How Groundbreaking Reporter Donna Minkowitz Found a New Chapter in Beacon, NY

Donna Minkowitz's journey to Beacon is a familiar one. Finding the cost of living in New York City increasingly onerous, she and her wife looked for options further up the Hudson River, eventually settling in Beacon. She expected to find a more affordable and quieter pace of life. What she didn't expect to find was a strong sense of community -- and one she would play and integral role in building.

"I've always seen myself as a New York City person and I didn't think I would be happy any place else. But amazingly, I like it here much better than the city," she said. "I love the really novel experience for me of being in a place where you know most people. It's a pretty small town, and I had no idea I would like that, but I do. And I have found people kind here, even when they didn't know me very well, and also more open to becoming friends."

Minkowitz, a journalist and writer who recently released her third book Donnaville, founded the popular Lit Lit reading series three years ago after the Get Lit reading series closed down. Lit Lit invites writers of all stripes to sign up for a five-minute open mic slot on the first Friday of the month at the Howland Cultural Center. Writers line up thirty minutes ahead of time to try to get a slot and the room is often packed with a warm, supportive audience, as a result.

Minkowitz's decision to launch a new reading series, coupled with an impressive resume of publication credits and her championing of other Hudson Valley writers has led her to be regarded as one of the region's foremost literary citizens.

And when she celebrated the release of Donnaville at Stanza Books on East Main Street in Beacon, she was greeted by a standing room-only crowd.

Donna Minkowitz Honed Her Voice at The Village Voice

Minkowitz worked as a journalist for The Village Voice from the late-1980s to the 1990s, covering the LGBT community and queer politics and culture in New York City during the height of the AIDS crisis. She went on to earn a GLAAD media award because of her reporting.

"I was really excited to be at The Voice because it was a writer's paper. That's what they called it, which meant that -- unlike almost all other journalism at the time -- you could have your individual voice. It could even be a really idiosyncratic and weird voice," Minkowitz said. "You could get literary with your journalism, and you did not have to pretend to be objective. It was fine to put your political opinions in there."

Her 1993 story covering the murder of Brandon Teena, a trans man, inspired the movie Boys Don't Cry. She went undercover to report on the Phelps family and Westboro Baptist Church, who were notorious for protesting at the funerals of gay men and women.

"I would try to pass as them at their events and disguise myself. And I found that very helpful particularly for getting in their shoes. And I came to understand -- I mean, I hated their politics on every level, but I realized emotionally that were not that distant from me," she said.

This experience would color her understanding of herself and the world around her as she went on the publish her first book in 1998, a memoir titled Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury.

Deeply Personal Donnaville Draws from Beacon

In her novel Donnaville, Minkowitz based the layout of the town of Donnaville on the landscape of Beacon. The goings-on in the town and its diverse array of citizens are entirely the internal landscape of the author.

The story centers around a child -- Donna -- kept in a prison in the heart of Donnaville by a sadistic Jailer, while a cast of characters, including a Dionysian trickster and an alluring goddess, go about their lives. Each character is meant to represent a facet of Minkowitz's personality.

"It initially emerged out of a kind of therapy I was doing," she said. "I started doing a kind of therapy called drama therapy, which is part of a relatively new movement in psychotherapy called parts work and in that, you basically identify different parts of yourself."

Minkowitz will hold an artist's talk at the KuBe Art Center in Beacon on Saturday, Nov. 9 from 3:30PM to 4:30PM.