Kelly Cogswell
CLICK HERE for archived audio
Spanning the twenty years from the Culture Wars through the War on Terror, EATING FIRE begins in 1992 with the author's transformation from ex-Southern Baptist hickster poet into fire-eating Lesbian Avenger. She haunts the streets of New York, battles cops on Fifth Avenue, eats fire in front of the White House, and mobilizes 20,000 lesbians for the International Dyke March. She also squirms through excruciating meetings and finds true love. Several times.
Her avenging doesn't end when the group implodes. She morphs instead into a pioneering citizen journalist, coding the pages of her own online magazine,The Gully, and looking everywhere for truth and justice, from Havana cafes to the Laundromats of Paris and New York. She mostly doesn't find any, and the book deepens into a meditation on citizenship and social change in the post-9/11 world.