On a warm, slightly overcast Tuesday morning at the end of November, I go to the Haymarket Café in Northampton to meet with local writer Sally Bellerose. She’s the author of the acclaimed 2011 novel The Girl’s Club and numerous short stories, mostly involving themes of gender, class, religion, and illness, among other things.
The café, which is deceptively large compared to its tiny and easy-to-miss entryway, is slow. A few silent, solitary customers populate the narrow top floor, immersed in work. The classic soul singer Sam Cooke plays over the speakers, occasionally interrupted by the high pitch of the espresso maker. While I’m waiting, an elderly couple sits down behind me and grumbles for a minute or two about the grand jury decision in the Darren Wilson case. They go silent once, I presume, their coffee has cooled down enough to drink it. Opened over 20 years ago, The Haymarket has become a something like a symbol of the community. At least one of Bellerose’s characters, having struggled to make a living in Chicopee, seems to think it would be an unrealistic expectation to ever own a house in Northampton. But nonetheless, the author does now lives here.
The Girl’s Club is a realistic but fictional novel set in Chicopee, MA. It vividly depicts the real pressures felt by young American women, especially poor, gender-nonconforming women, as they grow up, look for jobs, navigate religion, and are pressured into starting families. Beginning in high school, it stars Cora Rose, a young woman born to a Catholic family. She also has a painful and debilitating bowel condition, [su_spoilers ahead] for which she eventually has to undergo a complex surgical procedure. But well before that, she accidentally gets pregnant and marries her future child’s father, somebody she doesn’t really love, long before she ever envisioned getting married. To complicate matters, she’s not sure she’s interested in guys at all, having had a brief but intense, intimate encounter with a female, childhood friend. As she grows older and takes nursing classes while juggling work and parenting, the local lesbian bar The Girl’s Club and its charismatic cast of regulars begins to hold a certain allure for her, much as she is reluctant to admit it. Along the way, she’s alternatively supported by and argues with her two, very different sisters, Marie and Renee [end spoilers].
At about five minutes past our meeting time, I get a call from Ms. Bellerose on my cell phone. Apparently, we’ve been sitting at opposite ends of the room waiting for each other. At the same time, we both say we’ll head over to the other’s table, and end up sitting back down at our own tables to wait. Thirty seconds later, we’ve managed to sort things out, choosing to sit further away from the noisy espresso maker.
How much of The Girl’s Club is based on real experiences?
That is the number one question I get asked. I always say something sarcastic like 11.2%. If we’re talking broad strokes, much of it is based on my life. I had a brother who’s not represented in the book. I was not pregnant when I got married. But I was married to a man, we did have some arguments, ha, but the man the protagonists marries in the novel is very different from the man I married and the situations the characters find themselves in are fictional. I am queer, I did lose my colon. And so the bones of the story, if not the specifics, are based in fact.
And The Girl’s Club?
The Girl’s Club was a real bar.
So it’s not open anymore?
No, I went with a friend to look for it about five years ago. Some of the people hanging around told us that it’s been gone for maybe five years. I had gone to the Girls Club, maybe fifteen years ago, and it was still there in the back of a nondescript building in Chicopee.
Someone told me it was on a list of lesbian bars with the best names.
Yeah, it’s a great name.
The bartender Darlene wasn’t real was she? I thought she seemed like a real, sort of local personality.
No, she was based on somebody real. But characters take on their own lives and personalities once you start writing and put them in a story. It’s all fiction. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Did you really work as a nurse?
Yeah. I was a nurse for 26 years.
Were you writing during that time?
I was. I used to stick a pad under the Kardex and scribble stuff. Because nurses have so much free time. She laughs ironically.
Were you publishing at that point?
I was publishing in small presses. My first publication was in 1991. I edited a small press called Oregeny Press with Susan Stinson and Janet Aalfs.
Did you find it hard to balance writing and work?
Oh no, I didn’t [balance]. I worked my buns off. I had my son. The protagonist in The Girls Club also has a son, so that is another part of the book that somewhat parallels my life. But I didn’t balance writing and work, I wrote when I could steal a moment. I had no balance. It was all work, work.
Were you always writing about themes of feminism and gender? [Or] Addressing those themes?
Yeah, addressing those themes and other themes, as well. I have a half-written novel based on my job as a nurse working at Monson Developmental Center in Palmer, Massachusetts. That novel deals with race and disability. That institution has closed. I write a lot stories based on what I see and live in everyday life, short stories inspired by family and friends , stories about stories that other people tell me, or, sometimes just wild imaginings that come from who knows where?. But usually there’s an underlying theme. You write about your belief system, or anyway, I seem to .
I think I read on your WordPress that [your themes are] gender, identity, illness.
And aging!
Religion?
Yeah. [And] class.
So you said you were raised Catholic? Do you still practice?
You know it’s an interesting question because I don’t typically go to church, not that I wouldn’t. I think “Catholic” means both the religious aspect and the cultural aspect. “Practicing Catholic” always makes me laugh. Makes me smile. I was raised to be a Catholic. When I was formed, that’s what was given to me and taught to me. So, culturally, I’ll always be Catholic or, at least, always have been raised Catholic. I’ve been published in Catholic magazines. I apparently have that aesthetic. I recently had a story accepted to Dappled Things” a Catholic literary magazine. They were looking for stories that exemplified grace. I remembered grace as a glimpse of something divine, love or clemency from the harshness of life, those times when you feel transcendence coming from somewhere outside yourself. I think Catholic teaching would call the somewhere outside yourself God. Some people know I’m Catholic even when I don’t mention it.
Do you find it difficult to balance traditional Catholic beliefs [with your life]?
My god, yes. You know you have to like this new pope. He’s way ahead of his predecessors, but he has miles to go.
A lot of The Girl’s Club depicts Western Mass, which today has this sort of reputation for being very queer-friendly, at least the Valley does…
Yeah, right, the Valley does.
Do you think that’s a newer thing?
When I was growing up, I thought Northampton was much more liberal than Holyoke where I was born. When it was time, decades ago at least, to vote on domestic partnership, this was, of course before marriage equality, Chicopee and Palmer voted in Civil Unions before Northampton did. In Western Mass, at least for many of the people I know, there has always been a Yankee sensibility that says yes there are weirdoes, there are queers and we don’t necessarily have to like them, but, this individual freedom trumps that dislike, not in a not in a liberal way, more in a belief thatpeople had the right to be left alone.
So you said you were born in Holyoke, but did you grow up in Chicopee?
Yes.
One of the things that TGC depicted was young adults struggling to enter the workforce, [while also] coming out. Do you think young people today have similar or different challenges?
Every generation thinks the younger generation is better off and worse off. Financially, certainly as far as working class kids trying to get an education goes, this generation is worse off . When I went to nursing school it was about 250 bucks a semester and tuition was paid. There were all kinds of grants and scholarships. There were hoops to jump through, but if you could pass the test and move your case forward, school was paid for. That’s how I became a nurse. Even my books were paid. I don’t think you find that now.
I think I read somewhere that textbooks are 800% more expensive now.
Yeah, it’s insane.
So you just had a story accepted to “Saints and Sinners” I believe?
Yes, I won the Saints and Sinners Fiction Award and they published my story titled Corset.
So now it’s included in a collection?
Yes, and I got a trip to New Orleans. I love New Orleans. Oh my god, go to New Orleans. Sex, religion, Catholicism and Voodoo, class, race, a city alive with it all, struggling and surviving. Lots of grace in New Orleans.
So that’s out now?
Yes. It’s an anthology of fiction titled Saints and Sinners.
Is there like a theme for that anthology?
It’s LGBTQAI however many letters we use now. I like the term queer – inclusive without being cumbersome. “Saints and Sinners” is broadly the theme.
So you’re working on a novel?
I am.
What’s that about?
I have my little sentence about it. It’s called Fishwives. It’s about old women behaving badly. I’m working with themes of class and aging. The main characters, two women who are a couple for sixty years , are in their 90s by the last chapter. They meet in ‘56. So that’s really fun, I was born in ‘51 so I don’t remember ‘56. They meet in their twenties. The first few chapters introduce the characters as young women, but the book, as a whole deals mostly with the women when they are elderly.
So is that going to be a longer book?
I think so.
Sounds interesting. I love stories that take place over lifetimes, or even generations.
They say “write what you want to read.”
What draws you to that theme?
Getting old. Age heightens the whole class thing, particularly if you don’t have enough money. Luckily, I’m fine financially, but see some of my older friends struggling. It’s hard to poor when you’re young, and may be harder to be poor when you’re old. It’s just interesting to just be here at sixty-three and remember how things were and how they could be. Aging is very strange.
What authors do you like to read? Were there any that were influential, formative, or inspiring?
Well Joan Nestle, a lot of her early class/lesbian stuff was a revelation to me. Susan Stinson is a good friend of mine and I love her work. I love Toni Morrison and Denis Johnson and Marilynn Robinson. And of course Flannery O’Conner.
Any advice for young aspiring writers trying to find their place in the world?
Yeah. Send stuff out. When it comes back rejected, look at it, maybe rework it and send it out again.