When Lise Weil came out in 1976, she came out into a land that was all on fire. Lesbian desire was the pulsing center of...

When Lise Weil came out in 1976, she came out into a land that was all on fire. Lesbian desire was the pulsing center of an entire way of life, a culture, a movement. The air throbbed with possibility. At the center of In Search of Pure Lust is Weil's immersion in this culture, this movement: the grand experiment of lesbian feminism of the '70s and '80s. She and the women around her lived in a state of heightened erotic intensity that was, she believed, the source of their most vital knowledge. Desire was their guiding light. But after fifteen years of torrid but ultimately failed relationships that tended to mirror the tumultuous political currents swirling around her, she had to admit that desire was also a conduit for childhood wounds. It reared its head when she was feeling wary, estranged-- abused, even. It flagged when she was fondest and most trusting. And it tended to trump love, over and over again. In the mid-'80s, when a friend asked Weil to accompany her on a Zen retreat, she was desperate enough to say yes. Her first day of sitting zazen was mostly hell--but smitten with the (female) roshi, she stuck with it, later returning for sesshin after sesshin. A period of difficult self-examination ensued and, over a period of years, she began to learn an altogether different approach to desire. Ultimately, what her search for pure lust uncovered is something that looks a lot like love.

Author: Lise Weil
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 06/05/2018
Pages: 376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781631523854


Review Citation(s):
Foreword 03/26/2018

About the Author
Weil, Lise: - Lise Weil founded Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, an award-winning radical feminist literary and political magazine, in 1982, which she edited for nine years. She was also editor of its online relaunch, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, from 2004 to 2011. In 1990 she translated German writer Christina Thurner-Rohr's collection of essays Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose (Vagabundinnen), which was published by Beacon Press, and founded the online journal Dark Matter: Women Witnessing in 2014. Weil's short fiction, essays, reviews, literary nonfiction, and translations have been published widely in journals in both Canada and the US. Her collection of Mary Meigs's writings on aging, Beyond Recall (2005), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2006. Weil teaches in the Individualized Master's program in Goddard College's Graduate Institute. She lives in Montreal and spends summers in a cabin in the woods north of the city, where she hosts annual retreats for women writers centered around dreamwork.