Plural Stories

"A woman who hears voices is a lot more dangerous than a woman with an army. Keep that in mind."

Blurb: Radical feminist play about a smartass butch lesbian named Jeanne Romee (AKA Joan of Arc) who recounts her story as the hero of France, heretic burned at the stake, and redeemed saint against her will.

Why is it worth your time?: This play is award-winning for a reason. Jeanne is incisive and insightful, witty and angry, and Gage has a rare ability to cut to the heart of dissociation as a tool of control. This play is very much of its time and culture, but if that's not a problem for you, check it out! It's good!

Plural/1+ Tags: Abuse intermediate-focus, the dead (saints), spiritual, voices, nonswitching

Content Warnings: It is not a spoiler to say that Jeanne suffers the fate of the historical Joan of Arc. Others DO involve spoilers; see comments

Accessibility Notes: This play is shockingly easy to get, aside from an actual performance! It's available in audio form as MP3 download or CD, in script form, and in the collections The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and other plays (printed in 2004 from HerBooks) and The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (self-published and A DIFFERENT COLLECTION), the latter of which is available both on paper and ebook. It was also published (and now freely available online) in Sinister Wisdom #35, Summer/Fall 1988, pg. 95-116. Archive.org has audio recordings of various performances. Available in French, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Portuguese, Italian, German, and Spanish.

"I've no way of knowing if I've ever lived in Elsinore. After wiping they tell one very little about the past history of one's body..."

Blurb: Sci-fi retelling of Hamlet where Ophelia's mind was wiped and the woman she is now continues living on, telling her story to a rather insufferable female noble (before banging her).

Why is it worth your time?: Unusual story of a singular nature, and it's short, free, and online. "O" has no memories of the pre-wipe body tenant, and has only what she's put together and what she's been told.

Plural Tags: abuse low-focus, serially singlet

Content Warnings: incest plus skeezy sexual dynamics (very much on purpose)

Access Notes: This story is in an out-of-print small press anthology, Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. Used copies can still be scraped up; it is also available in bootleg screenreadable digital form on archive.org. The whole anthology contains many spirited, many-selved stories and is worth checking out!

"With a shock like ice water we were chained mind to mind. Another person shared my ship, shared the awareness of myself; I was the ship and no one could have it. [...] Through the chain I sensed all Writer: the pride, the remoteness, the arrogant imagination, the reach spanning praeterspace that sets a Writer above all other ultra-psis."

Blurb: A starship captain uses her mental bond to her ship and chains minds with a Writer to orgasm their way into praeterspace.

Why is it worth your time?: Lesbian erotic sci-fi writing about bonding minds with someone you really don't like (but is also hot)!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping, enmity, intimate, nonhumans [a spaceship], on purpose, setting-specific, voices

Content Warnings: sex!

Access Notes: This story is in an out-of-print small press anthology, Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. Used copies can still be scraped up; it is also available in bootleg screenreadable digital form on archive.org. The whole anthology contains many spirited, many-selved stories and is worth checking out!

"As he walked away I realized how wrong I had been with one of my answers. Two heads are better than one: Mara's and mine. She was silent then. I knew I wouldn't mind being in the hospital. But I couldn't bear if I were by myself."

Blurb: A heroine finds another world and a friend who helps her survive this one. What is sanity anyway?

Why is it worth your time?: A very short story, a time capsule from early feminist press sci-fi, still emotionally resonant today.

Plural/1+ Tags: Abuse:intermediate focus, nonhumans (space alien?), friendship, voices

Content Warnings: institutionalization.

Accessibility Notes: This story was only published in WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy: Stories and Art by Women, from New Victoria Press, a long shuttered feminist independent press, and it seems to be impossible to find a copy. (I myself found it in a sci-fi library.) Anna's Archive has a digitized copy, but the story is so short, I just typed it up myself.

"Please. I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please. [...] I wouldn't try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you'll let me, or I won't come in."

Blurb: Deep space captain Adam is on his first trip through deep space when a free-floating "matrix" personality escapes containment and takes residence in his body. She seems nice enough, but the rest of the ship is deeply afraid; how can they hide her?

Why is it worth your time?: It's a good, bittersweet tale of two different people finding and connecting with each other in space! Give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping, closeting, cofronting, teamwork, friendship, intimate relationships, setting-specific

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in audiobook, ebook, and still in print; also Italian, French, and German. Also on archive.org

Misc Notes: Nominated for Hugo, Locus, and Nebula.

"And again I feel
her black wings opening:

do not tame my angel"

Blurb: A poem about a woman's intense, erotic love for her Lilith angel, who comes for her in dreams.

Why is it worth your time?: It's a short, intense, erotic poem about sapphic spirit love. Give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, otherworld (dreams), dreamfolk, nonhumans (angels, Lilith?), intimate relationships, spiritual

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Screenreadable, free to read on archive.org. Read it here! I'm also just going to post it in the comments because it seems likely to disappear off the internet.

Misc Notes: Published in a Thelema tome, The Equinox Vol. 5 No. 4: Sex and Religion, which has a lot of older stuff in it that isn't well dated. Using 1981 as a placeholder for now, since that's when the book came out.

"There are more things in the human mind and heart, a twentieth-century Hamlet might remark, than are dreamt of in our psychology."

Blurb: Brief thumbnail life stories of overwhelmingly-American multiples from 1811 to 1981, including trance states, fugue folks, Spiritualist mediums, and the start of the MPD surge.

Why is it worth your time?: If you want a crash course and quick look-over of the historical progression of how multiples were seen and categorized in mostly-America over the course of 170 years, this book is invaluable! Dig into the citations in the back to find the original records; a lot of them are surprisingly findable.

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus (depends on the case), fusion/integration, otherworld, children, relationships of enmity and friendship, medical, spiritual, switching

Content Warnings: Institutionalization, medical ableism, physical and sexual violence, self-harm, and serial rape. Despite this, the thumbnail-sketch format of the book means none of this hits too hard.

Access Notes: Still in print, improbably, and though never officially digitized, we and Orion Scribner joined forces to create a screen-readable PDF of LB's copy. (Sorry for the annotations.)

"The woman who tells her life in the following pages is a Korean shaman [mansin], one who invokes the gods and ancestors, speaks with their voice, and claims their power to interpret dreams and visions."

Blurb: The anecdotes and life stories told by Yongsun's Mother, a mansin who lives outside Seoul.

Why is it worth your time?: Despite its academic source, this book is very readable, namely transcriptions of the stories Yongsun's Mother tells about herself in casual conversation or at work. There's a lot of possession stuff (her deceased husband has just as fractious a relationship with her while dead as he did while alive) that's very different from American norms!

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, the dead, nonhumans (gods, spirits), relationships of family and enmity, spiritual, voices, visions (dreams), possession

Content Warnings: Domestic violence in the past, and results of the Korean War--starvation, the torturing to death of a spy, and Yongsun's Mother got taken for a spy as a teenager, starved, interrogated, and marched north until she escaped. The war stuff is all in Chapter Four (aptly named "War Stories and a Meeting with the Mountain God"), the DV all over. Yongsun's Mother's familial relationships have always been complicated.

Access Notes: Paperbacks are pretty cheaply available for a few bucks secondhand; the ebook is only available for $149 for some unfathomable reason, which is highway robbery. This is a rare case where we recommend pirating it off Library Genesis instead.

Misc Notes:

"Her horror grows to anger. Her anger grows to rage. Her rage grows to berserker fury. She is not Petra now. She is not even Mayanna. She is..." (from Section 3 Chapter 3 of the prose serial)

Blurb: (adapted from the intro from Section 3 Chapter 3 of the serial) "Modern English schoolgirl Petra Stone is a reincarnation of the matriarchal warrior princess Mayanna. The Princess and the schoolgirl exist as two independent personalities. She has been taken back into ancient matriarchal Britain by an Amazon group: Rahiyana, the leader; Thunder, a seven-foot powerhouse; Whirlwind, the teen tornado and a shape-shifting imp named Uisce. But the evil patriarchal Lord Fear is determined to kill Petra and has sent a powerful and mysterious band known only as the Swarm..."

Why is it worth your time?: This is a heck of a ride: a mostly-lost sword-and-sorcery prose serial and computer game about a lesbian matriarchy whose chosen one is a multiple. The serial is pulpy.

The game is a throwback, even by 1992's standards, but it's spoken of with fondness and respect by text-only game fans, and while we took  a while to get our sea legs, we found it enjoyable with its dreamy, whimsical tone. It's the first computer game I know of with any multi themes at all. Unusually for its time, it involves multiple female party members, all of which you can play by typing the command BECOME WHIRLWIND (or Rahiyana, and so on), so there's a strange element to the player becoming multiple people and questing to bring a different multiple to power. I have never seen a project like this, and it is an odd duck that I'm glad has been salvaged, even piecemeal. If you're into sword and sorcery, or just the oldest multi computer game I've found, give it a shot!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, the dead, nonhumans [goddess, dog], spiritual, switching, possession

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: The prose serial is the most overtly multi part of this story, and it gives valuable context for the no-intro-given game, so read it first. Sadly, it seems to be mostly lost media; only Section 3: Berserker Chapter 3: Berserker and Section 4: Histories Chapter 1: Trial by Conscience have been scanned, though at least they've been posted online as both PDF and screenreadable plaintext. The special collections at UC Davis may have more?

Both halves of the game can be played thanks to emulator on archive.org, but despite being text-only, it is probably not screenreadable, and only Silverwolf Part 2: the Sacred Mountain has Petra/Mayanna/Silverwolf in it, and in a fairly passive role. (The two halves can be played in any order. We found Part 2 more enjoyable, but if you're dying for completionism, here's the link for Part 1: Quest for the Sword.) There is also a walk-through, which I found invaluable.

There was a comic meant to be released with the game, but far as I know, it never came to be.

Misc Notes: Okay, I fell down a rabbit hole with this one,because it is an odd, odd duck. I am restraining myself from infobricking about the kinky matriarchal Irish women who dressed in Victorian fashion and also became a well-reputed text-only gaming house. What a wild ride.

Also, I'm leaving the authors' names as "various" in the header bar because here are the names associated with this project:

• Michele Dennis (illustrator of prose)
• Laeretta Krenne-Genovene (writer of prose)
• St. Bride's (credited as the game creator, also the name of the group that the creators were part of)
• Priscilla Langridge or Marianne Scarlett, who were credited as St. Bride's Game Mistresses in this 1986 article from Crash Magazine.
• Zenobi Software (the company that picked up the Silverwolf game after St. Bride's went bust and actually got the damned thing released)

"My sister and I
talk in our heads..."

Blurb: Eight short poems by a multiple, dealing with topics ranging from death, despair, and denial, to longing for connection and friendship.

Why is it worth your time?: Some of them still sing clear, even after thirty-five years, and in short lines, they precisely delineate grief, righteous anger, and fear. No clue whatever became of Ann H., or whether she made more poetry, but at least we have this little time capsule.

Plural Tags: abuse high focus, memory work, medical

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Originally published in MPD newsletter Speaking for Our Selves, Vol. 1, no. 4, from June 1986, and thus these poems are only available in bootleg form. The original scanned file of the entire issue (non-screenreadable) is here. I have also textually transcribed the poems alone for posterity.

Misc Notes: Contains the poems "I Called You," "I Have No Arms," "You Ran Away," "Preoccupied," "Why Dig Up The Past?" "Magic Grab Bag," "My Sister and I," and "My Friend, in Peace and Love."