This is my contribution to Journey to Planet Write, a project created by Gay Degani at Words in Place. These are stories of writers’ journeys to their current writing career. Check them out!
Sex Talk Realness: Being Genderqueer by Rachel Hill
I am one of the people interviewed in this piece on cosmopolitan.com in October 2014. I’m really happy Rachel wrote this piece.I did not choose anonymity. I am the older one.
Scratch that. As of at least March 5, 2018, this link has been replaced by an article titled 4 People Explain What It’s Like Being Genderqueer, and I have been replaced by someone many years younger. This may be some new journalism practice that is entirely unfamiliar to me. What do you think?
Passing by Nina Rota (Eunoia Review)
I’m really happy to announce that my essay Passing has been published online at Eunoia Review. I write about gender issues so other people can handle these things better than I have, and if it’s not online who’s gonna find it?
While investigating the gender transition of LA Times Sportswriter Mike Penner/Christine Daniels, I found myself in the middle of my own gender identity crisis. A second transition lead me to the deeper nature of all life transitions, and an understanding of the impossible position Christine found herself in.
Passing first appeared in Witness Magazine.
The Shadow Temple
Hey Everyone, My essay The Shadow Temple has been published in the Sex Issue of Red Fez.
The Shadow Temple describes an explicit inner sexual fantasy in which a female narrator is an older man seducing a much younger man. We then follow the narrator’s experience of acting out the fantasy in real life with someone she meets at a gathering.
Interview with Nina Rota: Making Luscious (2006)
Photography & Editing: Kate Johnson. To watch Luscious, click here
The images in Luscious were captured with a digital still camera. The movement of the camera lens and the shutter made it impossible to register the images so my animator, Carolyn Stockbridge, and I used a camera with a removable manual lens and we locked the shutter in the open position. While we solved the problem of movement, the camera’s exposure was randomly off and we had to go back and manually adjust the brightness of most of the images.
Luscious (2006) – Written and Directed by Nina Rota
“Luscious” is an exploration of gender and flesh in eight scenes of luscious pencil-drawn animation.
Images in this five-minute animation are drawn, erased and redrawn on the same piece of paper. The erased pencil marks leave a trail as shapes move across the page. The shapes represent flesh separated from the body then thrown in the air, pulled apart, squeezed, and jumped on. Looking back, I realize that I was going through a mid-life gender identity crisis and the only way to work it out was to take my body apart and put it back together again in a form that I felt comfortable with. It seems to have worked.
The images were captured with a digital still camera. The movement of the camera lens and the shutter made it impossible to register the images so my animator, Carolyn Stockbridge, and I used a camera with a removable manual lens and we locked the shutter in the open position. While we solved the problem of movement, the camera?s exposure was randomly off and we had to go back and manually adjust the brightness of most of the images.
How Luscious was made
List of screenings
Director/Storyboard: Nina Rota
Animator: Carolyn Stockbridge
Composer: Carolyn Stockbridge
Post Production: Kate Johnson, EZTV Media
Foley Artists: Kate Johnson & Michael Masucci, EZTV Media
Photographer: Julia Brandreth
