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Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., is a Lambda award-winning writer, counselor and writing coach. Born in Germany, she spent half of her adult life in Paris and the other half in California (first in Berkeley, now in Pt. Reyes Station) where she works in private practice.
During her school years in Berlin and Hamburg, Renate pursued studies of music, singing, painting, and dancing. She majored in literature at Hamburg University, then moved to Paris in 1966 to focus on classical dance. After an engagement at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1970 and joined an experimental theater group. From 1975 to 1982, she worked in Paris as a cultural correspondent for German radio and press (Frankfurter Rundschau et al.), and as a personal assistant for surrealist painter Meret Oppenheim. "For all those years, I dreamt to be a writer. I had preserved my first poem, written at age six, kept a 'novel' penned at eight, and been a compulsive journal writer from age twelve. In Paris, I moved from one bohemian room to the next, dragging along a big old suitcase filled with diaries. And yet, despite all the signs, I feared becoming a writer."
The turning point came with the beginning of the French and German feminist movements in the early seventies. Renate became an activist from day one. "I had already come out, but now along with other women, suddenly found my voice. The encouragement of my revolutionary sisters got me started writing and speaking out publicly." In 1981, Renate wrote and co-created (with Danish painter Maj Skadegaard) the first feminist multimedia show in Europe, In the Beginning . . . of the End: A Voyage of Women Becoming. The show premiered in Berlin, in 1981, with two thousand women attending, and a year later, it was recorded on film by Studio D of the Canadian Film Board. Renate toured all over Europe with the film, leading discussions, giving workshops, and creating rituals for women.
At the same time, she began writing and lecturing on women's creative and erotic empowerment. Her essays and articles appeared in major feminist magazines including Feministische Studien and Emma. During the eighties, she became the first German translator of feminist authors Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, and others. In 1984, she accompanied Aurde Lorde as a translator on a reading tour of Germany and Switzerland. "In this period of my life, I felt I was living in my toolmaker's workshop. Writing in several languages, doing journalism and translations were challenges I chose because they would sharpen my tools." During this time, she also translated Gertude Stein's only mystery novel, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, into German.
Stein had been one of her muses long before Renate had any idea that one day she would create a new kind of biography of her, a photobiography with parallel visual and textual readings of Stein's life, Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures (Algonquin Books, 1994). "I discovered that it took at least four languages to read Stein's word games and decode her double (triple, quadruple) entendres: German, Yiddish, French and English -- all languages that I knew. I had studied Yiddish in the first university class offered in Germany, after the Holocaust. I also discovered that it was harder for me to write in my German mother tongue and that English, my sister tongue, gave me an unsuspected taste of freedom and playfulness."
Since her move to California in 1986, Renate earned a degree in clinical psychology and became a counselor. Simultaneously, she began building up a private practice as an editor and writing coach. She has given workshops and classes in creative writing and has lectured on literary as well as psychological topics.
The first book she published in the States, Sex and Other Sacred Games (Times Books, 1989), came right out of her feminist experience in Europe. It also came out of falling in love with an American in Paris, Kim Chernin, with whom she co-authored the book. Another collaboration with Kim was the result of a shared passion for a young opera singer, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (HarperCollins, 1997). For Renate, music, cultural journalism, and psychology all came together in this "portrait of the artist as a young woman."
Renate recently continued her reflections on women's psychology and eros with True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (North Atlantic Books, 2003), originally published as Love's Learning Place: Truth as Aphrodisiac in Women's Long-Term Relationships (EdgeWork Books, 2002). True Secrets is based on her work with women couples and on her own experience with the challenges of monogamy, claiming that truth-telling is a turn-on--"the healthiest, cheapest, most effective aphrodisiac available."
Renate's first novel goes back to her childhood in the outskirts of Berlin where her grandfather's garden provided for the family's survival throughout the war and the Berlin blockade. She wrote and illustrated The Grasshopper's Secret: A Magical Tale (EdgeWork Books, 2002) almost entirely under a small tree in her Berkeley garden. The novel is woven around the themes of love and death, the city of Venice, music, and the magic of glass. "Memories from my own childhood came up in unexpected ways, just as grasshoppers made surprise appearances on my laptop while I was writing."
At present, Renate is working on a Parisian memoir.
Read Renate's essay "Writing in My Paris Cafe"
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