the tension. The confusion. The real stuff dressed up as fiction. I read every book of mythology and find some hints of comfort in goddesses and amazons and warrior queens. I’m looking for the women that aren’t afraid. The girls that are smart. The way out. I travel to Narnia and Pern and Mars and am still disappointed when I get there. It still ends in a kiss I don’t want. A man who knows more. A woman who is a support beam. A cook stove. A baby carriage.

A stranger in a strange land. A woman on the edge of time. The last unicorn.

(Originally published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Issue 12, all rights reserved, do not copy or reproduce without the authors permission.)

Interview

Today I’m chatting with Sossity Chiricuzio about writing, life, and her current project. Welcome! Let’s talk a little about Honey & Vinegar: recipe for an outlaw.

What inspired you to write this story?

Storytelling is an art form and a place of connection in my family of origin, and my chosen family, and is one of the biggest ways I’ve found to connect with others. Sharing our similarities and differences can create understanding and solidarity like nothing else I’ve tried, and those are both central pieces in my spiritual practice and my activism. I also feel like the story of how both of those families were formed have some strongly unique facets, and wanted to explore and share those.

That’s really cool. As a reader, I’ve discovered a lot of the same things about connection, even when my own life looks pretty different from the author’s.

Is there a character you feel especially connected to? Why?

Skipping this because memoir 😉

Fair enough! We’ll just go right on. What was the hardest part of writing this?

Figuring out how to tell my story while respecting the separate nature of the stories of the people it intersects, and how to respect their privacy while sharing my own truths. There are things I left out because I couldn’t resolve that conflict, and there are things that perhaps people will wish I left out but which felt central. The only thing harder than that was digging into the painful parts of my story, which was reliving them in many ways. Thank goodness for therapy.

 I can definitely see that being a challenge. Even in fiction writing, I’ve gotten, “Was this based on so-and-so?” I always plead the fifth.

Choose a favorite line or short passage. What do you like about it?

“She is so strong that just about every butch and boy wants to lie down at her feet, which sounds like a compliment until you see how much lifting is involved. Like me, she loves taking someone apart and building them back up again. Like me, she gets tired.”

I love that this speaks to so many things at once, including feminine strength, emotional labor, the beauty and the work of caretaking (a skill/role so many of the people in my life hold), and the relief of being seen by someone who understands you so deeply. This passage is specifically speaking to one friend/ship, but also parallels the lived experience of most of the women and femmes in my life.

That’s a great quote! And your friend sounds like a hell of a person.

Tell us a little about any upcoming projects.

There’s three things jostling for my attention now that this book is launched: the performance duo Sparkle & truth (working towards an album), a chapbook dealing with my experiences as a person with chronic pain/disabilities navigating the world/medical system, and of course, volume two of the memoir!

I will read the f*ck out of anything about experiences with chronic pain and disabilities. Well, and obviously memoir part deux, but for real, there’s just not enough good stuff on dealing with spoonie life.

 Tell us a bit about your cultural, ethnic, religious, and/or spiritual background and how it informs your writing.

I was raised by a close knit group of flower children, both related and not, who were very determined to learn from and not repeat the mistakes of the generations before them, and who were deeply invested in exploring spirituality and fostering connections with people of every sort. The practices of examining self, motivations, biases, and places of potential connection and/or conflict were foundational to me, as was the practice of self-expression through art. I was encouraged to explore and express and examine, and these are the tools I use most often in my writing, and my life.

A lot of that resonated with me when I read about it in your memoir. My family wasn’t quite as open, but many things felt familiar as I read them. With that in mind, what cultural value do you see in storytelling?

I feel storytelling is one of the best ways to learn about, pass on, build and evolve cultural values. Figuring out how we work as individuals and in relation to each other, where our strengths and faults shine through, what our biases look like in action, what to strive for and what to grow out of—these all make for compelling stories, and opportunities to build/improve our culture.

That’s a great way to look at it. How do you hope your writing influences other people?

 The main thing I hope for is that it encourages other people to tell their stories and pursue writing as a practice, in whatever way feeds them best. Many people think you have to do all manner of professional and academic things to be a writer (because those myths keep the professional and academic money and prestige flowing in a circular motion) but writing is far more accessible then that. It can look like scribbled poems on the back of a bill envelope on the bus between shifts, or a daily practice, or oral history shared over board games and backyard fires that someone journals or otherwise records, or a log of email exchanges, or any number of ways that we use the words we have to note the passage of time and lessons and knowledge and emotion. Being published, reading your work out loud or sharing it with others, those are things you can do with your writing, but to be a writer simply requires that you write. I decided to defy the myths and honor my story, despite my lack of resources or access or training, and it has saved my life in many ways.

That’s amazing! I hope readers are paying attention to that and the words give them courage.

All right, time for word sprints!

What’s your favorite ice cream?

Chocolate and vanilla mixed

What’s a charity/cause you support?

I send money every month to Miss Majors because our queer community owes so much to her and Trans women of color.

What genre (other than your own) do you like to read?

Queer YA, particularly Sci-Fi/Fantasy, gives me so much hope.

Do you have any body art?

So much—it’s how I record my story on my skin.

If you could have any career (other than writer), what would it be?

I’m actually looking into going back to school to be a librarian!

Thank you so much. Everyone, please be sure to check out Sossity’s links below (especially those awesome YouTube readings!)

About the Author

Sossity Chiricuzio is a queer femme outlaw poet, a working-class crip storyteller. What her friends’ parents often referred to as a bad influence, and possibly still do. She writes as activism, connection, and survival, and is half of the performance duo Sparkle & truth.

***I respectfully acknowledge that I am living and writing on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes who have stewarded this land throughout the generations.***

Her work has also appeared in a variety of publications including The Rumpus, Salty, Adrienne, Argot, Lunch Ticket, F(r)iction, andGertrude, and anthologies like The Remedy: Queer And Trans Voices On Health And Health Care, Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy, Not My President, and Leather Ever After.

Social Media

Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Soundcloud | Goodreads

Be sure to check out Sossity reading from her book!