DeLYNN, Jane 1946-

PERSONAL: Born July 18, 1946, in New York, NY; daughter of Wilson (a paper bag manufacturer) and Bernice (a school teacher; maiden name, Deutsch) DeLynn. Education: Barnard College, B.A. (cum laude), 1968; University of Iowa, M.F.A. (honors), 1970. Hobbies and other interests: Travel (Europe and Mexico), plays, movies, dance, music, books (novels, science, mathematics, history), sports (watching baseball, football, and tennis; swimming).

ADDRESSES: Home—395 Broadway, Apt. 7E, New York, NY 10013-3540.

CAREER: Writer, 1971—. University of Iowa, Ames, teaching assistant, 1969-70; Kirkus Reviews, New York, NY, book reviewer, 1971-76; Lehman College, City University of New York, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor, 1989-90, substitute assistant professor, 1991-92. Founding managing editor of Fiction, 1971-72.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Elizabeth Janeway Prize, Barnard College, 1967, for "Variations on an Obituary," and 1968, for "Collected Stories"; Book of the Month Club writing fellowship, 1968, for "Variations on an Obituary"; grant from International PEN, 1975; New York Foundation for the Arts Award, 1978; MacDowell Foundation fellowship, 1980; Edward Albee Foundation Award, William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, 1981; New York Times Notable Book Award, 1988; Yaddo fellowship, 1988 and 1990.

WRITINGS:

Hoosick Falls (play), produced in New York City, 1974.

Some Do, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1978.

In Thrall, C. N. Potter (New York, NY), 1982.

(Author of libretto) The Monkey Opera; or, The Making of a Soliloquy, Peer Southern Concert Music (New York, NY), 1982.

Real Estate, Poseidon (New York, NY), 1988.

Don Juan in the Village, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1990.

Bad Sex Is Good, Painted Leaf Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) New York Sex: Stories, Painted Leaf Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Leash, Semiotext(e) (Los Angeles, CA), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including The Stone Wall Book of Short Fictions, edited by Robert Coover and Kent Dixon, Stone Wall Press, 1973. Contributor of articles and reviews to Redbook, Viva, New Dawn, New York Times Book Review, Advocate, Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, Los Angeles Times Book Review, World, Christopher Street, and other publications.

SIDELIGHTS: Jane DeLynn writes fiction in which the "exigent and explicit writing is mesmerizing," as Judith P. Stelboum stated in the Lambda Book Report. "The precision of the delicately balanced, cadenced sentence lures us in. The reader is unable to pull herself away from the scene. The word is captivating, and if we follow the word, which we do sometimes hesitantly, sometimes fearfully, angrily, excitedly, we allow ourselves to enter one of DeLynn's stories with voyeuristic embarrassment."

Among DeLynn's most noted works is Don Juan in the Village, which according to Tina Gianoulis in Gay and Lesbian Literature is "a loosely constructed novel consisting of fourteen chapters, each of which is a story in the life of Don Juan, an intellectually and emotionally jaded but sexually athletic butch dyke. Each chapter recounts a separate sexual adventure of the rakish Don Juan…. The sexuality in Don Juan in the Village is explicit. Some parts of the descriptions of S/M sex are so graphic that Playboy, a magazine whose content is largely sexual, declined to print it. Some lesbians have been angered by Don Juan, some by its sexual content, but others by the venom DeLynn expresses toward the lesbian community." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Bertha Harris claimed that in Don Juan in the Village, DeLynn "far too often abandons her particular gift for deadpan irony to go wandering amid portentousness, tough-guy mannerisms and banal philosophizing. Again and again it made me feel like a bartender with a single customer and a long night ahead."

Leash, DeLynn's 2002 novel, chronicles the utter degradation of its narrator, Chris, a lesbian writer who answers a personals ad placed by a dominatrix. "In quiet, cool prose, which makes the story all the more convincing," according to Alan Cheuse, a contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered," Chris describes her journey from light S/M to utter submission and her new life as a dog completely dependent on her mistress's whims, even to the point of committing bestiality with a real dog, in graphic detail. Lambda Book Report reviewer Rachel Kramer Bussel found that "the narrator's dual position as omniscient narrator and submissive, compliant slave made her intriguing, totally unpredictable, and sometimes infuriating." Paradoxically, her loss of control brings her a kind of freedom, just as her mandatory blindfold (she never even sees her mistress) gives her strange new insights. A number of reviewers felt another duality, torn between respect for the writing and horror at the subject matter. "DeLynn is an ironic, thoughtful narrator … although her graphic descriptions will challenge the digestive systems of many readers," noted Publishers Weekly contributor Jeff Zaleski. A Kirkus Reviews contributor summed up the novel as "commandingly abysmal, masterfully observed."

DeLynn once told CA: "I have always been interested in the space between sentences, that gap in which the 'zing' of life can be heard. I am pulled two ways in my work: toward minimalist formal experiments in which predetermined 'rules' for sentence or paragraph construction force patterns which would not occur in writing unrestricted by such (admittedly arbitrary) rules, and toward looser works of greater richness, complexity, humor.

"Politically, I am a leftist and don't understand how anyone can fail to be. I consider myself a gay feminist, but I despise the superficiality and smug insularity of most Movement-inspired writings. Temperamentally I am a skeptic, and lazy. I engage in no political actions: finding the action and discussion tedious and the possibility of success nil. I am unable to determine whether, like most people in most eras of human history, I simply believe things are getting (and have for some time been getting) worse, or whether, in fact, things are worse, and always will be. (I believe the latter.)"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Gay and Lesbian Literature, Volume 2, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

periodicals

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2002, review of Leash, p. 8.

Lambda Book Report, July, 1998, Judith P. Stelboum, review of Bad Sex Is Good, p. 12; June-July, 2002, Rachel Kramer Bussel, "Testing the Limits," pp. 21-22.

New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1990, Bertha Harris, review of Don Juan in the Village, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, January 14, 2002, Jeff Zaleski, review of Leash, p. 41.

other

National Public Radio, "All Things Considered," June 5, 2002, Alan Cheuse, review of Leash.*