“We’ve always been here”: How a lost 1960s queer novel found its way back
On the latest episode of Still Here, Leslie Clarke speaks with Dr D-M Withers of Lurid Editions and Dr Christopher A. Adams about the republication of Mariana Villa-Gilbert’s A Jingle Jangle Song: a rediscovered queer novel from 1968 and a friendship formed through snail mail.
The full episode drops on Friday 20 March 2026. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
There’s something quietly radical about dialling a number from the phone book. That’s how Dr Christopher A. Adams first made contact with Mariana Villa-Gilbert, a queer author who had published six novels in the 1960s and 70s, gained a cult following in the lesbian press, and then, gradually, slipped out of print, out of libraries, and out of view.
Adams, a playwright and scholar, was deep in his PhD research on post-war queer publishing history when he realised he couldn’t find a record of Villa-Gilbert’s death. He looked her up. Found a listing in Cornwall. Picked up the phone.
“I mostly try to avoid making phone calls,” he admits, with a laugh. But he made this one. Villa-Gilbert answered. And so began an unlikely correspondence: typewritten letters sent back and forth, a millennial printing and posting replies, an elderly writer who had no interest in the internet but had, it turned out, never stopped writing.
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