“Fieldwork” Review: A Lush, Chewy Memoir Full of Mushrooms

Beneath the forest floor, there is a hidden network of threadlike fibers — called mycelium —  connecting every tree and plant through the same fungi that eventually sprouts from the ground to produce mushrooms. It makes sure every plant organism in the forest has the resources it needs to survive and distributes those resources over many miles and ecosystems. The mycelial network stretches so long in every direction that it has more connections than the human brain’s neural pathways, functioning as a forest communication system that bridges all the flora there to each other’s presents, pasts, and futures. In Michelin-star chef Iliana Regan’s new book Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir, she utilizes a similar structure in her writing, linking all of her current experiences to her childhood growing up at her family’s farmhouse, the foraging missions she went on with her parents along with the ones she goes as an adult, and herself directly to the land she lives on.

Beginning and ending with two different kinds of dreams — the first of failed attempts at foraging morel mushrooms in the spring and the final one of teaching an imagined child to love the land as she does — Fieldwork tells the story of how Regan and her wife, Anna, escaped their hectic city life in Chicago to open their now-famed Milkweed Inn on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Regan’s interactions with the flora and fauna of their new home become reflections on her becoming. Fieldwork doesn’t begin where her first memoir, Burn The Place, left off. It builds on the stories she previously told to help readers understand how she became who she is even further. Where Burn The Place focuses on the most tumultuous parts of Regan’s past, on her struggles with alcoholism, and on her rise from home-taught chef to owner and operator of one of the best fine dining restaurants in the nation, the stories and reflections of Fieldwork operate similarly to the mycelium, adhering all of the painful moments of her life to the joyful ones, all of her family’s history to her desire to care for people through the dishes she creates, and all of the various parts of the ecosystems she inhabits to the different journeys of her life.

After many years of working in city kitchens and her own at the highly acclaimed Elizabeth in Chicago, Regan takes a “gamble” on Milkweed in the hopes of designing an atmosphere that would give people a taste of what it was like to grow up in her parents’ farmhouse: “It’s true that what I’m doing here is trying to give people something like the feeling of what I experienced as a child. Being in an untamed place yet feeling safe and nourished. I’m showing them the magic I experienced, welcoming them to how I once felt.”

Set to open in the summer of 2020, Regan and her wife quickly realized early that year they wouldn’t be able to bring this dream to life as soon as they wanted to. As a result, they both spent a lot time “testing out the different accommodations, keeping the place up, caulking, keeping out mice, organizing leftover items from the previous owners into ‘keep’ and ‘donate’ piles, starting gardens” and getting to know the land of their new home more intimately.

Interspersed with Regan’s stories of plant foraging in the forest, fishing in the Sturgeon River near the Milkweed Inn, and creating her own analog map of this new-to-her wilderness are the stories of how she learned to do these things and who she learned them from. She reacquaints us with her parents as they take her wild strawberry and mulberry picking, and with her sisters as they get in trouble with their dad for using drugs and sneaking out. She introduces us to her Grandma Busia as Regan’s mom recreates Busia’s famous czarnina — Duck’s blood — soup in the kitchen of their farmhouse, and her Grandpa Wayne as he tries to crack black walnuts with her dad on the same day her parents conceived her. Within each reconstructed memory and reflection, Regan illustrates the processes it takes to get these found ingredients to their final form: the fermentation of apples to make cider or cabbage to make sauerkraut or green elderberries to make capers; the chopping and slow cooking of her family’s czarnina; the stewing of mulberries for pies; the stuffing of intestines to make pork blood sausage. Much like the mycelial model the narrative took its form from, mushrooms — her love of them, her family’s love of them, her ancestral connection to them, the ways her Milkweed guests interact with them — help us move through the network from one reflection to the next. It’s enough to make you dream of visiting that farmhouse or, more tangibly, of spending a weekend at the Milkweed Inn.

As Regan guides you through the mycelial network she’s constructed, she candidly — at times, painfully so — examines her family’s history of addiction and her relapse into drinking near the beginning of the pandemic, her father’s anxiety and attachments to fear that seem to be rubbing off on her, her complicated relationship with her gender identity, and the grief she carries as a result of the death of her older sister, her inability to conceive a child, and a “hole” she cannot seem to fill no matter how hard she tries. Among all of it lies a beautiful and fascinating rumination on identity and how the the way we grow into ourselves is rooted — or connected — to everything before us and around us:

“Dad was the boletus. Mom was the chanterelle. Dad was the forest. Mom was the kitchen. Dad was the forager. Mom was the chef. Dad was outside. Mom was inside. Dad was nature. Mom was nurture. Dad caused problems. Mom solved problems. Dad was violent. Mom was safe. Dad was anxious. Mom was depressed. I fruited from them, and I was all those things too. I was also the sheep’s head — wily, twisting — and the honey mushroom — stretching, symbiotic.”

There are moments in the narration that seem surreal as Regan brings us to disparate parts of her network. She weaves dreams with memories. She intertwines narration of the present with bits of the past that she sometimes wasn’t even alive for. As she takes us along with her on her exploration of the forest, she calls on us to go find our own piece of the natural world that makes us feel as she does without ever really coming out and saying that. She reminds us, constantly, that there is so much more at our fingertips than we realize and all we have to do is give ourselves a little time to look in order to access it. From the moment the memoir begins to the final sentences at the end, Regan’s passions for the lands, foods, and people she loves and has loved are so palpable you can almost feel them yourself. When I finished Fieldwork, it felt like what I often dream I’d feel if I ever had the opportunity to visit the Milkweed Inn: full.

---

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan is out now.

“Judas Goat” by Gabrielle Bates Made Me Start Writing Again

I consider myself an avid poetry reader and writer, but over the past few months, my voracious reading has dimmed to a trickle. I would write maybe a poem a month and wasn’t reading new books at all. That all changed when I got the email about Judas Goat, the forthcoming debut collection of poetry from Gabrielle Bates.

On top of being a dynamic poet, Bates hosts The Poet Salon, a poetry podcast with Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat. The podcast hosts sit down with other poets and discuss the guest’s work over their favorite cocktail. I became familiar with Bates because of this podcast, and when her book was announced on Twitter, I was immediately intrigued by the title and the cover. It’s bad poetic practice to let a pretty cover sway you, but perhaps I’m not all that interested in being good.

Bates’ debut collection is the haunt embodied. I know it might sound cliche to talk about poetry as haunting, but the images she conjures arrest you in their wildness and their brutality. In one poem, the speaker recounts an incident with a goat:

“WHEN HER SECOND
HORN, THE ONLY HORN
SHE HAS LEFT,

goes up through the white and copper-topped
tunnel of my eye and enters the basket of bone,

we are no chimera the ancients ever dreamed.
At once too mundane and too fearsome.
At once too separate and too dependent.”

The image, the horn through the eye, is jarring and elastic. It stretches around your brain and becomes the only thing you can see, a fixation. Judas Goat is full of these images, of this language that makes you want to look away while pulling you closer. The collection explores love and intimacy between partners, between parent and child, and between a woman and herself.

All the while, even as the speaker of the poem moves, we feel still grounded and tied to the South that Bates grew up in.

Once I started Judas Goat, it was nearly impossible to put down. But I found myself writing down lines and words of my own, spurned by the richness in the text I was reading. Every poet will tell you that in order to write poems, you have to read poems, but I hadn’t felt compelled to write in a long time. This collection shook something loose in me.

In “Saint of Ongoingness,” the speaker muses

“The question dawns in me late in December:
Don’t I deserve joy?                              Rhetorical.”

I think this question really permeates throughout the second half of the book. The question of joy when you’ve lived through a messy life, one probably fraught with trauma, the shared trauma of not just being a woman in the world but a woman in relation to the world. When you come out from the other side of that, joy is a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite reach.

The question of joy stays with me because, after loss of any kind, we find ourselves scrapping toward it. Clawing as if through mud but also like a spoon ringing in an empty bowl. There is joy to be found, surely, but of course there are also imposters.

In “Rosification” the speaker states:

“We lie to each other all the time. What else can we do?”

And it makes me think of how we lie on our quest for joy, stating with assurance that the next thing, the next publication, the next job, the next love, will bring us joy, but these things are, again, imposters.

In opposition, the lie in “Rosification” is the truth that resonates throughout the other poems. The speaker tells us of a lost mother who has been found again, a marriage that couldn’t find itself, the joy and pain of friendships. It’s a blisteringly honest collection.

The poem is the one place you can lie or, put more delicately, exaggerate, stretch the truth. But these poems cut to the bone, and as a result, spur emotional reactions. Bates’ poems meet at the intersection of the human and the animal world. I have always thought the animal world is incapable of lying. Yes, some birds practice mimicry. Some bugs pretend to be snakes, but in that quest for survival there is a truth that remains untouched.

The goats and snakes and rabbits that appear in these poems ground you as the reader in the speaker’s reality, making her world more real and more true. You can’t always trust a poet to tell the truth, but you can trust a snake to bite.

Bates writes with such precision it’s almost ghastly. I love the way we move through the collection. Most books of poetry aren’t linear, we don’t move from darkness to epiphany, and I think good poems really resist that urge to tie everything up into a neat bow. The urgency with which she writes, the way she compels us to see the world of her making, is stunning.

Through all of the book’s themes, Bates finds a way to reach the reader with sharp and salient language.

“Conversations with Mary” ends with the lines

“How did it feel
Cold blood on the cock of God
Whose blood
My blood”

Such a damning and startling image but one that, again, pulls you in and beckons you to ask questions, to feel something other than complacency.

I hope that a second collection is in the works for Bates, though I know that expecting the next book out of a poet can be selfish and tedious. For now, I’m stuck on the poems in Judas Goat, returning to them when I need a splash of cold water to the face. These poems wake you up only to make you tremble with their frankness.

---

Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates is out now.

Tess Sharpe’s New Queer YA Novel Will Have You Chanting “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss!”

I was talking with the owner of my local indie bookstore the other day, as you do, and we were both raving about books that somehow manage to deal with heavy topics without weighing down the reader and making them feel heavy too. I was a couple chapters into queer YA author Tess Sharpe’s latest book 6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did) when I realized it was one of those special books. When you look at the cover — which emphasizes the romance and fanfic aspects of the book — you probably wouldn’t think it deals with any serious issues. It’s not that 6 Times We Almost Kissed isn’t a romance or an ode to fanfic. It absolutely is. But it’s also a searing look at grief, parental illness and death, rural medical access, trauma, and mental health. At the same time, it manages to be a swoony romance that will have you cheering for these two queer teen girls.

The two central characters in 6 Times We Almost Kissed are 17-year-old teen girls, Penny and Tate. Both are such full, real young women it’s a bit hard for me to remember that they are fictional! Tate has a reputation for being cold and aloof, which stems from her trying to keep herself together while her single mom has gone through not one but two major health crises. She cares very deeply for the few people she’s let get close to her and is incredibly loyal. She is a hardworking star on her swim team whose goal is to score a sports scholarship so she can go to college and earn enough so that her mom doesn’t have to worry about money anymore.

Equally strong and necessarily more mature and responsible than other kids her age is Penny. Although Penny is more emotionally open than Tate, she’s also been through a lot of trauma. Her dad died on a father-daughter rafting trip accident when she was 15, leaving her with permanent mobility issues in her hands and an emotionally negligent mother who abandoned Penny in her grief. Her mom has never made herself accountable or repaired their relationship. Penny loves the outdoors, especially the local river, and she is a planner and organization aficionado who outlines her life in steps in her bullet journal.

If you’re an avid fanfiction reader, right away you would have clocked Sharpe’s reference to “five times” fics, which she expands here to tell the intertwined lives of our heroines. She uses the structure to include snippets from different times in Penny and Tate’s high school years. Seeing Penny before her father’s death, before the trauma descends on her, is particularly bittersweet. Organizing the novel around these pivotal moments in Penny and Tate’s life allows Sharpe to not only give readers a full picture of Penny and Tate’s complicated history but to expertly pace the novel by slowly revealing the details of events that have been hinted at. It makes for an emotionally resonant, page-turning read.

In the present, these two young women are about to undergo another life-and-death event: Tate’s mom’s chronic illness has left her waiting for a liver transplant, and her best friend, Penny’s mom, has decided to become a living donor for her. In order to help both their families recover physically, emotionally, and financially from this exciting but scary endeavor, the “moms,” as Penny and Tate call them, decide to combine their households the summer before the girls’ last year of high school. If Penny and Tate were easy friends like you’d assume they would be with their mothers being lifelong friends, this wouldn’t be a hiccup. But while they’re not enemies, they’ve always kind of clashed. To put their moms’ health and recovery first, they make a pact to be nice and work together to present an easy, “everything is hunky dory” front for them.

The thing is, even if the moms weren’t both undergoing major surgery, Penny and Tate would be lying if they told their mothers that everything was fine between them. Because between bickering with each other and witnessing the best and worst of one another, they have a history of almost kissing. It’s a pattern that has followed them throughout their teenagehood, these odd little blips of undeniable attraction to each other that they have an unspoken agreement to ignore and never discuss after they happen. How on earth are Penny and Tate going to keep up this denial while living across the hall from each other and staying in Penny’s grandmother’s house alone with their moms recovering in Sacramento, hours away from their rural home?

They don’t, of course. The slow, slow burn of the story is Penny and Tate finally opening up to each other and being honest, mostly with themselves, about what it is that they actually want and what they actually mean to each other. It’s them finally seeing what everyone watching them from the outside sees, looking at these two and thinking, wow those are some soulmates right there. It’s so beautiful! After reading about the hardships each girl has gone through and how courageously they have fought for their own well-being, I can’t think of two other fictional queer girls who deserve a happy ending more. It’s difficult not to chant “kiss, kiss, kiss!” in your head while reading about all their almost kisses, even though Sharpe has already told you this isn’t the time their lips actually meet! And on more than one occasion, there is even only one bed that they have to share!!

The central romance is just one of the many compelling aspects of 6 Times We Almost Kissed. As someone who grew up in a rural place, I really appreciated how authentically rural this novel felt. Penny and Tate and their families live in the mountains in California; even though it’s a very different environment from where I’m from, I recognized a lot of details about Penny and Tate’s home and how they lived. They are the kinds of girls who know how to chop their own firewood to heat their house. They live in a place where you casually wait hours to carpool with someone because there is literally no other way to get around. Even when they’re mad at each other, they go for runs together because Tate has to keep up her training and it’s not good bear safety for her to run alone.

As complicated as Penny and Tate’s relationship is, Penny’s with her mom, Lottie, is even more so. For me it was the most painful part of the novel to read, even while Sharpe is careful to not make Lottie a simple villain. I mean, she’s giving her best friend half of her liver! But particularly as a new parent, reading about a parent who emotionally and physically abandons her kid in her grief for her husband was agonizing. On the one hand, I can’t imagine losing my partner suddenly in a tragic accident, and of course I have no idea how I would cope. On the other hand, I can’t imagine not putting my kid’s well being first and not openly communicating with and going through the process of grief with them instead of shutting them out. Sharpe smartly doesn’t wrap up Penny and Lottie’s story arc; there’s no moment where Lottie does a grand apology or where Penny forgives her. The focus is on Penny as her own person; she makes her own steps forward in healing journey apart from her mom, which is so affirming to witness.

Sharpe’s prose throughout the novel is thoughtful and evocative. She writes alternating chapters from Penny and Tate’s point of views, and their voices are clearly differentiated. Tate’s distracted mind often inserts parenthetical asides. Penny’s voice oozes with her practicality and tendency to organize. Simple metaphors and similes are incredibly effective at revealing the girls’ emotions, especially about each other. Tate tells us: “I’m sitting here, hanging on her words like she’s a cliff I’ve slipped from.” Penny thinks, after Tate says “Penny”:

“It’s just my name. I’ve heard it hundreds of times in my life. But this time, she kind of sighs it through her fingers as if she’s trying to hold it in. As if it’s suddenly become a secret I’m not supposed to hear.”

It’s a rare book indeed that manages to instill so much compassion and nuance into its exploration of weighty topics like grief and trauma while also creating an incredibly dreamy romance for the ages. To experience such a nail-biting, slow burn romantic plot starring two full, rich young queer women characters is thrilling. Even with less page time as supporting characters, the moms as well as Penny and Tate’s respective best friends, are just as compelling and authentic. 6 Times We Almost Kissed is a knockout. As Tate’s best friend tells her about Penny: “In every room you’re in, you’re always looking for her, Tate.”

Tess Sharpe, I’ll always be looking for your next book on every bookstore and library shelf.

---

6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did) by Tess Sharpe comes out tomorrow, January 24.

“The Fixer” Is Slow Burn Lesbian Romance at Its Finest

I stumbled upon the books of Lee Winter last summer when I was on vacation and in desperate need of a good romance to read by the beach. It felt like divine intervention. The clouds parted, the heavens opened up, and here was a treasure trove of lesbian romances featuring my absolute favorite tropes: ice queens and age gaps. I started with Breaking Character (per Winter’s own ice queen rating system: 3 out 5 icicles), and over the course of the next week, I had read The Red Files (5/5 icicles), Under Your Skin (4/5 icicles), The Brutal Truth (5/5 icicles), and Hotel Queens (3.5/5 icicles). I was worried the magic would fade whenever I started a new one, but Winter hooked me again and again.

Which is all to say, when my beloved editor Kayla asked if I wanted an ARC of Lee Winter’s latest romance, The Fixer, I was, as they say, extremely down to clown. The basic plot is thus: Eden Lawless is an activist with a big heart and an almost pathological drive to do The Right Thing™ at all times. She’s hired by Michelle Hastings, the CEO of a mysterious organization to take down a corrupt mayor from her hometown.

This is where things get interesting. The character Michelle Hastings also appears in The Red Files and its sequel Under Your Skin. It’s not uncommon in romance for side characters to become the protagonist of their own stories, and I don’t want to spoil anything from either of those books, but it does provide important context for the unorthodox way The Fixer is structured. Here’s what I will say: Michelle Hastings did a bad thing to someone. And when I say bad, I don’t mean romance novel bad like, “I was too scared of my feelings so I skipped the opening night/wedding/gallery party/family Christmas.” I’m talking about something truly cruel, something done with intention that had lasting and devastating consequences.

When I (metaphorically) cracked the epub and read this line in the acknowledgements: “I never intended to write one story told over two books, but it turns out some ice queens take quite a bit longer to melt than others,” I sat up a little straighter.  One story over two books in contemporary romance is something of a rarity — after all, the Happily Ever After (HEA) is pretty much the only thing the genre demands. I knew Michelle was going to be a tough character to crack, and I was excited to get into a book that features a character whose values and morals are…questionable, to say the least. Still, I was a little worried. Would the book feel satisfying — or would I feel robbed of my HEA?

The answer is…both? I know that’s deeply unhelpful, and you are gliding that mouse to close this window in disgust, but gimme a sec, okay? I’ve had some time to sit with the book, and I think more than anything, the part of me that wasn’t satisfied was the part that is trained to expect a tidy, happy ending. Because I loved everything else about this book: the characters, the world they lived in, and how fun and inventive Eden’s scheme to take down this corrupt mayor was. Truly, a tip of my cap to Winter for including a mysterious political scandal in this story, because the thrill is so enjoyable that you almost — almost! — forget that Michelle and Eden have exchanged one single hug by the end of the book.

Okay, that’s enough tablesetting; let’s get into the meat of it all. Eden is an activist who travels the country protesting, and when she’s not protesting, she’s consulting for other groups, getting their message out or helping them get organized. She lives most of the time in a van painted and named Gloria Steinem, she says “Goddess” unironically, and it is truly a testament to Winter’s writing that I was still charmed by her, despite all signs pointing directly to “Character Most Likely to Drive Me Nuts if We Met at a Party.” She’s in DC for a job interview that has something to do with her old nemesis, Francine Wilson, a property-developer-slash-slumlord who got Eden expelled from college once she started protesting the conditions of the properties Francine owned. Oh, and she also got Eden’s dad fired from the hospital where he worked, something for which he still has not forgiven his daughter.

Michelle is the CEO of “The Fixers,” a shadowy consulting organization made up of hackers and spies and ex-CIA/FBI employees. Think Olivia Pope & Associates with a lot more money and a lot more employees, and that’s basically the firm. To me, Michelle is a wife. She’s brilliant, hot, good at her job, and if she is choosing to ignore the fact that she is running herself into the ground, well, sometimes that is just the way it goes. The Fixers have been hired to stop Mayor Wilson from getting elected to another term, and Michelle’s research points to Eden as the solution. She is the only person who has ever been able to figure out how to rattle Francine, which makes her perfect for this contract. That is about as far as Michelle has thought about this, because it’s as far as she thinks about any job. The company’s morals are primarily dictated by who can afford to pay for their services, which means they are usually not great! Eden assumes The Fixers are some kind of well funded vigilante justice organization, and Michelle knows her life will be easier if Eden thinks that, so she lets her.

The Fixer is primarily Eden’s book, and the majority of our focus is on her as she returns to her hometown and everything she left behind after Mayor Wilson got her expelled. But she is good at her job, and the town-wide scavenger hunt she devises is pretty brilliant. This is something I have come to expect in Winter’s work — a B plot mystery or scheme that unravels along with the romance. They’re always expertly handled, helping to shade in the developing romance. After a while, the clues in the scavenger hunt become something she looks forward to giving to Michelle on their nightly check-in calls, something that allows them to get to know each other a little better. Eden needs something to look forward to, because even though her plan is slowly working, being home is hard for her. She still thinks her father blames her for his life falling apart, and she is constantly worried about running into him.

One of the magic tricks that Winter pulls off is making it clear that Eden’s father has treated her terribly and that he does not deserve to be forgiven just because he is her dad. When they finally have their heart-to-heart, he doesn’t demand she forget the pain he caused, nor does he try to minimize it. He gently points out that living by the impossibly high moral standard Eden’s mother has set might not always be possible — and that’s okay.

 “It’s okay not to be perfect, not to be too rigid about defining what’s allowed and right and ethical. It’s okay to live in the shades of gray. It’s especially okay to accept that people are a bit good and a bit bad and not all evil.”

Hm, I wonder if any of this is going to come up as Eden starts falling for a woman who works for a spooky shadow organization????  (Spoiler, it will!!!) This is the overarching thread that runs throughout this book and the next, the thing that pulls Michelle and Eden together, even as it pushes them apart. What does it mean to be a good person? Does it mean you always have to do the right thing, no matter the cost? If you’ve done something terrible, how long should you be punished for it?

While The Fixer is largely about Eden, Winter slowly shows us different parts of Michelle, a woman so closed off and impenetrable that I was tempted to inform my own therapist that I am actually doing just fine, comparatively! The forthcoming sequel, The Chaos Agent — which comes out next month — allows Michelle to take the stage fully, and you better believe I will be back with a deep dive on the full story of Michelle and Eden’s romance. Here are some parting words I will leave you with, until then: If you have ever known the joy and the pain of being totally head-over-heels invested in a slow burn, incomplete fanfic, then The Fixer is for you, I promise.

---

The Fixer by Lee Winter is available now.

Alison Rumfitt’s “Tell Me I’m Worthless” Is Fearlessly Honest About Modern Trans Life

In a time when so many popular examples of queer art have their edges sanded down, Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless is all edge. A horror novel about sexual violence and national hatred, Tell Me I’m Worthless pulls no punches in its depiction of the ways fascism drives people to hurt each other and themselves. For those exhausted by cloying positivity and mawkish romance in their queer literature, this is the antidote.

The novel follows Alice and Ila, former friends and lovers who three years prior escaped an encounter with a malicious, fascist manifestation haunting a house called Albion.

The two have spent the years since each believing that the other raped and mutilated them while inside, both bearing scars which validate their memory of the events. The thing neither of them can remember is what happened to Hannah, their friend who went into Albion with them and never came out.

Alice, who is trans, makes custom sissy hypno videos to get by, troubled by the racial hangups of her clients and terrified of the ghostly apparition that crawls out of a poster on her wall at night. Ila, meanwhile, has become a figure of repute in the TERF movement, though her adherence to its values masks a deep-seated self-loathing. Tell Me I’m Worthless has no illusions about the bleak state of modern trans life, and it makes no attempt to sugarcoat its impact on these characters. Rumfitt depicts the way that fascism infects people with its language and perspectives with a brutal honesty. Early on, Alice describes her unbidden bile at seeing selfies posted by other trans people online. “You’re sharing that picture of yourself? Everyone can see you’re not a woman. Everyone knows. A pale, nasty jealousy at their apparent unselfconsciousness. I don’t ever vocalise this side of me, of course. These thoughts are intrusive. I do my best to suppress them.” It’s refreshing to see a work of queer fiction unafraid to explore such a nasty side of the trans experience, that nagging voice in the back of the head that wants you to project all your self-hatred onto everyone around you.

Rumfitt’s prose perfectly captures the simmering tension and unavoidable cruelties of the world her characters (and her readers) inhabit. The novel is full of run-on sentences which breathlessly parade an overwhelming accumulation of horrors. By the time the novel reaches its climax, the writing devolves for long stretches into pure literary abstraction, jumbled trains of thought pulled straight from a dark subconscious. If the phrase “a literary take on Rob Zombie’s Halloween II” thrills you, you need to pick up this book, though readers looking for a more conventional narrative may find themselves frustrated.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is full of historical digressions and personal anecdotes, fleshing out the lives and backstories of Alice, Ila, and the house. Like so much of the best horror media, the book is more concerned with their inner lives and the collisions of their traumas than it is with straightforward plotting or scares. Examples of the latter are certainly present, however. The opening chapter features a terrifying sequence in which Alice and a hookup she’s brought back to her apartment are menaced by two malevolent specters, one an expression of the house’s malign influence and the other a remnant of Alice’s uncomfortable sexual history. It’s a terrifying scene and a perfect way to establish the book’s intimate approach to horror.

Tell Me I’m Worthless takes on challenging themes. Sexual violence is key to the book’s exploration of fascism, and Rumfitt does not shy away from the myriad horrors accompanying the topic. The traumatic things Alice and Ila experienced within the house weigh on them in ways that are far from neat or easily digestible, and they both lash out in ways that could be read by some as unsympathetic. The book is unapologetically authentic in this regard, treating trauma not as a vague metaphor to be overcome but as a very real personal demon which one can only learn to live with. Tell Me I’m Worthless has the courage to ask readers how they can hope to resist fascist violence if they cannot look it straight in the face.

With that in mind, Tell Me I’m Worthless is not going to be for everyone. It’s a graphic book with difficult themes, and it offers no easy answers or pat conclusions. But it’s exactly these facts that make the book so valuable. We need more books as fearlessly honest about modern trans life as Tell Me I’m Worthless. Tell Me I’m Worthless will no doubt be divisive, but isn’t it so with so much great art?

---

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is out in the U.S. now. You can already read Rumfitt’s essay on Eurosleaze horror films in Autostraddle’s 2022 Horror Is So Gay series.

Quiz: What Queer Book in Translation Should You Read?

Expand your queer reading horizons and try a book in translation! Not sure where to start? Take this quiz! I’ve gathered eight LGBTQ books in translation from around the world in various genres and forms. Manga? Check! Science fiction? Check! Family saga? Check! Magical realism? Check! And more! For other ideas for queer books in translation, check out this list of Must-Read Queer Books from Around the World on Book Riot and this list of Queer Nordic and Scandinavian Books by yours truly at Autostraddle.

---

Rainbow Reading: Happy Birthgay!

Kristin Cashore’s “Seasparrow” Continues The Great Graceling Gaying

If I were forced to make a guess, I’d say I’ve probably read 75% of all fantasy books written by women, about women protagonists, published in my lifetime. Stories are my favorite thing. And women saving the world with swords and magic are my favorite stories. So it’s no surprise I’ve read Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series dozens of times, devouring a new one every time it comes out, and then adding it to the rotation I read through at least once a year. Seasparrow, Cashore’s most recent addition to her ever evolving world, wove its spell on me like all the others. Plus! It continues the Great Graceling Gaying, which is how I think of Cashore’s ascent to building one of the most LGBTQ-inclusive fantasy worlds ever published. Our beloved Queen Bitterblue even takes up the cause of marriage equality this time around, making it the law of the land in Monsea, just as the United States was wrestling to do the same.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Graceling series, the basic concept is that some humans develop two different colored eyes in their infancy, and are then blessed with some kind of magical power. There’s really useful stuff like archery and speed-reading and — one of my personal favorite Graces — being able to smell someone and tell exactly what food they’d most like to eat, and then being able to cook it! And there are less useful ones, like being able to hold your breath an unnaturally long time. As the books go on, the worlds and their lore expand. Under the tunnels in the mountains, there’s a land with magical Monsters, supernaturally colored, who can mess with your thoughts. Under the tunnels, across the sea, there’s blue foxes and sea creatures that can telepathically communicate with humans, and also there’s airships!

Seasparrow, the fifth book in the series, follows the Hava — the secret half-sister of longtime protagonist Queen Bitterblue — a young woman Graced with hiding (with being able to shift herself to look like her surroundings, no matter what she’s standing near). In the previous book, Winterkeep, Hava helped rescue Bitterblue from a political kidnapping, and now Bitterblue’s entourage is on their way home, on a giant ship in the middle of winter. Like all of Cashore’s women characters, Hava is dealing with some serious trauma. Her and Biiterblue’s father, who was a psychopath Graced with mind control, killed both of their mothers. Hava’s, he killed right in front of her. Hava is moving forward with her life, working alongside Queen Bitterblue, trying to figure out who she really is, what she really wants to do, and how to connect with other people. She’s more at home on the ship than she ever has been anywhere, even in the castle where she grew up alongside her mother’s Graced sculptures. But nothing comes easy to Hava, especially navigating social situations, which she has mostly been avoiding doing her entire life.

There are mysteries on board the ship! Dangerous discoveries Hava is decoding from Winterkeep! Talking animals! Terrifying weather! And, of course, seeds of looooove.

Like all the Graceling books, Seasparrow allows the woman at its center to be angry, and hurt, and confused, and scared and messy and even downright unlikable sometimes. Kristin Cashore has never pulled a punch when it comes to exploring the ways women work to put their lives back together after being broken by terrible men, and Hava has maybe the hardest time of any of the women we’ve met. Which makes perfect sense. But she’s not in it alone; Seasparrow introduces dynamic new characters to exist alongside the cast we already know and love. It’s an ever-gaying cast that includes: Bisexual Fire, the protagonist of the second book. Bann and Raff, boyfriends since book one. Saf, Bitterblue’s ex-boyfriend, who is bisexual and now dating Prince Skye, another fan favorite from book one. He’s the ex-boyfriend of Teddy, a lovable scamp who’s writing the world’s first dictionary. In Seasparrow, Annette, the captain of Bitterblue’s ship is in a relationship with another woman sailor, Navi. They’re the ones that prompt Hava to strong-arm Bitterblue into moving the marriage equality law to the top of her pile of proposed legislation.

The Graceling series actually spends a lot of time talking about governing, actually. Pondering what ethical governments could and should look like. We get into the nitty gritty of it all with Bitterblue in the third book, and stick with it for the rest of the series. Which is why the conversations about marriage equality actually fit in seamlessly with everything else the characters discuss. The first Graceling book landed in the world in 2008, the year President Obama was elected, the year California voters overturned marriage equality in their state with Proposition 8, and three years before Obama came out in support of gay marriage. The evolution of marriage equality in the United States has almost paralleled what’s gone on in the Graceling realm, only Kristin Cashore doesn’t give any oxygen to the bigots. They’re some of the few characters in the books that are painted with a broad strokes BAD brush.

In many ways, I grew up with the women of Graceling, even though I was an adult when I started reading them. The first girl I ever loved placed the first book in my hands. Seasparrow is a worthy addition to the canon, and I can’t wait to read it over and over, cuddled up in bed with my wife.

---

Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore is out now.

54 Queer and Feminist Books Coming Out Winter 2023

---

January

Back in a Spell by Lana Harper (January 3)

Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed (January 10)

Friday I’m in Love by Camryn Garrett (January 10)

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns (January 10)

Hero Complex by Jesse J. Thomas (January 10)

The Daughters of Izdihar by Hadeer Elsbai (January 10)

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire (January 10)

Catch by Kris Bryant (January 10)

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane (January 17)

Warrior Princesses Strike Back by Sarah Eagle Heart and Emma Eagle Heart-White (January 17)

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt (January 17)

Happiness Is a Shade of Blue by Venetia Di Pierro (January 17)

The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott (January 17)

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (January 24)

This Unlikely Soil by Andrea Routley (January 24)

6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Did) by Tess Sharpe (January 24)

Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates (January 24)

Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni (January 31)

The Black Queen by Jumata Emil (January 31)

Then Everything Happens at Once by M-E Girard (January 31)

The Fixer by Lee Winter (January)

---

February

Clara at the Door with a Revolver by Carolyn Whitzman (February 5)

Consecrated Ground by Virginia Black (February 7)

A Good Day to Pie by Mischa Popp (February 7)

Choosing Family by Francesca Royster (February 7)

Out of Character by Jenna Miller (February 7)

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H (February 7)

Such Pretty Flowers by K.L. Cerra (February 7)

Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly (February 7)

The Severed Thread by Leslie Vedder (February 7)

Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe (February 10)

Desires Unleashed by Renee Roman (February 14)

Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu and Soo Lee (February 14)

How to Write Erotica by Rachel Kramer Bussel (February 14)

Always the Almost by Edward Underhill (February 14)

A Darker Wilderness edited by Erin Sharkey (February 14)

And Other Mistakes by Erika Turner (February 14)

Sweetlust by Asja Bakić, Translated by Jennifer Zoble (February 14)

Tides of Love by Kimberly Cooper Griffin (February 14)

Planning Perfect by Haley Neil (February 14)

Monstersona by Chloe Spencer (February 14)

Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom by Nina Varela (February 14)

The Thousand Eyes by A.K. Larkwood (February 15)

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (February 21)

The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes (February 21)

Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah (February 21)

I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life by Cody Daigle-Orians (February 21)

For Her Consideration by Amy Spalding (February 21)

Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns (February 28)

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran (February 28)

If I Can Give You That by Michael Gray Bulla (February 28)

A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon (February 28)

The Unfortunates by J.K. Chukwu (February 28)

Time’s Undoing by Cheryl A. Head (February 28)

The Wicked Bargain by Gabe Cole Novoa (February 28)

---

“Ingredients for Revolution” Offers a New Look at Social Justice Movement History

There’s a place in North Miami that I consider one of the important institutions in the tri-county area. It isn’t old. In fact, it’s only been open for a little over a year, but its value can’t be measured in the amount of time they’ve been slinging sourdough pizza and natural wines to a diverse, Leftist (and sometimes, not-so-Leftist) clientele. While the pizza and rotating dessert options always do knock me out with how delicious they are, that’s not really why my friends and I go to Paradis Books & Bread.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnK4-jjrcLW/?hl=en

We go to Paradis because, as the mission statement on their website says, it’s an “Owner-operated establishment, deeply committed to an ongoing practice of harm reduction” that “will do [their] part to welcome and care for marginalized folks within our community and beyond.” At Paradis, you can, of course, grab a cold brew or one of those 3 dollar slices I mentioned before, but you can also browse their bookshelves that are specifically curated for anyone at any stage of their radical/Leftist political education. You can attend a Democratic Socialists of America Miami chapter meeting, or go to a pop-up shop of local creators where part of the proceeds goes to the National Bail Out Collective. You can even get community acupuncture, or go to community screenings and discussions of Leftist films you might not be able to see anywhere else. Paradis is part of an ongoing but often overlooked segment of movement history where trying to survive under capitalism and helping the community thrive intersect, and even though it sometimes feels like it — radical establishments like Paradis are not without precedent.

In Alex D. Ketchum’s new book, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses, Ketchum presents a thoroughly researched examination of the rise of these feminist-led (and often, lesbian-led) enterprises in the 1970s, their growth during the 1980s, and the legacy they’ve either left behind or continue to cultivate by staying open to the public. Famously starting with New York City’s Mother Courage in 1972, the feminist restaurant phenomenon began with the hopes that creating women-centered spaces would improve the economic circumstances of the women involved in the creation of these spaces, help push forward the ideals of the women’s liberation movement, and help the communities in which they existed.

Shortly after Mother Courage’s opening, feminist establishments popped up all over the country in places both expected and not, from the Common Womon Club in Northampton, Massachusetts to Grace and Rubies in Iowa City, Iowa to the still up-and-running Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant & Bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut. As Ketchum points out at the beginning of the book, these spaces became hubs for marginalized members of the communities they were in, and learning their history helps us understand the power of their impact.

From this methodological approach, Ketchum examines the circumstances that led to the openings of these businesses, the circumstances that made them possible in the first place, and the hurdles these women had to overcome in order to get the capital necessary to create these spaces. The ways they interacted with the community, the politics of trying to run businesses while also adhering to anti-capitalist ethics, and the difficulties of achieving consensus with diverse collectives of women involved are also explored.

The book is split into three parts — one that covers feminist restaurants and cafes specifically, another that covers feminist coffeehouses and other temporary spaces, and the final part which discusses the legacies of the movement. The chapters break down the processes by which feminist activists came up with the ideas for their spaces, how they were able to (sometimes very creatively) finance and furnish these spaces, the impact they had on the communities where they were located, and the feminist community at large, how they conceptualized “feminist food,” and how even temporary spaces had the ability to bring communities together. Through case studies, qualitative research such as interviews with the founders of these businesses, and a review of literature from the periods Ketchum covers, she provides example after example of how these women-led establishments beat the odds and created spaces that allowed them to build a feminist economy that was less reliant on the system at large.

In what I think is the most interesting and important chapter of the book, Ketchum describes how these restaurants and coffeehouses became part of a larger “feminist business nexus” that allowed the cultivation and support of other feminist and/or radical Leftist enterprises throughout the 1970s and 1980s: “These businesses enabled other feminist businesses to exist by providing other business owners, independent contractors, and artists with spaces to operate, audiences, and cross-promotional opportunities.” Because of this, these establishments became the centers of an ecosystem that helped build and maintain so many other factions and institutions involved in social justice work. Ketchum goes on to explain:

“…women faced systematic barriers that prevented women, particularly unmarried
women, working-class women, lesbians, women of colour, and those at the intersection of these identities from accessing the capital necessary to start a restaurant. As a result, they sought alternative routes to accomplish their aims. This process often involved mutual support systems of like-minded craftswomen and tradeswomen, who might in turn accept lower pay because of their belief in the cause. […] The decision to support feminist artists and musicians was a necessary decision for the economic well-being of the restaurants and cafes as well as the artists and musicians. Both business and artist were able to receive literal capital from this exchange.”

In addition to that, these spaces were often in support of the social justice work occurring in their neighborhoods and not just because they said they were. Ketchum describes how the operators of these spaces often provided whatever they could — from the use of the space to meals to advertisement — to the activist groups in their communities, usually at severely reduced prices or completely for free. This chapter puts into perspective the impact of these establishments and shows what places like these and Paradis can do for the radical/Leftist communities that they’re geographically linked to and ones they’re not.

Ketchum’s work also complicates the discussion of what it means to survive under capitalism while simultaneously trying to make the system combust. Throughout the book, Ketchum documents how much these conversations come up for the women involved in the creation of these spaces and also attempts to provide some context for why and how these businesses challenged and continue to challenge the status quo.

Ketchum’s work shows how these places might not be leading the revolution against the capitalist system just by existing, but the fact of their existence and our access to them might just help bring our communities together enough to execute that revolution ourselves. While this book is probably not the best for a casual reader or someone who isn’t familiar with academic studies of the history of social justice movements, it does fill a very large gap in the way we discuss and imagine movement history and it serves as an important reminder that the movement work we do is part of a long and active lineage of people who have encountered and overcome the same obstacles we do every day.

In a Year Full of Great Sapphic Holiday Romances, “Kiss Her Once for Me” Stood Out

2022 was a great year for sapphic holiday romances, with the usual ones published by indie lesbian presses bolstered by a number of books put out by mainstream publishers. Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun is one of the latter, and we are so lucky to have it. It is incredibly festive, effortlessly queer in a very Portland, OR kind of way, and totally adorable. Plus, it is trope-tastic in a very satisfyingly gay way and takes on themes of fear and intimacy with nuance and compassion for its characters.

Alison Cochrun writes in her acknowledgements that this book originated as a “fluffy holiday rom com about a lesbian Bill Pullman” aka a gay While You Were Sleeping. While that description isn’t inaccurate — I think fans of the movie will enjoy this book, although I wouldn’t be put off if you aren’t — you can definitely feel in the finished product how Kiss Her Once for Me evolved to be so much more. Truly no shade to relentlessly fluffy rom coms, they are a beautiful and necessary thing in this world. This book just isn’t that.

Kiss Her Once for Me takes place over two timelines: the present, aka this Christmas, and last Christmas. (Yes, queue up the Wham! song, which of course plays at the most inopportune times for our bi and demisexual heroine, Ellie, to rub salt in the wounds of her heartbreak). Last Christmas, Ellie thought she was on the road to success: she’d successfully landed a job at an animation studio in Portland, where she’d recently moved, and she’d had a romance novel worthy meet-cute at Powell’s bookstore when she and the butch of her dreams both reached for the last copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home at the same time. Ellie and said butch, Jack, spend an amazing snow day together exploring Portland, falling in love over the course of a day as you do, and end up spending the night in Jack’s Airstream trailer where they get to exploring each other, wink wink.

But something goes horribly wrong the next morning. As the dual narratives unfold, they alternately give readers sweet details of Ellie and Jack’s snow day and catch us up on Ellie’s present. This Christmas, Ellie is not doing so great. She got laid off from her job in animation, throwing her majorly off track in her carefully designed ten-year life plan. Things with Jack, which seemed so initially promising, didn’t work out. She’s working at a hipster coffee shop with an asshole boss. She is horribly broke, and her manipulative mom is guilting her into sending her money Ellie can’t spare. Her rent is being increased. Her only bright spots are the web comics she creates anonymously and her friendship with Ari, a fellow cafe employee.

Cochrun effortlessly balances the two timelines, stretching out the narrative tension of how and why Jack and Ellie imploded so soon after their magical day just long enough to keep the pacing propulsive but not too long. She’s got plenty of other tricks up her sleeve to keep readers enthralled and turning the pages. For one thing: romance tropes! So we know from the beginning this is a second chance love story, of two women who are torn apart by circumstances but brought back together serendipitously. Cochrun is just getting started, though. There are also many more staples of the romance genre on display in this book: the fake relationship! Having to get married to secure your inheritance! Getting snowed in together! Only one bed!! It’s a smorgasbord of romance tropes, made deliciously gay.

Back to Ellie and her dire situation. You can see how under such circumstances a girl might decide that agreeing to fake marry a property investment bro — the landlord of the coffee shop Ellie works at — is a decent idea. Enter Andrew Kim-Prescott, who proposes a drunken plan that will solve Ellie’s financial woes, help with her loneliness, and allow him to get the 2 million dollar inheritance his grandfather stipulated he had to be married to receive. Andrew offers Ellie ten percent of the inheritance to be his fake fiancée then wife for about a year before they part ways. Win-win, right? They’ll launch the pretend relationship by spending the Christmas holidays in Andrew’s family’s cabin. What could go wrong?

The (gay) twist here is that Ellie isn’t going to fall in actual love with the person she’s fake dating, as the trope usually goes. We know she’s still hung up on Jack from last Christmas. And in a delightfully expected way, you know that this awesome sister Andrew keeps talking about is, of course, Jack. Now Ellie is trapped in a huge rich person’s idea of a cabin in the snowy woods with her fake boyfriend and the woman who broke her heart! In the lead up to the reveal — because of course the truth eventually comes out — there are a ton of festive and wintery activities that make this book very Christmasy in the best cozy way. There is carol singing, ugly Christmas sweaters, tree decorating, cookie baking, a family Christmas photo shoot, a ski trip, and much more!

And it’s not just the content of Kiss Her Once for Me that is festive. Cochrun’s writing, on top of being very funny, is often thematically and seasonally on point. Take, for example, this description of Ellie’s anxiety: “My insides are a runny glass of eggnog.” When Andrew arrives in the coffee shop for the visit that sets the plot in motion, Ellie tells us: “A visit from Andrew Kim-Prescott is usually a highlight in my sad-hermit life, but this is just the flammable tinsel on the dried-out Charlie Brown Christmas tree of my day.” Christmasy metaphors abound!

In the middle of the book before the shit hits the fan, Cochrun also introduces two of my favorite secondary characters, Lovey and Meemaw. These ladies are two pot-smoking, drinking-sangria-first-thing-in-the-morning grandmas who are the previous wives of Jack and Andrew’s despicable now deceased grandfather. They are a nonstop delight. There’s also Dylan, Jack’s old friend who got disowned from their family when they came out as nonbinary and who’s been adopted by the Kim-Prescotts. Dylan is extremely prickly — in general but also for a very good reason I will not spoil for you — but underneath they’re a big pile of mush; they’re the kind of person who has a neck tattoo but is also a kindergarten teacher. Ellie might not be in love with Andrew, but she does fall for his family in the time they get to spend together, which makes the reality that she isn’t really joining their family all the more hard to swallow.

One thing I really appreciated about Kiss Her Once for Me was how deeply integrated queerness is into this story. I’ve read sapphic romances that feel like they could have worked equally well as a cishet romance if you’d simply swapped out the characters’ names and pronouns. There’s nothing wrong with books like that, per se. But Kiss Her Once for Me wouldn’t work as anything other than a queer romance. And that’s not because the plot hinges on homophobia either. The meet cute is so gay! The secondary romantic subplot is so gay! The friends are so gay! The dialogue is so gay! Take this sparkling Ellie and Jack scene full of gay banter, for example:

‘How have you never chopped wood before?’ I ask her as she grips the axe with an uncharacteristic lack of confidence.

‘When would I have chopped wood before?’ she practically shouts… ‘I had a very privileged upbringing!’

‘But you wear so much flannel.’

‘Everyone wears flannel! It’s Portland!’

‘And the Carhartt jacket.’

‘What is your issue with my jacket?’

‘And I’ve heard you talk about building a chicken coop.’

‘With a table saw.’ She brandishes the axe in my direction. ‘And why am I the one who has to chop the wood?’

‘Because you are the butch lesbian.’

She glares. ‘That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? A butch lesbian stereotype.’

‘No, you’re very complex and multifaceted, but your arm muscles are objectively bigger than mine, so you’re just going to have to do the stereotypical thing here.’

Another of the book’s strengths is the delicate balance between fun and humor and the heavy familial issues both Ellie and Jack are dealing with. Ellie has anxiety and a deep, deep fear of failure, rooted in her parents’ lifelong negligence. Her fear of failure is a habit borne out of being the kid of two parents who got accidentally pregnant when they were hardly out of childhood themselves and who kept the baby because of their Catholic background. It’s a recipe for resentful parents who blame their kid for her own existence. Maybe, Ellie thinks, if she never ever fails and is the perfect daughter, her parents will love her. Jack, for her part, is the decidedly less favored sibling in her family, but not because she’s gay. She’s not interested in or good at the kind of traditional academic learning her dad’s (wealthy) side of the family values, especially as he expects his kids to continue the family investment business. It’s meant years of Jack trying to fit herself into a box that was never right, and sacrificing some of her family’s support and respect in order to live her life doing what makes her happy, namely, being a baker.

One thing to love about romances is there’s no spoiling the end, at least not in a general sense. We know these two queer women end up making it work and get their happily-ever-after, because otherwise it wouldn’t qualify for the genre. The joy in reading an awesome romance like this one is the journey along the way and the specific ways that the book explores familiar themes and tropes. In that way, Kiss Her Once for Me is a truly stellar example of not just a holiday romance or a queer romance, but of any kind of romance because it’s so good at playing with genre expectations and at building fully realized leads who have character arcs separate but complementary to the love story. Plus, have I mentioned it is really fun and really gay?

---

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun is out now.

Eight New Queer Indigenous Books

In this month’s Ask Your Friendly Neighborhood Lesbrarian I am featuring eight new queer Indigenous books! When I say new, I mean all of these books have been published in the last year. They include poetry, contemporary YA, science fiction, short stories, essay collections, graphic novels, and more! I am so excited about the amazing queer work being done by queer Indigenous writers that has been made more widely available recently. More please, publishing industry!

---

Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel

In this collection of Métis futurism, science fiction stories tackle themes of ancestral traditions, colonization and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, Indigenous resistance, and more. Looking back in order to imagine a future, the work references a common contemporary saying among Indigenous people: “education is the new buffalo.” In other words, education is the backbone of survival as buffalo historically was for Plains nations. But what, Vowel asks, if Indigenous people ensured that ancestral ways — like dependance on the buffalo — continue into the future instead of relegating them to the past? Vowel investigates this question in the book’s eight stories. In one, a Two-Spirit rougarou shapeshifts in the 19th century and becomes involved in an organization that successfully changes the future and stops Canadian colonial expansion. In others, foxes transform into humans and entangle themselves in human romance and a Métis man is gored by a radioactive bison and gains superpowers.

---

A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger

The second novel by queer/ace Lipan Apache YA author Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth is about an Apache girl, Nina, who lives in the mundane world but believes in the old stories. She’s in the middle of a project translating a story she recorded her great-grandmother telling. Now that her great-grandmother has passed away, she wants to investigate her claim that there is magic on her land. Nina’s world and the world of spirits and monsters are suddenly brought together by a disaster on earth. Oli, a cottonmouth shapeshifting snake from the land of spirits: meet Nina. Oli, like all of his kind, has been cast from his home. But he’s making it work living at the edge of a bottomless lake. Their stories are told in vignettes set in both worlds, in a languid, luxurious pace. Themes you can dig into in this powerful novel include: friendship, family, human-animal relationships, and identity building. Nina is asexual, by the way!

---

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

The first novel by poet and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation), A Minor Chorus is about a queer Indigenous PhD student caught between his childhood growing up on the reservation and the new world of urban academia in which he’s enmeshed. He has paused his dissertation and turned to novel writing. Unnamed throughout the book, he recounts various encounters and memories. He thinks of his cousin Jack, who is trapped in a cycle of drug use and police violence. It’s only through the work of chance that the protagonist has avoided being caught in this cycle himself. He looks at Jack’s life and sees it running parallel to his own. In the meantime, he meets with a man named Michael from his hometown, who is closeted. Michael’s loneliness as a queer Indigenous man emphasizes the marginalized position he occupies. And even for scholars lucky enough to make it to grad school like the narrator and a colleague, River, there are enormous pressures they face specifically because they’re marginalized within the academy as a microcosm of the wider world.

---

Rabbit Chase by Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster

This middle grade graphic novel is a queer Anishinaabe retelling of Alice in Wonderland! The main character is Aimée, a nonbinary Anishinaabe middle schooler. One day, on a field trip, they accidentally wander off into the woods and find themselves falling into an alternate dimension where characters and figures from traditional Anishinaabe stories — as well as things like robots! — live. How is Aimée going to get back home? They team up with a trickster tasked with hunting down dark water spirits, with help from Paayehnsag, spirits known for protecting the land. As Aimée journeys through this new world, they meet new foes but also new friends. If they make it back to the mundane world, maybe they will have something to contribute to the cause of protecting land from development, which was the original reason behind the field trip. Featuring expressive, realist artwork by Ojibwe-Anishinaabe artist KC Oster and authentically tween words by Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish writer Elizabeth LaPensée.

---

Ask the Brindled by No’u Revilla

The debut poetry collection of No’u Revilla, an ʻŌiwi queer poet and educator, tackles the history of the Kingdom of Hawai’i; the stories of queer and Indigenous Hawaiians throughout time; contemporary queer life, love, and grief; and a queer Indigenous future. The collection oscillates between poetic forms, including sonnets and “Erasure triptychs,” a form where Revilla omits words from a found text but also comments on what has been removed. Throughout the poems a shapeshifting figure, mo’o, is woven. Mo’o is a water protector, lizard, woman, and deity; also, though, mo’o is a story, tradition, or legend, and it can, as per the collection’s title, be “Brindled, of the skin, markings on those who feed and protect.” Revilla writes for and about queer Indigenous women today, whose stories and baskets she asserts are “still sacred.” But she also calls out to the queer Indigenous daughters of the future: “the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough.” She looks back to her grandmother, whose advice to hold knives in her hair she follows, “the way my grandmother—not god— / the way my grandmother intended.” Writing from her moment in the present day, she also looks backward and forward to weave an emotionally resonant book that creates new Indigenous artistry while condemning colonialism.

---

Màgòdiz by Gabe Calderón

In the Algonquin dialect of Anishinaabe, màgòdiz means a “person who refuses allegiance to, resists, or rises in arms against the government or ruler of their country.” The novel, of course, features many characters who fit this description, resisting the dire circumstances in a post-apocalyptic world where evil Enforcers, ruled by a spiritual entity intent on subjugating humanity, are the only people left with any power. No one can read or write, lacking both tools and knowledge. This story is a queer, disabled, and Indigenous twist on the classic fantasy quest narrative, with a ragtag group of heroes — a storyteller, a healer, a firekeeper, an engineer, and a warrior — leading the resistance. If they can stay alive and combine their ancestral strengths, they may be able to send the evil away for good. Calderon’s dystopian world is an astute take on today’s climate crisis, as well as a warning about the loss of knowledge traditions and the importance of transferring information from one generation to the next.

---

Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead

Joshua Whitehead, a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw writer and member of the Peguis First Nation, recently published his first book of nonfiction. A collection of hybrid essays / memoir / confessions / notes, the book tackles concepts of the body, language, and the land. Using a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory,” he crafts sovereign narratives beyond genre rooted in the Indigenous body, its joys, pain, beauty, and trauma. Topics include mental health, heartbreak, sexual assault, the pandemic, relations with kin, responsibility to the land, rediscovering old ways of being, and more. While exploring these themes, he often hones in on small pieces of language, exploding them for meaning. For example, in the essay “Joshua Tree,” he writes that the word “ex” is “a signifier that [he] didn’t want to attribute to a relationship, a disgusting word with its colonial sentiment of ownership, its finality.” If you’re a fan of his novel Jonny Appleseed, like I am, one of the pieces also contains a behind the scenes peek at creating that character!

---

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet by Jen Ferguson

This debut YA contemporary novel by Jen Ferguson (Métis and Canadian settler) is a powerful story that lives up to the contrasting tastes of sweet and bitter in its title. The protagonist Lou(isa) is facing a complicated post-grade 12 summer in her small prairie town. She’s set to work in her family’s ice cream shack business, but her co-worker is her newly ex-boyfriend. That relationship was toxic and coercive, leaving Lou feeling hurt and confused. On top of that, she receives a letter from her biological dad, who has been released from prison and wants to meet her. Lou can’t think of anything she wants less. A good surprise, though, is the arrival of King, Lou’s old best friend who left their town three years ago without explanation. Through exploring herself and a burgeoning romance with King, Lou learns about ace and demisexual identities, boundaries, and intimacy. This is the kind of YA book that feels like it’s about real teenagers who don’t have things figured out, don’t have answers, and are just exploring who they might want to be.

---

Do you have any favorite queer Indigenous books? Please share them in the comments!

Nicole Morse Wants You To See Trans Feminist Futures in Selfies

My Google Meet conversation with Nicole Morse in early December begins almost in media res: “we’re thinking about the dates April 12, 13, and 14, right?” they ask me, right after we wave hi to each other through the screen. For a second, I don’t know what they’re referring to — then I remember that just minutes before the call, we were texting about booking a hotel room together for an academic conference in the spring we’re both attending. I confirm the dates and we catch up for a few minutes before I press “record” to begin the formal part of our conversation.

Morse and I communicate on a regular basis: We met at an academic talk in the fall of 2016 when we were both PhD students in film and media studies programs in Chicago, after which we quickly connected over our love of queer and trans media and popular culture. I admired Morse’s fierce commitment to radical organizations like Black and Pink and the University of Chicago’s graduate student union, and hoped to learn from them what it means to be a queer and feminist scholar-activist. Flash-forward five years: Morse, now an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and I are close friends and frequent collaborators. In addition to working together in conference panels and writing groups, we often share with each other how we navigate the joys and upheavals in our daily lives and relationships. While we talk all the time, I find myself excited about the opportunity to ask them key questions about their new book in this more structured way.

Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art is a book about selfies and our relationships to them. In the book’s Prologue, Morse writes, “I want to tell a story of selfies that strays far from how they are popularly understood.” The story Morse tells is about the political potential of selfies we take, post, and look at, and particularly the trans feminist politics of selfies taken by trans women and transfeminine people. By exploring how we look at selfies — and really, how we look at each other — Morse envisions a trans feminist future in which the material experiences of trans women and transfeminine people are taken seriously.

Why selfies? Morse shares:

“The project really began in 2014 when I was spending time on Tumblr. I was looking at and seeing a lot of selfies, and in the communities that I was in on Tumblr which were, you know, very queer and trans, I was noticing that selfies were operating differently from how popular discourse was describing them. So, rather than being this kind of narcissistic statement of ‘here, I am in this cool location,’ people were using selfies to document their own identity but also as a mode of relationship building: sending selfies to friends and asking for selfies. And this idea that looking at selfies and seeing someone else’s selfies was a meaningful social activity made me ask, what’s going on with these selfies? And why is this so different in this subculture from what I’m encountering in the broader public discourse?”

Morse is critical of popular dismissals of selfies as self-indulgent. “This is an opportunity to really challenge the stigmatization of selfies as, you know, feminine and frivolous,” they add. Instead,  they see selfies as a crucial component of trans and queer digital networks and friendships. Selfie Aesthetics in part explores the relationships and ethical commitments that come into view when we take selfies seriously as objects of study.

The stakes are particularly high for self-representational images of transfeminine people, Morse argues, because of longstanding stigma attached to the now-discredited diagnosis of autogynephilia, a theory suggesting that trans women (and in particular queer and lesbian trans women) desire to transition to fulfill a sexual fantasy. Morse notes that embracing femininity and self-representation is a way to challenge this stigma. “That was actually the kind of activism that Zinnia Jones was doing that originally drew me to her work. She was challenging people who had dismissed her as a ‘male sexual fetishist’ using this discredited diagnosis. She would challenge them, not by performing respectability politics, but by overindulging in her desire to take selfies of herself and enjoy the process of self representation and self-exploration.”

Morse explores similar themes via the work of interdisciplinary trans artist Vivek Shraya. “I was also really struck in an interview that I did with Vivek Shraya, when she described how a photographer who was planning to take photographs of her — so was seeing her as a viable, photographic subject — judged her and kind of scolded her for taking ‘so many selfies.’ And that illustrates this tension about, you know, who gets to authorize the gaze or the look, and what it means for people who are supposed to be spectacles, who are supposed to be objectified, who are not supposed to be offering their self-image, to take control.” Morse’s analysis of Jones’ and Shraya’s selfies in their second and fourth chapters explores how transfeminine artists negotiate the politics of visibility via self-representational art and media.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by VIVEK SHRAYA 🆚 (@vivekshraya)

With that said, Morse doesn’t argue that selfies taken by trans and queer people are automatically forms of activism or that they are always resistant to oppressive norms of transphobia and homophobia. That simple reversal of expectations would reduce their complexity. “We’re never just fully in control, and particularly with digital media, selfies can stray far outside someone’s power to author their image,” Morse argues. When we post selfies online, we have to talk about the politics and policies of the digital platforms we use as well as how these images circulate widely.

Morse is most interested in what happens when we as viewers engage with selfies by closely examining the aesthetic strategies (hence, “selfie aesthetics”) trans feminine creators use to represent themselves. “What happens when you approach the selfie as a space for meaning-making between the creator and the spectator? And then how do we make those meanings?” they ask.

To find out, Morse spends a lot of time looking at selfies. They find that close reading, a mode of analysis that prioritizes the sustained and careful observation of the specific details of an image (what is shown and how it is shown), can allow them to explore insights and observations about trans feminine selfies. “I felt free to overread,” they share. “Just being able to dwell with an image and learn as much as possible about it, including things that go far beyond what the creator even imagined or intended like that, is such a pleasure. It’s such an opportunity and it is really a space of creativity. And it’s not at all the way that we’re supposed to look at selfies. Selfies are supposed to be consumed very quickly in passing as you scroll through a feed, unless perhaps you’re looking at a selfie by someone you love or a selfie of a dear friend or family member. So that question of love, and bringing love to the encounter with the image, that’s for me what close analysis enables.”

In their careful and loving close readings, Morse finds a number of themes in the selfies they analyze, and the chapters of Selfie Aesthetics are organized around these themes. The first chapter examines doubling as a visual strategy of transfeminine selfies, which they explain as “the ways that doubles, shadows, reflections, [and] mirrors operate in selfies. I argue that, that kind of persistent trope, which we can see across all kinds of selfies, within the selfies that I examine offers perspectives on trans experience that challenge some of the dominant narratives about transition.” For example, they look at images of doubling in trans artist Zackary Drucker’s selfies and self-portraits to explore selfies as “relational and messy” rather than just about the assertion of a self. Drucker’s self-representational artwork often stages her in relation to other people: her mother, trans elder Flawless Sabrina, her ex partner Rhys Ernst. For Morse, Drucker’s multimedia selfies demonstrate how we constitute ourselves through our relationships with other people.

In Morse’s second and third chapters, they analyze selfies as serial and improvisatory. They explain, “selfies aren’t singular, but are kind of accumulative and in dialogue with other images and that shapes, you know, how they’re taken up and how they’re understood. Selfies are also improvisational. So, they’re playful, they evolve, they’re responsive to situations [and] to other images and that, in dialogue, with seriality, creates a kind of opportunity or openness that creates the possibility of exploring new ideas. Not just reproducing what has come before, but being open to the unexpected.” Morse looks at sets of selfies created by artists like Zinnia Jones, Alok Vaid-Menon, and Che Gossett, examining in particular how these images suggest an ambivalence toward the politics of representation and an interest in constructing and theorizing the self, trans identity, and visibility otherwise.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAVSkAoOlmF/

Morse’s final chapters look at creators such as Shea Couleé, Vivek Shraya, and Natalie Wynn to “show how selfie aesthetics open up alternative temporalities and transformative futures.” What do they mean by this?

“When it comes to some of the dominant modes of trans visuality, we think about selfies as kind of chronological selfie timelines, transition timelines images, you know, in order over historical time tracing how someone has changed. But because of the way social media operates outside of intentional, curated timelines, we actually encounter selfies in a variety of nonlinear ways. They’re presented to us out of order. You can go back to an image, you can be surprised by an image…and so in looking at time, I was looking at the ways that artists like Natalie Wynn and Vivek Shraya use time and temporality, and then how those can be interpreted overall to challenge any kind of technological determinism, and instead, think about technological facilitation, what is made possible by the technology that produces selfies.” 

The cover of Selfie Aesthetics provides an excellent example of the alternative temporality Morse finds in some of these selfies. The cover includes a screenshot of an Instagram post by trans artist Tourmaline, a mirror selfie accompanied by a caption that reads: “Future self peeking thru to say there’s still time to abolish Amerikka starting with the presidency, prisons and police.” The radical politics in Tourmaline’s caption gestures towards a trans feminist future, one that might already be visible in her reflection. “That image was a moment when I really started to figure out what the project was about, when I came across that selfie on Tourmaline’s Instagram,” Morse reflects. The mirror, the reference to the future, the radical politics – it becomes clear how Morse could read trans feminist futurity in the selfies they look at.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tourmaline (@tourmaliiine)

Key for Morse is the encounter between the selfie creator and selfie viewers, who they imagine as collaborators participating in these processes of making meaning. “This is what I’m asking people to do when they look at selfies. Like ask, ‘what commitments are you bringing to this encounter?’ And so for me, I’m bringing a commitment as a trans feminist, a commitment to trans futurity, to trans liberation, and those commitments are going to shape what I see, what draws my attention, and how I interpret it.”

While some scholars avoid researching their own communities, for Morse it was a powerful experience.

“There’s a certain amount of stigmatization around ‘me-search’ in academia and researching something that’s tied to an identity. So initially, I had wanted to avoid anything that was too explicitly LGBTQ. I still in some ways ended up avoiding ‘me-search’ because I have been looking primarily at transfeminine artists and I’m not a transfeminine person. At the same time, broadly I’m in community with trans people of all kinds and so it’s certainly much closer to my own identity than I originally thought my scholarship would be. And I think that process of accepting that I could be part of the scholarship and accepting that that did not make the scholarship frivolous or pointless was tied into my journey to recognize selfies as a viable visual art form, because selfies are dismissed for being self-absorbed, for being too interested in the ordinary, the quotidian, and the self, and specifically stigmatized for being feminine and seen as feminine. So through accepting that this was something that I did want to study and that it was valid to study LGBTQ cultural work, I got to also work through some of my own thoughts about how I could show up in the work, what it meant to be a queer scholar studying LGBTQ material. And then finally honestly to explore femininity, as something valuable and powerful as a genderqueer person assigned female at birth who has a complicated relationship to femininity, I have learned so much about femininity and femme power from looking at this art.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Morse what it has been like to publish this book about trans selfies in the midst of so much anti-trans backlash. “I really decided that this was an opportunity for me to weigh in on the issue of visibility politics which had been seen as automatically producing rights, safety, and progress,” Morse shares. “And say that visibility on its own is not enough because, and I think this is how I end the book, what matters is how we are looking and what we are seeing. For me, in my future research, the question [that] continues to be the question that I’m trying to unpack is: if we no longer assume that making a community visible or making a problem visible will automatically produce some sort of political solution, then how do we move toward the political outcomes that we desire and that our communities need to survive? And what does it look like to kind of cultivate the commitments that enable us to engage with media and mediation toward liberatory ends?”

Morse sees platforms like Autostraddle as a crucial part of this liberatory project. “Something that really helped me in moving into this project was communities like Autostraddle, queer communities that are invested in feminist takes on popular culture, where we allow ourselves to take what we love seriously and to take the ordinary, or you know, ‘unimportant things’ as something that matters for creating community, for creating ourselves. I was always an avid reader [of Autostraddle] and I think that shaped the way that I was thinking about selfies, as colleagues and professors kind of were aghast that I would consider studying something that seemed so not worth studying. But I was part of all these subcultural queer communities where we were paying attention to television shows, to social media, to memes, to jokes, to all kinds of cultural ephemera that were making our lives better making our communities stronger.” Their comments remind me of Autostraddle’s tongue-in-cheek Vapid Fluff content and No Filter posts that both embrace and playfully satirize celebrity gossip coverage. For Morse, selfies and trans feminist selfie aesthetics play a similar role: they facilitate the creation of transformative community between their creators and viewers.

A few hours after our conversation, I’m scrolling on Instagram and see a filter called “which bisexual r u?” I take a front-facing video of myself using the filter, and it decides I’m a “cuffed jeans bisexual.” I send the video to Morse, and then I realize I have inadvertently sent them a video that they might consider a selfie: an image of myself looking back at the camera and at the viewer. I think back on their analysis of trans and queer selfies: the political possibilities they hold and how we can harness those possibilities by taking selfies seriously and looking at them closely. I think about the power of queer friendships and the importance of building relationships in which we see each other and are seen. Perhaps if we lovingly view each other’s selfies — as relational, as messy, as ambivalent, as political representations of ourselves and our lives — we can help create a world in which trans and queer communities survive and thrive. A few minutes later they see the video I took and reply: “so accurate!!”

Rainbow Reading: Hey Siri, What’s the Opposite of Listless?

Queer Naija Lit: Hausa Is a Language of Love in Arinze Ifeakandu’s “God’s Children Are Little Broken Things”

Hausa is a language of love. This assertion, made in the first story in Arinze Ifeakandu’s story collection God’s Children are Little Broken Things butterfly-cut my heart in preparation for the rest of the stories.

Hausa is spoken everywhere in Nigeria, but mostly in Northern Nigeria where it’s one of the many languages indigenous to the region. The furthest North I’ve been in Nigeria is Niger, which is more like a central state, but I know Hausa is a language of love because of my mother.

My mother spent secondary school in Sokoto, one of Nigeria’s northernmost states. She also schooled in Bauchi and spent time in Jos, Maiduguri, and Kano, all Northern states. My mother speaks Hausa (and Igbo and Yoruba and Fula), and in my childhood, Hausa and Igbo were the languages I heard her use the most. She would greet me in the mornings with “Ina kwana?” which is Hausa, or in Igbo, “I teta ofuma?” both of which ask if I slept well. My mother was also my Sunday school teacher, and the first christian song I learned was in Hausa.

Hausa became the thing that connected us across states when I went to secondary school in Abuja while my mother stayed in Lagos. The first thing I did was try to learn Hausa. I never succeeded past the insults and slang my mates were quick to teach me. Still, every other Saturday, when we were allowed, I would call my mother and practice new words with glee. Hausa made me feel closer to her.

My mother’s ability to fluently speak some of Nigeria’s most widely spoken languages made it so I saw my country primarily through language and connection. No matter where we went, we could talk to someone. The rest of my family tends to see the country in segmented ways. The Biafran war — which placed Igbo and Hausa people on either end — did little to gentle the relationship between tribes.

“The Dreamers Litany” the first story in this collection, which follows  shop owner Auwal and his relationship with Chief Emeka, engages with these complex realities. Between the layers of hurt, shame, and confusion that clouds their relationship, there’s Hausa. Connecting.

Ifeakandu makes intentional choices not just in the stories he tells but in how they’re told and what is pulled to the surface and woven together.

The back of the book describes Ifeakandu’s writing as “alert to the human and universal in every situation” and I agree. Ifeakandu is able to center the uniqueness of his characters’ stories by sharing what is the same in their realities. Inevitably every experience, even universal ones, are made individual by the individual experiencing it.

To be human is to be, or not. To love, or not. I spend a lot of time thinking about beingness and language and the way humans interact with both things — with duality in general. Humans are in an eternal presence-absence by nature of our being. The moment we’re born, we begin to die, this is the universal. Between life and death is individual potential. Some people call this potential for life, God.

Life has been restricted in an infinite amount of ways. This too is universal. Humans have been kept from expressing the fullness of their own potential, largely by other humans. What happens when you can’t be you, right down to the way you think of yourself even in your head? What do you do if something works to make you an impossible existence to your own mind and spirit.

This is life for the majority of queer people globally — and in Ifeakandu’s book.

Ifeakandu skillfully explores these realities with grace. While the characters themselves shoulder shame and fear, and lash out, the god that writes them does so with a gentle pen. The ten stories in Ifeakandu’s collection move between Kano, Lagos and Enugu, forming a triangle of states that encloses more than half of Nigeria.

Each story is intimate, painful, and beautiful. Ifeakandu explores the lives of queer Nigerians in a way that emphasizes the connection of our struggles. He writes about queer Nigerians but also poor Nigerians. He writes about the myriads of abuse and limitations that stifle life: the misogyny, the tribalism, the capitalism, all of it feeds the things that restrict our lives.

There are at least two things happening in each story: a breaking and a joining or life and death.

Sometimes characters get to choose their direction; other times the choice is made for them. Most times, it’s some combination of the two.

Pain, joy, loss, happiness. Most people experience these things, but what is the shape of your fear? The taste of your loneliness? The color of your peace? The way we respond to our experiences is what’s human. Ifeakandu leans into the response, and the stories are snapshots of responses to life happening, while the characters are being denied the right to life because they are queer.

The stories are not tragedies, though some are tragic. Hope is in the trying, and not the outcome. With stories, hope is in the telling. Most characters in the book try, and the tragedy lies in the limitations on their attempts, external and internal. The characters deal with loss, disenfranchisement from their families, and sickness, all while their right to being is suppressed by legislative authorities.

In all this, the question asked by the book, the title, the characters, is “where is God?”

God in one sense is authority. For queer and disenfranchised Nigerians that the book centers, authority exists to suppress their existence. The violence of the Church in Nigeria for all Nigerians, and particularly for queer Nigerians is something Ifeakandu’s characters must contend with. Shame and the Church often go hand in hand. When secular governmental bodies also reinforce the violence of the church, it can seem and be impossible to escape. Worse, it can feel impossible not to internalize the narratives.

However, the characters in God’s Children are Little Broken Things are written with such kindness that their hurt, which feeds their shame, doesn’t fuel condemnation in me but empathy. The pain of that empathy became a point of catharsis for me. I found myself getting angry for the characters and the things they’re forced to endure. In doing so, I became angry for myself because a lot of those experiences have been mine as well. Very few queer Nigerians are able to escape the “deliverance” of the Church, in whatever abusive form it takes.

When abuse is justified by the people we love, our internal narrative starts to rationalize it, because in that moment it might hurt less, or be safer to blame ourselves. Yet, when we take responsibility for pain that isn’t ours, we internalize another person’s narrative, and can deny ourselves the freedom of our own gaze.

Ifeakandu’s book showed me a different face for God. God in another sense is love. The companionship of close friends. Art. The very possibility of existence itself.

For as much as bigots try to deny people the right to be, they cannot make and unmake a person. They can kill and hurt, but hurting me doesn’t make me less queer, it makes me unsafe. Ifeakandu shows how, even within the seemingly omnipotent reach of suppressive authority, there is love and possibility, if we take the chance to see the connections.

Thank you, Arinze.

---

Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.

92 of the Best Queer Books of 2022

---

Comics / Graphic Novels or Memoirs

Thieves by Lucie Bryon

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer

Messy Roots by Laura Gao

Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish

Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith

Space Trash, Vol 1 by Jenn Woodall

---

Fantasy

The Final Strife by Saara El-Arifi

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman

Spear by Nicola Griffith

Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan

The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg

The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri

---

Horror

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Queer Little Nightmares edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

---

Historical Fiction

The Lost Century by Larissa Lai

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Even Though I Knew The End by C.L. Polk

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

---

Literary / Contemporary Fiction

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin

We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

LOTE by Shola von Reinhold

---

Memoir / Biography

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Except My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili

Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec

Ma and Me by Putsata Reang

In Sensorium by Tanaïs

Knocking Myself Up by Michelle Tea

Middle Grade

Where the Lost Ones Go by Akemi Dawn Bowman

Drew Leclair Gets a Clue by Katryn Bury

Moonflower by Kacen Callender

Hazel Hill Is Gonna Win This One by Maggie Horne

In the Key of Us by Mariama J Lockington

Ellen Outside the Lines by A.J. Sass

---

Mystery / Thriller

Delafield by Katherine V Forrest

Survivor’s Guilt by Robyn Gigl

Vera Kelly: Lost and Found by Rosalie Knecht

Dead Letters from Paradise by Ann McMan

Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor

---

Nonfiction

Body Work by Melissa Febos

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

It Came from the Closet edited by Joe Vallese

---

Poetry

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on by Franny Choi

Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi

The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick

Ask the Brindled by No’u Revilla

Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee

As She Appears by Shelley Wong

---

Romance

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia A. Higgins

Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner

Stud Like Her by Fiona Zedde

---

Science Fiction

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

X by Davey Davis

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe, et al

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

---

YA Contemporary / Historical / Romance

A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds

A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo

Man O’ War by Cory McCarthy

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes

---

YA Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

This Wicked Fate by Kalynn Bayron

Dauntless by Elisa A. Bonnin

Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore

The Scratch Daughters by H.A. Clarke

Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

---

I’ll Never Look at the Ocean the Same Way After Reading Sabrina Imbler’s “How Far the Light Reaches”

I first encountered Sabrina Imbler’s work through their chapbook Dyke (geology), a strange and revelatory work that genuinely defies conventional genre categorization. I wrote that the book made science horny, and I stand by it. A writer with penchant for lyrical, almost poetic prose as well as a science journalist, Imbler’s hybrid approach of embedding science and reportage in personal narratives and queer storytelling gives them a singular, striking voice. Their essays for the New York Times and elsewhere have become my favorite works of science writing ever since, because they really do make science queer and trans as fuck — sometimes in subtle strokes and sometimes with more direct allegories and observations.

When I learned they were writing a new book-length project, I was instantly hooked. How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures continues their excellent alchemy of queer science writing and personal narrative. A taxonomy not only of ten varied and complex sea creatures but also of the self, the body, familial and romantic relationships, and gender, it’s one of the best nonfiction books I read all year. I’ll never look at a goldfish — or even the ocean, really — the same.

In the book, sea creatures become iridescent metaphors. Each essay focuses on a different creature, Imbler holding it to the light and turning it to reveal new textures.

In “My Mother and the Starving Octopus,” a Graneledone boreopacifica octopus who refused to eat while brooding becomes a door into Imbler’s relationship with their own mother, marked by body image issues, disordered eating, starvation. In “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish,” the shimmering, shifting cuttlefish morph alongside Imbler’s morphing perceptions of their gender, of what they want. In “Pure Life,” Imbler writes of ocean floor-dwelling crabs:

Caught between frigid and boiling waters surrounded by wasteland, the crabs have nowhere else to go; they must find a way for this one small safe haven to accommodate all who need it.

Perhaps it is not difficult to see from there how Imbler casts a line toward queer spaces — specifically a monthly dance for queer people of color where they seek refuge with friends. But even when the metaphors are this on-the-nose, they do not feel obvious or trite but rather potent, teeming with meaning. Just as the science writing here functions on multiple levels, so does the allegorical work. Even when sometimes language fails, Imbler finds a way in, such as in “Beware the Sand Striker,” a brutal and intimate essay that chronicles a sprawling history of violation of their body at the hands of men, particularly in college when they would drink to the point of blacking out. “I acknowledge this metaphor of predation is cheap,” Imbler writes of the sand striker metaphor of their own making. But they go on to write:

I don’t fault the sand striker for hunger, or for hunting. It works much harder than I do, someone who buys meat already dead and plucked. Part of the reason I find its body gruesome may be a hardwired instinct in the animal in me, an animal that fears snakes and creatures that move like them. When the sand striker snatches a fish and begins to feast, it is not thinking of what the fish is feeling. It has no complex brain and no sense of morality, which means its intentions are never cruel. A worm cannot shirk a duty it does not know. But we can.

Even where the metaphor fails, there’s meaning. This book makes science accessible, but it does not overly simplify anything, reveling instead in complexity, vastness, morphing shapes.

While the writing is confident and sharp, Imbler also doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to the questions they raise. These are always my favorite kinds of personal narrative; the kind that excavate the self but also leave room for the unknown, for the malleable or paradoxical. Not all questions need to be answered, because not all questions can be answered, especially when contending with as complex and slippery of subjects as are touched on here: sexuality, desire, heartbreak, gender. Imbler treats presents their experiences as having just as much wonder, mystery, and layers as the ocean itself — you want to submerge yourself here, even amid uncertainty and darkness.

Science entails rules and specific structures, and that is not lost entirely here, even if it is combined with messier, more pliable language and ideas. There’s attention to scientific detail, to fact, to processes. Embedded in the text are occasional, necessary missives on climate change, on the ways humanity have impacted the ocean and its dwellers. Imbler presents facts with just as much lyricism as the more fluid parts of the narrative. I love a good list, and there are plenty to find here, such as: “A dead whale could be farmed for a number of products — bone carved into corsets, teeth fashioned into the crowns of walking sticks, baleen bent into hoop skirts and umbrella ribs.” Or this listy passage on swollen feral goldfish, grotesque and bouncy on the line-level: “Their gills, once rouged by the ammonic burn of their piss, drink in the oxygen of surging, aerated water. Gorged on algae and worms and snails and the eggs of other fish, their bodies begin to balloon. They swell to the size of Cornish game hens, cantaloupes, jugs of milk.”

They also invent specific forms to adhere to throughout, as with the essay “How to Draw a Sperm Whale” in which a necropsy is performed not only of a whale but of a failed queer relationship. Every essay finds its own distinct rhythm to moving between the creatures and Imbler’s personal narrative. This is indeed queer science, a playful challenging of what science writing can be. Sea creatures: They’re just like us. Let Imbler show you how.

---

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler is out now.

Rainbow Reading: Call That an Elliot Page-turner

Marika Cifor Wants You To Activate Your Nostalgia for ACT UP

Feature image by Catherine McGann / Contributor via Getty Images

When I started volunteering at the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives, which helps preserve Midwestern LGBTQ history and culture, the director immediately put me to work helping to sort through their large ephemera collection. In archival terms, “ephemera” typically refers to documents created for a particular purpose but generally designed to be discarded rather than saved. This could include postcards, ticket stubs, event programs, pamphlets, and flyers — materials that people usually make a lot of copies of, and tend to throw away. On my first days at Gerber/Hart, I found myself examining thousands of pieces of paper: a flyer for a gay radio show in Cincinnati, a pamphlet with information for a community forum about HIV/AIDS and nutrition, an invite to a “Steamy Sundays” party at a long since closed gay bar, a poster detailing the schedule of events for Detroit Pride in 1996, and a flyer for the memorial of local Chicago AIDS activist.

I soon learned that ephemera comprises a large part of many LGBTQ archival collections and is often notoriously tricky to sort and organize. The director devised a system for sorting the material (by region, state, and then organization), but even with the instructional guide, I felt woefully underqualified for the task. How was I supposed to know which categories these materials belonged to? Could an important piece of LGBTQ history be lost if I mis-categorized it?

Marika Cifor’s new book Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS explores how LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS archives shape our understanding of history. Cifor, a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies and an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, became interested in the study of archives as a volunteer herself at the GLBT Historical Society. “Part of what brings queer people together are things that are very difficult to document, right? Bodies, feelings, relationships, sex, things that are just not well captured by paper documents,” she noted in a conversation I had with her via Google Meet in mid-November. “So I think community LGBT and queer archives have always have had a fascinating set of collections.“

Viral Cultures explores how LGBTQ artists and activists have historically determined how and where to preserve and archive their organizing efforts, when so many of these histories are ephemeral. What kinds of libraries and archives should these histories be donated to — volunteer-run LGBTQ community archives, like Gerber/Hart and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, or institutional and academic libraries with more resources but fewer connections to community? Cifor thinks about these questions by visiting the archives themselves. She spent a lot of time with the Gay and Lesbian and AIDS/HIV collection at the New York Public Library, for example, which holds over 100 collections — examining their organization as well as interviewing the archivists who sort the materials.

“AIDS archives occupy a really complex relationship to LGBTQ archives and collections,” Cifor told me. “They’re often grouped together at places like the New York Public Library. They share a curator there. They share a collection resource guide, but they’re not actually one and the same. For me, AIDS archives became a really interesting space to explore tensions there are around what is or is not LGBTQ+ knowledge.” In the book’s second chapter, she examines this relationship by narrating how members of ACT UP debated and decided to donate their archives to the NYPL.

Cifor is also interested in exploring the gaps within these archives: how do LGBTQ collections reflect the ways activist history is gendered and racialized? “In some cases, certain records don’t exist or weren’t saved, or certain people weren’t told their histories were valuable and worth documenting,” she said. Existing AIDS archives tend to focus on the histories of cis white gay men, perhaps because they have historically had greater access to the resources (time, money, social capital) needed to preserve their efforts than multiply marginalized LGBTQ people. “But it’s also about the kinds of narratives that people enter spaces with, right? If you already imagine AIDS activism looks a particular way, if you already come in with these kind of existing narratives that shape how people read and engage with these collections,” Cifor added. In writing about the whiteness of AIDS archives, Cifor critically analyzes how the archived history we have in some ways reflects the historical systems of power and patterns of exclusion within LGBTQ communities and AIDS activists.

Viral Cultures demonstrates how the archives themselves shape the narratives we have about AIDS activism. In critiquing the “silences” of the archive, as Cifor calls them, she looks toward more expansive and nuanced histories of HIV/AIDS. “We do not need a new dominant narrative of the AIDS crisis; we need many narratives,” she writes in the conclusion of her book.

Ultimately, Cifor is interested in how we can remember and repurpose our nostalgia for radical AIDS activism in the contemporary moment. Her book explores how LGBTQ artists and activists activate AIDS archives with what she calls “vital nostalgia.” Nostalgia is often thought of as a conservative longing for a past, particularly a past that might never have existed in the first place — think the right-wing call to “Make America Great Again.” But Cifor explores how LGBTQ artists leverage nostalgia for radical AIDS activism towards urgent issues around health, gender, sexuality, and race.

“I began to think about nostalgia as a way to talk about my own relationship [and] different kinds of generational relationships to AIDS. And I think there can be some resistance to that kind of nostalgia when talking about AIDS, right, in its kind of uncritical sense…. I think there’s this nostalgia for this kind of American AIDS activism that happened that’s like very flashy, on the street, and filled with these fascinating, beautiful aesthetics and all of these kinds of like radical communal practices. And it has this queer politics, as it’s all deeply engaged with queer movements that are happening in and outside of the academy in the same period,” Cifor shares.

Cifor is certainly not alone in expressing a nostalgia for radical AIDS activism. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers (myself included!) have explored the relationships between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 in an effort to think through what kinds of organizing efforts we might need to confront this new pandemic. Additionally, scholar-activists like Alex Juhasz and Theodorr Kerr have argued that the last decade has witnessed an “AIDS Crisis Revisitation” that at times reproduces an uncritical nostalgia for AIDS activism, one that romanticizes and often whitewashes its history.

Cifor is interested in complicating this kind of nostalgia. “For me, vital nostalgia is a way to think about where we can use those kinds of nostalgia, that kind of interest in these moments, to do important political work now. And for me in the book, that’s a lot about thinking about, how do we reinvest in HIV/AIDS as both a kind of local and a global crisis with urgency again, which at least in the American context, [was] really lost, and to think about how AIDS intersects with other kinds of structural oppression, with racism and with other kinds of pandemics, COVID, poverty, a lack of access to healthcare and resources?”

Cifor finds vital nostalgia in the work of a number of contemporary LGBTQ and HIV+ artists and activists. These artists take the ephemera of AIDS archives and repurpose them, often circulating them through online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. Cifor is “interested in how these records have a kind of contemporary life,” she said. “Because what interests me about archives is what they tell us [about] our relationship to the past, tell us about our present and the ways in which they shape feature possibilities. So for me, telling the story of how they circulate on Tumblr in the book is a way of thinking about how these records move and how we engage with them.”

The first chapter of Viral Cultures looks at a poster created by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin called “Your Nostalgia is killing me,” itself a response to the idealization of early ‘90s AIDS activism. In later chapters, she looks at the work of Indigenous queer artist Demian DinéYazhi´ who “takes some of the power of these records and uses them to talk about issues that were neglected or overlooked, or that to put them in conversation with contemporary social justice movements, in conversation with Immigrant rights indigenous sovereignty and other kinds of contemporary discourse.” One of DinéYazhi´’s pieces, for example, reimagines a piece of AIDS activist artwork to ground it in critiques of settler colonialism. Cifor wants to show us how “there’s a way in which you can take some of the power of these records and use them to talk about issues that were neglected or overlooked [at the time], or that put them in conversation with contemporary social justice movements.”

Cifor is especially interested in digital projects like the AIDS memorial on Instagram because artists who repurpose and circulate AIDS activist records make these archives available to a wider public. “The digital space is a complex and interesting space to do that kind of mediation…if you’re not a researcher thinking about these topics, it might be how you actually encounter these records for the first time.” This can be a powerful way to encounter AIDS archives, and one that Cifor hopes has the potential to trigger vital nostalgia in viewers.

Toward the end of our conversation, Cifor shared how we can revisit and repurpose vital nostalgia for AIDS activism in the midst of COVID-19. Finishing the book in the fall of 2020 gave her the opportunity to explore “the ways in which these two pandemics are intertwined and the ways in which they are fundamentally distinct,” she said. She wanted to “be really keenly aware of what it’s like to live in two pandemics, and I think in ways that were both flattening and ways that were generative and exciting. COVID offered opportunities to re-engage in a public discourse about AIDS because it’s a pandemic we’ve been living with and thinking with and addressing for much longer.” And while Cifor is not interested in simple equivalencies between HIV/AIDs and COVID-19, her book describes “how pandemics operate along social fault lines. They expose racism and sexism and transphobia and xenophobia and things that already exist in our world, but they really amplify it and draw it out to the surface.”

As we continue to live through these two pandemics, Cifor ultimately wants us to activate our nostalgia for AIDS activism, and sees the archive as one place to begin this process. “Nostalgia Is a way to think about, why do we have those kinds of relationships with the past and how can they be generative in this moment?” she asks.

I think back to my days sorting through ephemera in the volunteer room at Gerber/Hart. As I looked through document after document, I wondered about all of the people who created those events, parties, conferences, and protests advertised on the flyers, pamphlets, and ticket stubs. Coastal cities like New York and San Francisco are over-represented in narratives of LGBTQ history, and local and regional community archives like Gerber/Hart provide us with glimpses of LGBTQ organizing in the past that expand our understanding of queer and trans history. For Cifor, the power of these archives lies in the way they can inspire a vital nostalgia, allowing us to confront urgent crises in our communities in the present.

“Men I Trust” Is a Beautiful Graphic Novel About Loneliness, Connection, and Capitalism

There’s this old John Mulaney bit I think about a lot. “Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone,” Mulaney begins. “And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah I’ve been really lonely lately.’ And they’ll be like, ‘Well we should hang out.’ And I’m like, ‘No, that’s not what I meant at all.’”

If the cure to loneliness was as simple as being around other people, few of us would be lonely. But sometimes being around people is when we feel the loneliest. What we want is a connection most can’t provide. What we want is someone with whom we can share our burdens and our joys, whose joys and burdens we can share. What we want is something that requires trust and time and the ease of resources.

Tommi Parrish’s stunning new graphic novel Men I Trust is about two lonely women. It appears to be the story of their connection, but as it unravels it becomes darker, deeper, and, ultimately, in its own way, more hopeful.

The book follows Eliza, a working class single mom in her early thirties. Her kid’s dad is around, but more in the sense that he provides further headaches rather than any real support. When Eliza isn’t taking care of her kid, she’s working at a deli. When she’s not working at the deli, she’s going to AA meetings. When she’s not going to AA meetings, she’s reading her poetry in pursuit of a different life.

At one of these readings she meets Sasha, a fan. Sasha is an upper middle class 20-something who just moved back in with her parents after a mental health crisis. She’s mostly unemployed except for an occasional sex work client who acts sort of as her sugar daddy — when he’s not starring in a renovation show that seemingly targets low-income housing. Sasha is socially awkward and unable to hide her admiration for Eliza or pick up on Eliza’s feelings — or lack of feelings — toward her.

This is a story of people eager to connect with people disinterested or without the time to share that eagerness. Children, parents, crushes, lovers, clients, admirers, friends. They move through their sad lives never having enough love, never having enough time, never having enough money.

Parrish wisely contextualizes their characters with the world around them. As one side character jokes, “Just trying to survive under capitalism haha.” Those in need of money face greater challenges than those with it, but everyone is shown to struggle with a world structured away from the things that matter most.

Without providing specific spoilers, I do think Parrish’s greatest stroke of genius is never shying away from how loneliness can corrupt. Sasha begins the story with a total lack of boundaries, but a reader empathetic to her isolation, her struggles, wants to give her a pass. Eliza wants to also. Eliza keeps chastising the walls she puts up with Sasha, claiming that she’s incapable of making friends. But sometimes our walls are justified. And as Eliza’s walls start to lessen, the reality of a person like Sasha shows itself.

This doesn’t mean Sasha is a bad person. It certainly doesn’t mean people who are socially awkward or struggling with mental illness don’t deserve kindness. But Sasha’s behavior isn’t driven by her social skills or her mental illness — it’s driven by her entitlement.

These are sticky conversations we should have more in the queer community. For people in Eliza’s position and people in Sasha’s. When Sasha learns to have boundaries, her connections will be more reciprocal and stronger. When Eliza learns that connections require effort, she won’t default to a false connection just because someone is pushy.

The isolation of the story is enhanced by the beautiful hand-painted art. Parrish’s human beings have small heads and large bodies, faces that reveal little and then so much. The distance their style creates reveals itself to be an invitation. When characters feel distant, sharing their distance is the best way to get close.

The unique art is fitting for its unique story. Parrish has created a book that feels singular in narrative and form — heartbreaking, challenging, human. Not every relationship is meant to last. But each one can teach us how to be better for the next person we encounter — better for them, better for ourselves. We’re all just trying to survive under capitalism. Ha. Ha.

---

Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish is out now.