Renate Stendhal

Renate Stendhal
Born 01 January 1944
Germany
Occupation writer, writing coach, provost
Nationality German
Genre Fiction, non-fiction
Subject Feminism, women, eroticism, children's literature
Website
www.renatestendhal.com

Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (born Renate Neumann, January 1, 1944) is an award-winning writer, writing coach and counselor. German-born and Paris-educated, she now lives in California. Her recent memoir “Kiss Me Again, Paris” was a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist and won an International Book Award. Her offices are in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Biography

During her school years in Berlin and Hamburg, Renate Stendhal 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.) – an occupation she picked up again in 2005, writing cultural reviews for the international magazine Scene4. In Paris, she also worked for many years as a personal assistant for surrealist painter Meret Oppenheim.

With the beginning of the French and German feminist movements, Renate Stendhal became an activist 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” (1980). A year later, the show was recorded on film by Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada and shown at women's festivals and international film festivals. While touring with the film across Europe from 1980 to 1983, Renate Stendhal started giving workshops and lectures 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 Susan Griffin, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, and others. In 1984, she accompanied Audre Lorde as a translator on a reading tour of Germany and Switzerland. She translated Gertrude Stein's only mystery novel, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, into German keine keiner and in 1989 created a photo-biography with parallel visual and textual readings of Stein's life, Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. The English edition (Algonquin Books, 1994) earned a Lambda Award. In 2009, the photo-biography was republished and served as an inspiration for the exhibition "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, Summer 2011", at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Renate Stendhal was involved in the educational programming surrounding the show and the parallel exhibition "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde", at SFMOMA. Her blog, quotinggertrudestein, followed the preparations, the "Summer of Stein" and the aftermath of the epochal exhibitions.

Since her move to California in 1986, she earned an MA in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in spiritual psychology, but chose not to pursue a license as a therapist. Instead, she chose a spiritual path, getting ordained as a minister by AIWP, the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person, practicing a different kind of listening and intuitive, common sense conversation. In 2005, she became a provost at the University of Integrative Learning), guiding students through MA and Ph.D. programs that reward students for their lifelong learning. In 2010-2011, she became a certified hCG practitioner in the Dr. Simeons weight-loss protocol based on hCG amino acids.

In the States, Renate Stendhal published Sex and Other Sacred Games (Times Books, 1989), co-authored with her life companion, author Kim Chernin, with whom she also co-authored the portrait of a young opera singer, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (HarperCollins, 1997). She wrote and illustrated a novel for young adults, The Grasshopper's Secret: A Magical Tale (EdgeWork Books, 2002), and continued her reflections on women 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). Her most recent collaboration with Kim Chernin is Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit (Lesbian Love Forever, 2014) a quick reference guide and handy toolkit for married and soon-to-be married couples. Renate Stendhal has been a writing consultant and editor for over thirty years for professional and beginning writers.

Her latest publication is a Parisian memoir à clef, 'Kiss Me Again, Paris,' which won a pre-publication award in the 2015 Yearly Writing Competition of the WNBA (Women’s National Book Association), juried by Deirdre Bair. 'Kiss Me Again, Paris' is the Winner of the 2018 International Book Awards in the LGBTQ Non-Fiction category and was nominated for a 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. See reviews on her website and on Amazon.

Books

  • Gertrude Stein: Ein Leben in Bildern und Texten (1989)
  • Sex and Other Sacred Games (with Kim Chernin; 1989)
  • Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures (1989)
  • Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (with Kim Chernin; 1997)
  • Cecilia Bartoli: Eine Liebeserklärung (1999)
  • The Grasshopper's Secret: A Magical Tale (2002)
  • True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (2003)
  • Die Farben der Lust - Sex in lesbischen Liebesbeziehungen (2004)
  • Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit (with Kim Chernin; 2014)
  • Kiss Me Again, Paris (2017)
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