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Rainbow Reading: ’Tis the Damn Season Already?

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey hi, everyone!

Literally what do you mean that it’s December already? Wasn’t it August like five minutes ago? Once again, the passage of time takes me by surprise, and here we are. I’m behind on my Christmas shopping, personally — I’m sure all of you are very put-together this year, but I am not, and so I have gathered a list of books I read and adored this year that will get me in the right gift-giving state of mind. Next time, I’ll be gathering a list of some Wildly Cool 2023 Books To Preorder As Gifts For Literary Trendsetter Types, too; my friends preordered me some signed copies of books I’d been looking forward to last year, and as they arrived throughout the first months of the year they were such delightful surprises.

I know it’s been a heavy few weeks for the queer community; I hope you’re all taking good care of yourselves and your crew, and I hope your reading offers you the respite and reinvigoration you deserve.

Okiedoke, let’s make like the Stones and roll. This week on Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

In no particular order, Rainbow Reading’s 15 Books of 2022 That Yash Loved Hollering About That You Should Buy As Presents For People You Actually Like:

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

  • In the wake of the tragedy at Club Q in Colorado, I want to boost this anthology, originally published after the Orlando massacre at Pulse: Our Happy Hours: LGBTQ Voices From the Gay Bars is a beautiful tribute to the spaces queer community has built for itself, and there’s a lot of galvanizing comfort to be found here. (You can also get an ebook copy of it here)
  • I’ve had a crush on Sabrina Imbler’s writing ever since their poetry book Dyke (geology) swept me off my feet, and because life isn’t fair, they are ALSO a wildly talented nonfiction writer as well as a poet. How Far the Light Reaches, their debut essay collection, comes out on December 6, and it’s a fucking stunner. Imbler’s writing makes science sing, and they cut their science writing with a genius angle on memoir and a sly, cheeky sense of humor that we all came to love from their pieces like Started Out As A Fish. How Did It End Up Like This and I Respect Ticks But I Still Want Them Dead. You can read an excerpt here, and preorder your copy here!
https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/1592176372524670977?s=61&t=vW6ZWjGTjq6MMUl0eezhaw

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

You already know that I’m going to say how great the books coverage is this week and every week.

Because I can and because none of you can stop me, here are also some of my favorite non-literary pieces from Autostraddle recently:

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

Short Fiction Playlist: Five Queer Short Stories To Read on Thanksgiving

Feature image photo by Erdark via Getty Images

A swirly background in blues, oranges, and golds. The words HOLIDAYS 2022 are on torn gold paper, along with the Autostraddle logo.

Holigays 2022 // Header by Viv Le

I haven’t done one of these in a little while, and if I’m being honest with you, it was because not that many people were reading them. But if this week is supposed to be about reflecting on the things we’re thankful for, this is one thing I appreciate about the work I do here at Autostraddle: Traffic and hits are just one metric by which we evaluate posts, and we only really do so because we’re forced to by capitalism, the tumultuous online media industry, and the impossible competition we face as an indie site. It’s not that we don’t care about traffic; we have to care about traffic. But the pieces we prioritize, solicit, approve, and write ourselves do not have their value determined solely by clickability. I started writing Short Fiction Playlists for myself, really. It gave me a chance to actually read the short stories I want to read instead of letting them languish in tabs. It gave me a chance to discover new LGBTQ+ writers who weren’t previously on my radar and also hype up the ones I already love. Short fiction never gets enough love. Queer short fiction writers make magic all the time. They put themselves out there by submitting and submitting and submitting, even the best of the best fielding endless rejections.

So, anyway, I’m back with another Short Fiction Playlist. Not because we needed to fill a gap in today’s publishing schedule but just because I want to. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the folks who might be alone tomorrow or otherwise not doing much for the holiday — either by choice or circumstance. I wanted to keep the anti-colonial, queer, community-oriented, reimagined Thanksgiving vibes going, so I’ve approached my curation with that general sentiment in mind. If you want a chill day of reading queer short stories tomorrow, check some of these out. Follow the writers, preorder or buy their books, learn their names. I’ve picked a range of lengths and tones so that all can be enjoyed in the span of a day.

“War Kink” by Bobuq Sayed, published in The Drift

War softens dicks. I couldn’t blame the men I slept with for losing their erections. I’d never fucked an Afghan either. The pressure to repopulate a dying race was a major boner-killer. No one should be thinking about babies mid-coitus.

In attempting to pick an excerpt for this story, I ended up just reading the whole thing again. It’s so good, and if you only have time to delve into one short story tomorrow, let it be this one. And if you do read it and find yourself drawn to the particular queer aesthetic Bobuq writes into (which is distinct from a lot of mainstream gay fiction in its refusal to perform a softened, palatable, gushy queerness for straight and/or straightlaced readers) then I also recommend you read them on Paul Dalla Rosa’s story collection An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life in Astra Magazine. “War Kink” is as sharp on the zoomed-in interpersonal and cultural impact of war as it is on the nuances and dynamics found within queer sex. Even the title alone is evocative. Just trust me and read it.

“Wild Man” by Nic Anstett, published in Outlook Springs

After five years of nothing, my father called and told me that he had shot a Bigfoot dead in his backyard. He asked if I would come identify it because I used to be a park ranger. I had actually been a ticket booth security guard for a state park in Delaware during my gap year after undergrad, but I didn’t correct him.

Nothing says “Thanksgiving” quite like a story about reconnecting with an estranged parent while cleaning up the dead body of a Sasquatch, amirite? In all seriousness, this mordantly funny and strange story about a trans woman helping her father after he has killed a Bigfoot packs a punch for a very short story. Whether you have daddy issues or cryptid issues, this one’s for you! No one does monster fiction quite like queer folks. If it leaves you wanting more from Nic, she has written a couple pieces for Autostraddle, too!

“Talking Fowl with My Father” by Lori Ostlund, published in New England Review as well as the story collection The Bigness of the World

Last year, my father’s doctor gave him a list of safe foods, foods recommended for someone in my father’s condition. Turkey was high on the list. My father has never liked turkey, except at Thanksgiving and only then because it comes with all sorts of things that he does like—fatty skin swaddled in strips of bacon, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls and butter, ham (yes, ham). My father has always managed to treat turkey as the annoying but harmless relative who shows up once a year on the holiday, but now, now turkey has become my father’s enemy.

That excerpt alone makes this seem like an obvious pick for this playlist, but this story is ultimately neither about Thanksgiving nor about fowl really. It’s about intimacy and complications of it; it’s about a fractured relationship between a lesbian and her father. It is also not the first time I’ve shouted out this short story, which I first encountered when my girlfriend read it aloud to me on a trip to Los Angeles. I’ve returned to it many times since and also to her brilliant analysis of it for Ploughshares.

A Minor Chorus excerpt by Billy-Ray Belcourt

An almost animalistic instinct compelled me to turn off the highway and into a predominantly white hamlet named after a French Catholic priest from the early twentieth century. I wanted, for the first time as an adult, to return to the site of the Indian residential school my relatives were forced to attend as children. It was one of dozens in Alberta intended to brutalize rather than educate. This was an era of horror so prolonged and systematic that it continued to permeate the larger Indigenous consciousness. We are still haunted by it.

This is indeed not a short story but rather en excerpt from Billy-Ray Belcourt’s new novel, A Minor Chorus. You might already be familiar with Belcourt’s work by way of his nonfiction and poetry, but this is his first novel, one that further proves my long-held belief that poets can write anything. This small, haunting excerpt published by the Toronto Star tracks the protagonist — a queer Indigenous doctoral student trying to write a novel — as he arrives at the remains of a residential school. Read this excerpt and then buy the book.

“This Is Not a Poem About My Mother” by Sreshtha Sen, published in The Margins

Over the phone, my mother says: “Everyone has father issues these days. To be a successful poet, you should make up mother issues.”

Sorry for tricking you by slipping a poem into this playlist of short stories, but it’s my series and I’ll do what I want! Sreshtha — who has also written for Autostraddle before — is a maestro at the sexy-sad poem. Thinking about your mother at an inopportune time? That’s GAY and also HOLIDAY VIBES imo. If you want more poetry recommendations, Dani Janae will never lead you astray with her series, In Verse.

Eight Romance Novels Featuring Trans Women, by Trans Authors

Last weekend, I was having a blast talking books with our A+ members in the reading and lit section of the A+ Discord when I was called to do my lesbrarian duty! Well, actually, someone asked for recommendations for romances with trans characters, preferably trans women, and I swooped in to say I would love to tackle the question for an installment of Ask Your Friendly Neighborhood Lesbrarian. And here we are! The following eight romance novels all have trans women main characters, but they are all over the map in terms of subgenre. We’ve got fantasy romance, contemporary romance, YA science fiction comic romance, historical romance, and more! All the books are by trans authors. Tbh, I was disappointed when I was researching this question that there weren’t more romances starring and written by trans women published in the last year. This list is also very white. Publishing, I am begging you: More diverse trans women romances in 2023!

Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier and Val Wise

Cheer Up!: Love and Pom Poms the book features two girls in cheerleading costumes on its cover

This YA contemporary comic is about former best friends (a cis lesbian and a trans girl) falling in love on the cheerleading team! Cue cuteness galore. There are also a lot of deep, poignant moments and careful attention to nuance; somehow despite while not ignoring the sometimes harsh realities of queer and trans teens, this romance remains sweet and tender. Beebee, the trans girl, is the kind of kid who wants to make everyone happy, especially her overprotective parents. Their support for her transition is somewhat conditional on her keeping her grades up and smoothing over any hiccups in her constantly chipper social butterfly persona. Annie, the cis lesbian, is Beebee’s opposite: antisocial, grumpy, and very reluctantly joining the cheerleading team when her school counselor warns her she won’t get into a good college with such a lopsided transcript of only academics and no extracurriculars. Full of fun, emotive illustrations, Beebee and Annie’s queer romance is as charming as it is authentic.

Beauty’s Beast by S.T. Lynn

Beauty's Beast by S.T. Lynn features a Black girl on the cover in a field with a palace behind her

The third book in S.T. Lynn’s Black Trans Fairy Tale series, Beauty’s Beast is, as you probably guessed, a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Lynn’s version of Belle loves wearing the dresses she inherited from her mother and lives with her father who helps braid her hair. One of her favorite pastimes is to curl up in the courtyard of an abandoned castle in the woods and read one of her beloved books. But it turns out the castle isn’t as abandoned as she thought. There is a Guardian of the castle whom Belle learns to communicate with via sign language since the Guardian can’t speak. Soon she finds herself learning the story of the Guardian and a whole host of the castle’s inhabitants. Her burgeoning relationship with the Guardian and his friends is soon threatened, though, by the villain of this tale: Gaston. Determined to possess Belle, Gaston storms the castle with weapons and an army of small-minded villagers. Can Belle save the Guardian and retain the only community she’s ever felt a part of?

Fake It by Lily Seabrooke

Fake It by Lily Seabrooke features a woman in a suit on the cover

This contemporary queer romance features one of the genre’s most beloved tropes: the fake relationship. Holly is a celebrity chef whose TV show is stalling. The boost her agent thinks it needs? Throwing her lot in with new luxury restaurant owner Avery, who is stuck in a feud with her celebrity chef, Mike. If Holly can save Avery’s restaurant, Paramour, maybe it’ll save her show too. The fact that Mike is Holly’s ex-boyfriend and has had his eye on Holly’s job as the host of her series is an added bonus. Who wouldn’t want to add a little revenge to a good career move? In order to really ramp up the reality drama, Holly’s agent suggests one final thing: Avery and Holly pretend to be an item. What TV viewer wouldn’t want to tune in for this chaos? The women’s situation becomes a little more complicated when real feelings start interfering with their fake dating. Come for the sapphic romance with trans and bi representation, stay for the yummy descriptions of fancy food.

For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes

For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes features a blonde woman on the cover in a slip dress

I chose this feel-good BDSM trans romance as one of the best books of 2021 for good reason! April is an excellently drawn character, full of complexities: intelligence, insecurity, a strong nurturing instinct, and a touch of geekiness. She begins the book as a regular at a kink club named Frankie’s. She’s given up on finding a relationship, having been burnt one too many times as some guy’s side trip on the highway to hetero cis monogamy. When she meets Dennis at Frankie’s, she reluctantly gives him her number. When it becomes clear Dennis is really into her – and not just to meet on the sly on weekends at Frankie’s – April has some work to do to see if she can make herself vulnerable. Dennis, for his part, is brand new to the kink scene and recently divorced, and has some work to do himself. April and Dennis are such a cute pair, with equal parts mommi and dad vibes. If you’re looking for a BDSM story that is as fluffy as it gets, this is the trans romance for you.

The Calyx Charm by May Peterson

The Calyx Charm by May Peterson features a woman with dark lipstick on the cover

True love at the end of the world? That’s what this fantasy romance delivers, believe it or not. This series (The Calyx Charm is book three) is set in a richly realized alternate world with dense backstories of history, politics, mythology, and magical creatures. Dragons! Mages! Moon spirits! Prophecies about inevitable doom! Violetta has been hiding in the underworld, trying to prevent her power hungry father from syphoning her magic to use for his own ends. Tibario was recently dead; now reborn immortal, he has powers he doesn’t know what to do with. But you know who does? His mother, a crime lord boss whose longstanding foe and competitor is … Violetta’s family. It’s under these very Romeo and Juliet circumstances – the novel is in fact an explicit retelling – that Violetta and Tibario fall in love. They were best friends, in a past life: but Tibario only knew Violetta as Mercurio. Now that she believes Tibario is dead, she thinks she’ll never get to share her real self with him. But with a second chance at life, will Tibario risk getting in touch with his enemy and former friend?

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor features a cartoon woman with her dog on the cover

A trans teen princess in love on a foreign planet? Sign me up! Galaxy is a YA science fiction comic about an alien princess forced to live as a boy on Earth. Her alter ego, Taylor, is living what seems to be a dream life: happy family, adorable corgi, basketball star, good looks, and great grades. But she’s miserable, because Taylor is actually a war refugee from the planet Cyandii and has been hiding in a human boy disguise for six years. She’s feeling increasingly suffocated, both as the wrong species and the wrong gender. When Taylor meets Kat, a girl from Metropolis, she’s blown away by the other girl’s cool confidence and beauty. Meeting Kat makes Taylor no longer want to hide who she is, no matter what the consequences. Will Taylor take the risk to show her true self to the girl she’s falling in love with? And will doing so attract her mortal enemies from lightyears away? Featuring bright, colorful, and expressive artwork by a nonbinary artist as well as intergalactic teen words by a trans writer.

The Companion by E.E. Ottoman

The Companion by E.E. Ottoman features a cartoon woman in front of a large house on its cover

Set in Upstate York in 1949, The Companion is a polyamorous romance featuring two trans women and a trans guy. Madeline has been trying to make it in NYC’s literary scene for years. She’s exhausted. So when a friend suggests her as the companion to a reclusive bestselling author, Victor, who lives upstate, Madeline doesn’t hesitate to accept. Madeline is drawn to both the handsome, intelligent Victor as well as his neighbor Audrey, equally stunning and intriguing. Audrey and Victor, Madeline discovers, are ex-lovers. So if Madeline might be falling for both of them, is there a future for the three of them together? In this one you can look forward to lots of sexy times, as well as cozy post-war period details. Perhaps the fourth star in this romance is the sense of safety and relief these characters create together. It’s a haven away from the often hostile outer world where Madeline, Audrey, and Victor choose happiness and each other.

Through the Inferno by Jessi Noelle

Through the Inferno by Jessi Noelle features trees with changing fall leaves on its cover

Through the Inferno is a romantic thriller, for all you readers who like a good dose of crime, adrenaline, and mystery with your romance. The hero and heroine of this story meet after Jason, a firefighter, is badly burned and injured after a burning building collapsed on him and his colleague when they were rescuing a kid. Recovering at home, Jason is assigned a nurse, Zoe. The two develop a close friendship, so close that Zoe is the only one who notices that Jason is struggling with depression. But their relationship is cut short when Zoe is sexually assaulted on a date, her trans status revealed in the aftermath when the perpetrator is caught. Jason’s transphobic mom makes sure Zoe loses her job caring for him. The two stay in touch, so Jason is horrified to learn that Zoe’s house has been torched and that she’s left town fearing for her safety. Knowing that there is an ongoing threat to Zoe, whom he now realizes could be the love of his life, Jason sets off to figure out who is out to hurt Zoe and why, before it’s too late.

Have you read any of these trans women romances? Do you have any other romances featuring trans characters to recommend? Please chime in in the comments! And if you have a question for the resident lesbrarian, comment below or send me an email at casey[at]autostraddle.com.

Rainbow Reading Stands With the HarperCollins Union Strike

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey howdy, folks —

We’re going to do something a little different this week. Usually, I run off a list of all the exciting queer books that are out now or coming soon, and I bang my pots and pans together about how vibrant and powerful our queer literary landscape is. This abundance of queer literature is not something I celebrate lightly; queer historians John D’Emilio and Esther Freedman wrote movingly about a time when “one could read it all in a single summer, yet still have time for a relaxing vacation.” Every time I have too many cool things to fit into a single column, I think about what a wonderful and luxurious problem that is to have.

In the big picture, we owe this abundance to many things —the various waves of political progress that allow innovative artists and daring storytelling to flourish — but when we get down to brass tacks, we owe this abundance in large part to the publishing workers who guide stories through the machinery, turning them from manuscripts into beloved bestsellers.This abundance is because the authors we love were given a chance and were set up to succeed.

  • Editors acquired these manuscripts, rallied teams behind them, and defended authors’ right to depict their experience in ways that rang true.
  • Designers literally made these books — they laid out the interiors, created the covers, turned a .docx file into an object you cherish.
  • Production teams got those words literally onto the page, even when printers were loathe to take on “obscene” works, even when supply chain issues threatened the very paper and ink these books depend on. (And if you’re the e-reader type, you have designers and production teams to thank for ebooks with text you can resize and highlight, and that can be read aloud by assistive technologies!).
  • Marketers got these books into the hands of booksellers and onto bookshelves near you; publicists made sure you heard about them.
  • And now, with so many attacks on queer books and authors nationwide, lawyers are defending the books, authors, and presses that champion LGBTQ+ stories.

You see where I’m going with this? These minutiae may feel boring, but this is the machinery that brings the documents and dreams of queer authors to life. This is how the sausage is made, and it’s important.

Today, the unionized staff of HarperCollins are going on strike, and if you care about queer books and the future of queer publishing, you should care about this. The people shepherding our stories deserve a living wage and an equitable workplace. LGBTQ+ publishing workers deserve jobs they can afford to stay in, and where they can build careers. They deserve environments where they aren’t tokenized, pigeonholed, or passed-over. LGBTQ+ writers deserve teams that aren’t overworked and understaffed, and who can most effectively advocate for the power of their work. LGBTQ+ readers deserve the most expansive and vibrant and inclusive literary landscape possible. Everyone does.

As publishing faces a reckoning about how it exploits those who keep the lights on and the wheels turning, HarperCollins Union is setting a precedent as the only U.S. publisher with unionized staff. The things they hope to accomplish at the bargaining table will have a ripple effect on the industry at large. After my experiences as the only out queer person at a press (do not recommend), after working with queer authors who are underestimated and undersold by out-of-touch executives, after covering so many incredible books that deserve more acclaim than they’ve gotten, I want to see the literary future that HCP’s union is pursuing.

So yeah, there are some really exciting queer books coming, and we owe that in large part to the publishing workers behind them. This week, I’m joining a groundswell of queer writers and readers in support of the strike, and I’m going to show my respect and solidarity by not crossing the HarperCollins picket line. This includes abstaining from promoting any HarperCollins titles in my column — when HarperCollins and their union reach an agreement on the the new contract and the strike is no longer in effect, then I’ll be delighted to bang my pots and pans together about their titles once more.

Okiedoke, let’s make like a matchbox and strike. This week on Rainbow Reading, let’s talk about:

What changes are the union asking for?

  • Higher pay (commensurate with HarperCollins’ record-setting and massive profits, and commensurate with the impact of inflation and the NYC cost of living as workers are brought back into the office)
    • Starting salaries are often what make or break a young marginalized person’s ability to remain in their chosen field, and publishing’s starting salaries are notoriously low. It’s also important to remember that in publishing, folks are rarely (if ever) getting raises and that even cost of living adjustments are few and far between. I know my readers who work in media, nonprofits, and academia can sympathize!
  • A greater commitment from management to diversifying staff (since publishing as a whole remains primarily white, primarily upper-middle-class, primarily cishet, etc)
    • You can learn more about the current state of diversity in publishing from the Lee and Low Diversity Baseline Survey. The last survey was conducted in 2019, and the results are stark. You can read more of their in-depth analysis here.
  • Stronger union protections to ensure the security and sustainability of collective bargaining at HarperCollins (since the union has made massive strides over the last couple years and they want to ensure the union’s continued existence so that none of these gains are at risk of being walked back or undermined)

What does this mean?

I spoke to some of the LGBTQ+ workers who will be participating in the strike (including some who helped organize it!), and here’s what they said about how this opportunity could benefit queer book workers and the queer stories they champion:

  • “This was the first time I felt like I had a job where I could be out at work from day 1 and that I am well-liked and respected because I am queer, not in spite of it. We’ve built a real community for each other here, and I think the company fails to recognize how creating opportunities for workers to build community (like unions) makes for a better workplace for everyone. This contract fight is, for all of us, about doing what is right for those of us who need it the most. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make a place that is more equitable and just.” — Union Unit Chair
  • “Every day I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to work on queer books for queer kids — the kinds of books I wish I had when I was younger, and the kinds of books I am eternally grateful will exist in the world for my queer stepkid. Striking is not an easy thing to do. It’s not what we wish we were doing. But we are withholding our labor, withholding our power, and withholding our passion from a company that completely undervalues us in an effort to materially change the conditions of our company and our industry. A successful strike will mean that the barriers for entry in this industry will be lower. It means that more queer people and more people of color will be able to join the ranks of book publishing and put out incredible books that reflect who are are and who the world is. I’m grateful to be queer in books, and I’m looking forward to making HarperCollins see just how vital we are.” — Marketing Associate
  • “The more that people can’t afford to live off of publishing wages, the more that the book publishing world will remain for those with more privileges than any of us will see in a life time. It’s important because they’re going to lose not only the inclusive voices inside the company, but also those we publish. I think the more we lose diversity in the company, the more the catalog of books we publish will lose as well.” — Senior Designer
  • “Making sure queer books end up in the hands of queer kids is the whole reason I’m in this industry. Historically, only people with privilege can afford to stick around in publishing. This translates to young, passionate workers who are committed to uplifting diverse authors burning out and leaving those authors behind in order to survive. In a more sustainable and fair industry, a marginalized author would have room to build a career with a specific team, and marginalized employees would no longer have to make the choice between passion and pay (and could instead devote their whole focus to publishing and advocating for diverse books!)” — Associate Editor

How can you show support?

https://twitter.com/smathewss/status/1590376841562705921?s=20&t=a6dLhbcQx2NE97t7Vljpsg
https://twitter.com/nemerevermore/status/1590372464819068929?s=20&t=4pC69fkxr6jlHI8mqZ1MCw
https://twitter.com/allie_therin/status/1590115237218250752?s=20&t=pvpq1KuqhqLJeR5fRMu8Wg
https://twitter.com/scribblesmadly/status/1590036837774475265?s=20&t=pvpq1KuqhqLJeR5fRMu8Wg

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

Queer Naija Lit: Akwaeke Emezi’s “The Death of Vivek Oji” Delves Into What Is Born in Death

Welcome, welcome to another book review by yours truly for Queer Naija Lit. Today, I’m getting into The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi. The novel centers Vivek Oji, born to Kavita, his mother and Chika, his dad. There’s also Vivek’s extended family, his uncle Ekene — Chika’s elder brother — Ekene’s wife Mary, and their son Osita.

Vivek’s immediate family is a fairly standard Igbo family living in Aba, Nigeria. Their family — or really, Vivek and Kavita — are isolated from the community. At first, the isolation is because Kavita is Indian. Eventually it becomes because of Vivek’s “strangeness” as well. The majority of Vivek and Kavita’s community is made up of the Nigerwives and their children. The Nigerwives are a socio-communal group formed by the wives of Nigerian men who were not Nigerian. The group provides space for women who’ve been wrested from a lot of what they know and their safety mechanisms and are forced to rely on a man in his home country. It also offers a community for some of their children who have to deal with different kinds of ostracization. Vivek is one of these children, and so are the kids that become his friends and shelter, Juju, Elizabeth, Somto and Olunne.

Vivek needs shelter because his mind, body and spirit are existing in a reality that his father Chika and most of the adults around him are fighting to suppress. The reality is this: Vivek is the reincarnation of Ahunna, Chika and Ekene’s mother.

This isn’t a reality that’s hidden from the people around Vivek and most Igbo people reading the novel. Vivek is born as Ahunna dies. Vivek has the same scar on his leg that she did, and Ahunna was buried the same night she died. Vivek starts to experience blackouts and premonitions of things that happened when Ahunna was alive. It doesn’t end there; the signs of reincarnation are clear throughout the novel.

The book, like its title makes clear, revolves around the death of Vivek, a jarring painful horror that wrenches an already splintered community further apart. Vivek’s death becomes a true thing; an irrevocable presence that forces everything else to move and restructure around its truth.

The plot turns the title on its head and shows how the first tragedy in Vivek’s life isn’t his death, or even Ahunna’s death, but his family’s refusal to acknowledge his life. Vivek isn’t told about his grandmother. He isn’t told who he could be, and the reality Vivek is carved from is suppressed by the people who raised him.

I hurt for Vivek, and my anger at the family that let him down is plenty, but Vivek’s family aren’t the only ones responsible. Fear is no justification for bigotry, yet the people that manufacture the fear that feeds bigotry are responsible for it as well. The spiritual reality Vivek exists in, one where he is his grandmother, would be actively denounced by most of the religious circles I grew up in as “village superstition.” This denouncement is a remnant of colonial authority, which permeates through private and public spheres.

The consequences of Nigerians being forced to witness and interact with ourselves through the eyes of colonizers is that our own realities, which we’ve been taught to see and interact with, become othered, explained away, and mislabeled.

The spiritual consequences, both for Vivek and his family, are dire. Understanding this requires understanding the role of reincarnation in Igbo culture, and particularly in the family. This is one of the many aspects of the novel where Emezi’s skill as a writer and theorist shines. The plot of Vivek moves through time, unbound by his death. This allows the reader the chance to step into Vivek’s narrative as he is experiencing it. One of the ways Vivek describes himself is as a hinge. The philosopher Jacques Derrida uses the term hinge to describe the connection between absence-presence. Think of it like a door hinge that separates and connects, and both functions are vital.

So, Vivek our hinge is connecting what is absent and what is present. In other words, life and death. In other words, Vivek’s body, life, self, experience are a tether to the spiritual realm. In Igbo culture, there are procedures around this kind of thing. Unfortunately for Vivek, none of them are followed. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.

More painful is that it’s so clear how much Vivek’s family needs Ahunna. In Igbo culture, the need of your descendants is enough to cause an honored elder to return. Vivek should have been seen and recognized for who he was, especially by the people who needed him there. Vivek (the present thing, the material) was a channel for spirit (the absent/needed thing).

Outside of the spirit face of the book, the characters are living human contextualized experiences. For Vivek and his community, this means they’re having experiences contextualized by their embodied realities. Vivek (who isn’t a man) is forced to align with his parents’ perceptions of gender and sexuality that don’t settle neatly on his skin.

It’s his friends — Somto and Olunne at first, then Juju, Elizabeth and Osita — that breathe life into Vivek. While Vivek’s parents worry about how he is, his friends try to make sure he is at all. Vivek’s friends face ostracization (for their tribe, or gender, or sexuality) and they allow that hurt to soften their hearts toward each other best they can.

Another place Emezi’s writing shines is in their ability to create worlds within each character. In a novel like Death of Vivek that centers on community, this results in a near endless depth to the layers within the text.

Death of Vivek is based entirely in Aba, Nigeria, and through Vivek’s relationships, Emezi is able to authentically capture and communicate multiple realities of youth growing up in Nigeria. A big part of how they accomplish this is in their god-tier ability to disappear within the text. Emezi is a writer with a strong voice — it’s impossible to be reading their work and forget you’re reading Emezi — and strong character presence. They’re able to present a story from within the character’s perspective so that the reader is truly immersed in Vivek’s world, even as the reader is also unmistakably within an Emezi world. Just the best kind of mind melder.

It was fun to hear them talk more about this aspect of their writing process — intentionally presenting a slept-on reality from within the perspective of a character living it —  on a Twitter space hosted by The Reading Corner a few weeks ago. It was nice to have confirmation of the intention behind the work (even though it’s evident in the text) and the questions asked in the space were better than most of my grad school discussions.

Emezi’s ability to immerse the reader into multiple characters’ realities and tell a story that isn’t just one narrative but infinite is reminiscent of Toni Morrison, even as Emezi creates something entirely new in Vivek. It’s like hinges again, Morrison and Emezi’s work are connected by a spirit, a trace that exists in the space between and within both of their works.

Emezi skillfully explores various aspects of Nigerian society, from boarding school as a hotbed of queer activity — the only true universal experience — to the many violences of the Church within the Nigerian intimate family sphere. The characters embody and engage with tribalism, gender discrimination, and political upheaval.

The Death of Vivek Oji is a book to read and read again!

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

A Memoir Isn’t a Self-Help Book

In the ten stunning essays that make up her debut memoir, Heretic, Jeanna Kadlec recounts her youth and young adulthood in the Evangelical Christian church while weaving in important explorations of U.S. and Evangelical history, cultural criticism, and political analyses. Through each intricately woven part of Heretic, Kadlec painstakingly dismantles every aspect of her identity and invites on her journey from good, Christian girl to disenchanted Christian wife to ex-evangelical lesbian astrologer. Although Kadlec’s story is about figuring out who she is and wants to be, it’s also about the difficulties of leaving community behind, the grief that accompanies that loss, and the struggle to build a life that is entirely her own. Kadlec not only offers a portrait of a person who — by fighting against all odds — was able to claw their way to a life on their own terms but also an examination of exactly how it feels to have to do so.

Having grown up queer and critical in a faith community of my own, I knew that there would be a lot for me to relate in Kadlec’s book, but I wasn’t prepared for how rich, incisive, and eloquently crafted it is. Heretic isn’t only striking on formal and structural levels, but it prompted me to re-examine parts of my own life, as well. I was given the opportunity to interview Kadlec right before the book’s release, and I knew I had to focus on the questions that stuck with me most after I finished the book. Our conversation went on for over two hours, but below, you’ll find some of the highlights.

Stef: I’m really interested in how you settled on the title for your book. I come from a religious upbringing, so it immediately reminded me of, as you talk about in the book, the view that heresy is one of the worst things that we can do. And it also reminded me of how Jesus was once labeled a heretic. Obviously, you’re rightfully critical of evangelical Christianity in a way that would be considered heretical, but also thinking of our memories or of certain events or moments in our lives as being viewed as heretical by the people who were there…that is something that is interesting to me, too. So, I just thought maybe you might want to speak a little bit about that or and how you landed on that title.

Jeanna:I love that question, and it’s so weird getting asked about the title because Heretic is the first major nonfiction project I ever worked on, and the title came before anything else. The title hit me in the body in a way that I think sometimes people talk about ideas hitting them or a spark of “Oh, a character came to me.” I was like, “Oh, I should write this,” even before I think I consciously understood what the memoir itself would be and how it would take shape. The concept of writing a book about my life in some capacity called Heretic just came and overwhelmed me.

And I remember very distinctly when it happened because I was walking. I was out for a walk with my ex-partner. We were walking in Somerville and just having a walk in the evening, and we were talking about my writing in some capacity and I just remember this happening. It was like lightning. It was one of those very stereotypical moments where people talk about the moment of creative inspiration being so embodied and being so clear and so, “This is it.” And that was the title for me. I have never had that experience with a title before or after.

I think that even though I wasn’t really thinking actively about heresy in my immediate time coming out of the church and coming out and processing, the fact that the title came so clearly indicates something about, as you note, that the old stories and those sermons about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and about heretics really had settled somewhere deep in me and the knowledge of what I was, was very profound, and I really wanted to wrestle with that. The title has always been a north star.

When we talk about memoir, we talk about how people you’re writing about will disagree, and they’re not going to have the same perspective as you. In fact, they might just say that you’re lying. I love the idea of this memoir being connected to this word, just playing with that idea that people are always going to have different ideas or perspectives of what we went through. Even the people closest to us.

That is such a beautiful and generous reading of the title. I wasn’t thinking of that take on it at all. It was very much through the religious lens, the way that I was conceptualizing it as I was working on it. But in a retrospective way, I do love that idea, that even the positionality of being the narrator of a memoir is a kind of heresy, that’s gorgeous.

I think some people might consider it a sin to write about them and portray them in a certain light. So, I was drawn into that very quickly.

Something that was definitely hard for me, I think, in the early years of working on it was that question of consent.

I really struggled in those early years, especially with a few questions around what my parents would think, but also just with the ethics of representing people, even people who I was no longer in a relationship with and people who had arguably done significant harm to me like my ex-husband. I still really wrestled with a tremendous amount of guilt. What is mine and not mine to share? How can I still be fair to this person? And it took years to figure out and to be like, I want to tell the truth of what happened to me, but I also want to do it in a way that is as generous to what I understand this person to have been going through as possible. That was very challenging.

In the author’s note, you had mentioned that anyway. That this is from your perspective. And I think that’s where the connection came for me after reading the author’s note and the title. People are going to think this is not accurate.

Which is a question and an allegation that every memoirist deals with.

I have a strained relationship with my parents, a very estranged relationship with my parents these days. But I feel like I have been extremely lucky in the years leading up to the book being published because my mom, in particular, has just been so generous when we’ve talked about it. She has just consistently said over and over, “This is your version of what happened.”

And she’s really affirmed that. She had her version of what was happening. Obviously, she was in this marriage and this domestic abuse situation with my dad, but she’s like, “You and your sister had your own versions of what was happening in that house.” I think that having that affirmation reflected back to me by my mom just really helped me to build those boundaries up. When considering readers who I wouldn’t know, who then would be projecting their own shit onto me, that really helped a lot.

Totally. You just reminded me of something I tell the high school students I teach. We read a lot of non-fiction in my class because I teach AP language, and we talk a lot about other people and their experiences. I give them a lot of readings from people who are Black or Indigenous. And sometimes there are things in the works that make them ask, “How could this be real?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s real to these people, so you don’t need to interrogate whether it’s real or not, do you? You can just let that be and live in their space for a second and not worry about this ‘Empirical Truth’ that you think you have to be searching for all the time.” And I feel like memoir breaks that barrier, and that’s what I like the most about it; there is no capital-T Truth. There’s just a lot of lowercase-T truth everywhere, and we can just live in that together. Or I wish we could. I advocate for us living in that together, I guess you could say.

I think especially because as queer people — and depending on what intersection a person is living at, what particular positions they’re occupying in society — there are different kinds of being doubted and different parts of them and different parts of their experience that are going to be under attack. And so I think I was in a lot of ways, in part because I had written personal essays for so many years leading up to the book coming out, as a woman and as a lesbian, I was like, “Sure, there’s certain pieces around my relationships in the book that I may have to deal with fall out from, whatever, that’s fine, I’m used to it.”

But something that I was really, really nervous about and have been dealing with to an extent in interviews is what you’re talking about with this “Empirical capital-T Truth.” I am a formerly very religious, faithful person who still believes and still engages with the spiritual. And there are lots of people out there who don’t, which is, do your own thing, go your own way. But I have definitely been asked by a number of interviewers in a particular kind of way, “Did you really see Jesus? Did that really happen? Are you sure?” They have really started to drill in on me and connect that very brief scene to some different parts of the book to say, “Well, this is a pattern that it might connect to.” So, I’ve had to explain to a lot of folks so far: This is the world I live in and we’re going to treat it as real.

I think that’s reasonable.

Right. And it’s so interesting because once you reach a certain level of success, you get to say whatever you want and people don’t press on it. Like Hilary Mantel, may she rest, got to write about seeing ghosts. And that was fine because it was Hilary Mantel, but a debut, Latinx memoirist sharing experiences of magical realism, that’s going to get pressed on. Someone coming from a Pentecostal background talking about speaking in tongues and how it was weird, that’s going to get pressed on.

I definitely think it has something to do with the fact that you were specifically evangelical Christian talking about talking to Jesus, seeing Jesus, that people are like, “No, that’s not real. That’s not a thing that happens for people.” People are very quick to say, maybe that’s just how you interpreted it at the time, which you kind of say in the book anyway. They’d just rather focus on their perception of how that actually is: “Okay, you weren’t talking to Jesus, it was just your subconscious or whatever.” And they want to rationalize it down.

A memoir isn’t a self-help book. It’s not an instruction manual. It’s just one person’s lived experience. And it’s about being willing to connect with that person, with that narrator as they are. And you don’t have to agree with, I mean, provided they aren’t doing incredibly harmful things to themselves and the people around them, you don’t have to agree.

Yeah, you don’t. And you also don’t have to make it about you. You can make connections without fully understanding. I don’t know, I think people don’t understand that’s a thing that can happen. You can be connected, you can feel a connection to somebody else without fully understanding their experience, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s just as a result of working in organizing spaces and racial justice stuff that I know you can’t expect to fully understand somebody else’s experience and whatever they’re going through. And we say that and people say that, but then they can’t release it when they’re engaging with stuff like this and I just don’t understand that. What’s the block there?

I think that that gets at queer community things, too. I mean, that gets at things that are specific to our spaces and around wanting to put things in very neat little labels. And I can only fuck with it if you’re under this category and if you fit into this thing that I recognize. If I don’t know how to categorize you or if I have put you into a category that I don’t like or that I don’t trust, then it’s suspect, and that connection’s inhibited as opposed to just being open to an individual experience.

I was wondering about the structure of your book. There’s moments where you’re getting really tense or you’re describing something that’s just generally very difficult or really scary. And then you’ll just pop in with some historical information or reference or some examination of pop culture. And I really liked the flow of that, because it was nice to see that some of that tension was cut for a second before you came back around to it. How did you get to this structure? 

What it is now is very much a hybrid memoir. It’s very much a personal narrative braided with history and pop culture and a lot of other things, which is for some people, and other people really hate it — and that’s okay. This is what I read. I wrote my favorite kind of memoir. This structure is a representation of how I talk and how I think. It’s highly citational, it’s highly indicative of my academic background. The first drafts of this book were trying to be straight memoir, by which I mean more a book that is just personal narrative and is the kind of memoir that reads like a novel, and you’re just in the narrator’s POV. You’re in-scene a lot, not a lot is being told, it’s just scene, scene, scene, scene. It’s unfolding like a movie the whole time. I tried to do that, but I kept digressing. I kept going off on these long tangents talking about Lilith or talking about art history and the history of feminist performance art in the ’70s and talking about Carolee Schneemann and shit.

My agent and I found a way to make that work with the first three sample chapters that we ended up sending out on submission. We sent a book proposal out to editors the first time with three sample chapters and nobody bought it. A lot of them were like, “What the fuck is this?” We were trying to sell it as straight memoir, and they were like, “You have these random tangents about art history.” So, we spent a year revising, and I really cut a lot of my personal narrative down and tried to make it more of a critical essay collection. When we went out on submission again, the editor who I ended up really connecting with, my editor Jenny Xu, had the vision for bringing it into that space that I think instinctually I had always wanted to go toward, which was this blend of memoir with the cultural crit.

I also think that way. Everything to me is connected to everything else. Stuff that I’ve written for Autostraddle so far since I’ve been here has been just…history is tied into everything that I do. Other literature and pop culture, too. I examine my own life through that lens. I almost feel like I’m doing a closer reading by examining the ways that all the little things kind of come to where I’m at right now and how I got here.

I think it is a close reading, and I think there’s something very queer about it and something that very much is divesting from that really harmful heteronormative, actually just very white supremacist, Enlightenment idea that there’s an individual genius in the tower and that he is struck with the lightning of inspiration and that he alone receives this solitary knowledge and comes to it on his own without community, without any input from other people, without education, without the influence of those around him. And so to me, there’s something incredibly queer about making your thinking plain on the page and about representing your process for the reader. How do I talk about being a teenager if I’m not talking about the books I was reading, the music I was listening to, what my parents were doing, the people who were around me, the Bible verses that were incredibly potent, the kind of lineage of how purity culture is moving through the churches, through the schools?

All of this context is actually quite essential to really represent both how I get where I am, but also on a broader scale, how so many people who are like me get where we are and that’s incredibly important. My books are always going to be in conversation with other books. My work is always going to be in conversation with other people. And hopefully, after you read my book, you go out and read those other people.

Something that struck me is the part where you’re detailing the beginning of the process of deconstruction and the processes of your divorce and just coming out. There, you talk a little bit about how tarot helped you find a new way of hearing yourself and trusting intuition. I hadn’t really thought about the ways that being a part of a faith community kind of takes that away from you until I read that part. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about the process of learning to trust how you’re feeling without looking for the explicit approval of something else outside beyond yourself? Do you feel like that’s something you’re still learning how to do?

It took a very long time. I think that I am much, much better at it now. I definitely am a lot better at trusting my gut. I’m a lot better at believing myself and at believing my experiences, but it took many years. It took a lot of talk therapy. I’ve stayed in talk therapy almost continuously for the last ten years, which I’m really glad I’ve done. The last few years, I’ve been tempted a few times to duck out. But particularly given the very weird ups and downs that accompany writing a memoir that includes revisiting really traumatic experiences, I cannot recommend staying in therapy when writing a memoir strongly enough. It’s incredibly valuable.

 I’ve been in therapy, and around the time that I was starting to think about leaving my ex-husband, I started on antidepressants which, shocker, are extraordinarily helpful or at least, I should say, were incredibly helpful for me and are something that I intend to continue doing. So between having professional medical help and intervention and also basically what I did with tarot was fold it into my preexisting journaling practice because I had been journaling almost my whole life. I’ve had a lifelong journaling practice, which I think is really lucky.

It must have been so difficult to disentangle your sense of morality from religion, too. And just thinking about what makes a “good person”? What does it mean to be a good person? How do I, outside of this thing, become a “good person”? I imagine that that was part of those early conversations with tarot and with your journal, too.

I still just kind of auto-piloted on Christian morality for a while. Just for myself because I was just too busy figuring some other shit to handle big morality questions. But I think something that really, really helped was the ex-partner I mentioned before. We started dating about a year after my divorce. And she was an atheist, well I imagine still is, I don’t know. But she was at the time at least a very committed atheist and had been her entire life. And so she was one of the first people who I was in such a close, intimate relationship with who I was like, you are a foundationally “good person” and religion has never been a part of orienting you to that. I think that she’s one of the people who really helped me start to parse out what I thought about honor and integrity as moral codes outside of any religious non-Christian framework. But that wasn’t probably until a solid year after.

And it’s so interesting, right? Because I think that the big ones just don’t change no matter who you are. The big ones — don’t kill people, don’t assault people, don’t hurt children —  it’s just don’t hurt people. They’re big ones that are just universals that I think are actually very easy for everybody to agree on. And we don’t have to make it a fucking commandment.

Speaking specifically about evangelical Christianity, you talk a lot in the book about how evangelical Christian belief impacted the founding of this country and how it impacts politics now. It made me think about its wider influence on our “culture” here and other religions — if you think about Catholicism, which is the church I grew up in, and Amy Coney Barrett — that are usually separate have moved closer and closer to the values of evangelicalism over the course of our lifetime. I just wanted to ask if you had some thoughts on what you think the cause is of that. You mentioned in the book that there are some people in our world who seem to exist to make evangelicalism irresistible in a sense, like Chip and Joanna Gaines for example. Do you think that that’s connected to it or is it just a power grab like everything else?

I talk about this very, very briefly in the book, but my dad’s family is Catholic and we were very close to my grandparents growing up. When my grandpa died and my grandma came to live in the same town we did, I grew up going to mass often and was in an extremely close proximity to Catholicism in a way that most evangelicals never are. It’s so interesting to me in the way that these far right Catholics and far right evangelicals have become strange bedfellows. On the far right fringes, you have this agreement in this way that they’re both really seeking theocracy and have agreed to disagree on their theological differences in order to do this power grab.

Evangelicals embrace Amy Coney Barrett practically as one of theirs. And it’s like, no, she’s a fucking fringe Catholic. But she has all the evangelical talking points, which is also really indicative in the way that she talks about biblical womanhood, for example. The way she talks about her marriage and her motherhood is so out of an evangelical marketing textbook in that way that evangelicals, over the last what 50 plus years, have put targeted messaging — around gender roles, around “family values,” around anti-LGBTQ stuff, around purity culture — into the hands of mainstream Protestants and also Catholics in order to try to build coalitions, in order to get abstinence only education in schools, in order to do what we’re seeing them do right now with introducing this fucking “Don’t Say Gay” Bill in the House.

I think it’s very much the political power. At the end of the day, I do think it’s very much using religion in the name of consolidating political power and economic power. But among those people who are doing that, you absolutely have the true believers who I think those of us who grew up in the church can spot like Mike Pence. He is a true believer. And for that reason, he scares the shit out of me. Because for as many of these people who are going to stand up and say they’re Christians in order to get elected, you also have the Mike Pences who practice what they preach and who absolutely with their entire heart believe that they are doing God’s will on Earth. And honestly, those guys scare me more than anybody else.

I think people underestimate how difficult it is to leave a community that’s so integral to who you are and how you think. Even if it’s destructive or abusive, it’s still the place that you always went and that you were always a part of and that you felt included in. And in the book, you made a point about how many of the alternative spiritual modalities focus on individual healing as opposed to healing with and through community. So, I’m just wondering, what do you think we can do to keep these things that seem so separate from these individualist values and just the organizing structure of the U.S. from taking on those values and that structure? How do we keep these modalities from reenacting some of the same violences that you mentioned in regards to organized religion on those who practice them?

I think that what you hit on, “How do we keep these groups, these queer communities, these spiritual communities from taking on those and reenacting and reinforcing and replicating those social violences that have been previously done to us?”…I think that fear is a huge reason why people get reluctant to rejoin in the first place. That fear of getting hurt again. The fear of “I don’t want to make myself that vulnerable again to this group of perhaps unknown people.”

I don’t want to say that abuse is hard to control for, because it’s not. But I think getting hurt is hard to control for, because humans are human, and humans are going to be human. But there are definitely, and I am not necessarily the person to be giving solutions here, but I think there are plenty of mutual aid organizations and cooperatives locally here in New York that have really great models of more collectively distributed power as well as things that I look for like transparency and accountability. They have incredibly clear accountability structures for the people in charge, and those people are actually held accountable with clear paths to restitution if there’s harm done.

Just to use an example from my own life in a church space, an evangelical church is so often just on its own floating without a denomination. It’s just one guy with a group of 200 people and he doesn’t have to answer to anybody. There’s no accountability there. And then when the people, when the folks may come trying to hold some space, they get shut down, they get dismissed, they get denied. They are gaslit and, ultimately, shunned out. That structure can be replicated so easily, religious or not, when one person’s in charge.

This is also why, just to speak in the spiritual space more generally, I am so skeptical of and so cautionary to folks of the “guru mentality” and of only getting your information from one source, only relying on one person for your horoscope, only relying on one person even for your information about what’s going on in the world. Again with transparency, people shouldn’t be afraid to share their sources. They shouldn’t be afraid to redirect you to other folks. They shouldn’t be afraid to admit that they don’t know everything because nobody does.

Transparency and being willing to be held accountable are just two things that are foundationally threatening to patriarchy. They’re foundationally threatening to white supremacy. And those are basically the structures that our entire culture in this country is built on. If you’re rocking with those two things, you’re already doing great in your organization.

Just staying on the community aspect…When I was reading your book, I was just thinking about people’s reactions to it and how a lot of people might assume that when you leave a hurtful or abusive community or even a hurtful or abusive relationship or actually even if you’re just coming out as queer, that you find a new freedom to revel in. And I think that that is true to a certain extent. But in the book, you discussed very candidly that it wasn’t an immediate feeling that you had. That freedom was elusive in these situations because you were technically losing so much at the same time. I just think that is such a crucial part of the conversation that I don’t ever see. We are constantly talking about the things that we have gained, and there’s rarely ever a roadmap for people that shows them how hard won that freedom is. So, I was curious about the process of reexamining that time of your life and what that was like for you as you were writing the book. What made you want to include that as part of the conversation? 

It wasn’t even a question that I would talk about it. The loss was such a critical part of that process for me. Loss like that shapes you; it shapes people in an absolutely foundational way. I feel like there is almost a Grand Canyon in my life, and there’s the before I was 25 and after I was 25, and just so many things, places, experiences, but also so many people on the other side of that canyon. And I will never see them again. I will never talk to them again. And the enormity of that loss, I don’t even know that I conveyed half of it in the book. It’s extraordinary.

I am so happy for queer folks who get to come out and not experience that. And also, there are so many of us who do, and I really felt it was vital to stress how grave the consequences of living with that are. That grief doesn’t leave. And I think that grief is also really complicated for those of us who continue to be on the other side of it in whatever capacity, for whatever reason. I know that I don’t want to have relationships with those people anymore. I know that I am better for being on this side of things. The people in my life now, the relationships I have now, are so rich and so deep and so fruitful and just loving in ways that I never experienced before. And also, I still dream about people from my past a lot. And I still have a lot of grief for it, and I’m just not sure if that’s ever going to leave. I have finally come to terms with the fact that it’s okay if it doesn’t, that I’m not a “bad queer” for still grieving the loss of people in my life who were homophobic, frankly.

I think things are getting a little bit more nuanced, but that experience of loss has been so brushed over. When people experience that, I’m sure some people do have that feeling of, “Okay, I left and I am better for it,” and that’s the end of the conversation. I think that representation of it being like that has taken over in a weird way. But I think it’s totally natural and human to miss that part of your life and miss those people.

Folks in my life now, they have childhood friends, they have college friends, they have people who can speak to these different parts of them. And there are a handful of people in my life now from high school and college. There are four of them who have stayed in my life since all of that. And everyone else is gone. Given how close I was to a lot of people and how good I am at staying in touch also, it’s a chasm.

I’m so glad you talked about it in the book. Like you said, it feels like you are supposed to turn your back or else you’re a “bad queer.” And I don’t think that’s real. I don’t even think it’s aspirational to be honest, but maybe it might feel good to some people to do that. But I don’t think it’s real.

And I understand the ways in which it’s been important to have representation of the, “I’m doing great” given the criminalization and stigmatization that we are sick or that we are criminals or that what we have is an illness. So, I understand the impulse for so much of the art to emphasize, “We are fine and we are happy” and all this stuff, even if lesbians are dying on TV all the time. But also, I am glad that we are in a place where the nuance can be there, too.

You write a little bit about how when you realized that you’re queer, the fact of being queer didn’t necessarily feel wrong. You didn’t feel guilty for being queer, and it wasn’t something that was unnatural to you. You talk about how the divorce was a bigger sin in your mind, but you also talk about how you knew that other people would obviously view it as a bad thing and it would change your life inside and outside of the church. I had a similar experience when I came out as a teenager. I didn’t think it was wrong or unnatural or even immoral. I just knew that it would be a problem for other people and that it would blow up some things in my life and wouldn’t go over well. And when I think about that and think back to being 14 years old, I am constantly impressed by that grace. Reading that you had that same experience, reading that you also gave yourself some grace in that moment, it made me wonder where that grace came from. And I just wanted to see what you thought made you capable of extending that hand to yourself where it was like, “Yeah, no, this is fine. Technically, this is fine. It’s just the problem is…”

“The problem is that I’m married.”

Yes! What do you think made you capable of doing that at that moment? How do you think you came to that?

Honestly, I don’t know where that grace came from. I suspect that it probably came from having been around so many queer people in my life. I had been friends with queer people since I was in high school, and I was a women’s studies major in college. And so, I think that the realization that I’m queer felt like things just clicked into place. It felt like getting the right prescription for glasses. It was just that whole thing about how when you die, you see yourself, you see the flash of your whole life. It was almost like at that moment I saw, well, I did die, but also I saw my whole life in a flash and I was like, “Oh.”

When I first started reading the book, I think I assumed that the audience for the book would be other ex-evangelical people or other people who left faith communities at some point or maybe just queer people and other women struggling with processes of deconstruction and coming out. But then, as I kept reading, I thought about conversations that I often have with my partner about the US. She’s not American, and she can’t understand how ingrained Christianity is in everything that happens here. And then, as I was reading this book, I was like, “Well, maybe this book would also be a good primer for people on understanding this place a little bit better.” So, I just thought I would ask you, now that it’s finished and you don’t have to think about the audience, technically, who are you hoping might find this book aside from the audience you had in mind?

Queer people and ex-evangelicals or folks who are ex-fundamentalist in some capacity of any organized religion or cult are obvious audiences for it. And part of the reason that I really explicate and go so deeply into detail, connecting those micro- to macro-processes of how Christianity works in the country, is because I wanted it to be accessible and hopefully informative for folks who didn’t grow up with religion, didn’t grow up here, and who wanted to better understand why things are the way they are and why does the U.S. does what the U.S. does. I think the fact that I went to grad school in Boston and was so profoundly surrounded by really skeptical liberals — not to use it as my dad uses that word but — liberals who were so condescending to the Midwest and to the South and who were convinced that the separation of church and state was a real thing and who just didn’t take anything I had to really say seriously contributed to my chip on my shoulder and my desire to write toward the coastal elite. Ignoring evangelicals and ignoring Protestant Christianity’s chokehold on this country doesn’t make it any less fascist than it has always been.

One of the actual great gifts, even though the book isn’t out yet, has been having some folks who grew up in really liberal households, really atheist households, come to me and be like, “This helped so many things click into place,” in terms of understanding the far right and how they treat abortion. Some people who have had really horrible relationships with abusive ex-boyfriends who were steeped in evangelicalism and they were like, “I didn’t understand why he was saying certain things. Then, I read your book and it helped me understand why I was being treated the way I was.” Which is horrifying, but also, I’m so glad that it’s able to serve as this translator for people who don’t have that language.

I’m really happy that it’s finding audiences that understand that shit is really fucked up and that maybe just don’t have the ear and that that just didn’t grow up in the church and don’t hear the dog whistles in everyday life.

Yes, totally. Chapter two, especially, I felt chapter two in my soul as a perpetual Florida defender.

Chapter two is a love letter to every queer person who’s from a “red” state.

Another thing that really resonated with me was when you were discussing the ways that you read scripture closely and critically because I did that exact same thing, and I feel like I can partially trace my love of stories back to that experience. Do you feel like that experience is what led you to where you are now as a writer and reader? 

I think that it’s impossible for me to untangle my love of books from the level to which I was ingratiated with and in scripture as a child. Did my mom read me a lot of other books before bed? Yes. Did I learn to read very early? Yes. Did I have favorite books that were secular? Yes. Check, check, check. All those things. And was I also constantly reading stories of scripture and were stories of scripture played on my cassette player and was a children’s Bible my first book? Also, yes. The Bible is just inextricable from that love of story and reading. And the book of Esther was my favorite book of the Bible growing up. Hilariously, as you certainly know, it’s the only book of the Bible that does not mention God, which in hindsight I find very amusing. Woman heroine saves her people, gets the bad guy murdered. God isn’t mentioned anywhere. I loved that story.

So gay.

Oh, it’s such a gay story. It’s also so femme. She wins a beauty pageant. It’s very gay. Very drag. It’s so good. But yeah, and I think that the affinity that I had later on for close reading in high school and for just how easily I took to studying books was definitely laid out by reading scripture. Once I was allowed to stay for Sunday sermon, once I wasn’t being taken off for children’s Sunday school, in the churches I would go to, you get the Sunday bulletin and sometimes the pastor, his sermon will have notes and little fill-in-the-blanks to fill in as you follow along with certain verses. There was that. And also, I just took to bringing a notebook to church so that I could take notes on the sermon. In part, because it helped me pay attention better. But I think in part, it was something that I could then refer to later because I just really wanted to know more. I was just really curious. It’s impossible to pull them apart. And I think, in really weird ways, the church ironically laid that foundation for that love of reading and textual study that would, of course and later on, lead to me leaving.

In regards to learning, you describe how in the beginning of your tarot journey, you kept pulling the Hierophant card. You said you were mad about it because it’s usually related to religion and then after you got an alternative tarot deck, you realized that it wasn’t just about religion and that it was more about healing from religion and about teaching and writing. It made me think of the ways that writers and artists are teachers in their own rights. That even if you’re not directly imparting something on the people who encounter your art, they are still forced to learn something. It could be actual new information or learning by some kind of self-examination. And so that made me wonder, in the ten years that you spent healing and dealing with the aftermath of everything that you talk about in the book, who have been your most important teachers in this process? Who do you look towards for that reassurance?

I think I go a few different directions with that, and I think some of my teachers are very literally people who have taught and mentored me over the last few years like Theresa Reed and Briana Saussy. And also, some people who are very close friends but who I would consider mentors like my friend Mecca Woods, who is a wonderful astrologer and who was the first person who told me that I should really do astrology professionally and who really held space for me in figuring out that journey. I think in some ways those teachers are public figures who I don’t have a personal relationship with. I think of Brene Brown’s research on shame and empathy and how much that has helped my healing journey. I think of writers in the [queer] community who have passed on. Audre Lorde’s work is a touchstone that I return to again and again and that I learn something new from every time I go back to it.

Toni Morrison’s work, actually the collection of her non-fiction, The Source of Self-Regard, has been — this is weird, but I feel like people who are extra religious will get this and that I mean it in the highest compliment — a devotional that I go through a little bit each day and then go back to the front and then I reread it, and I go back to the front and I reread in that capacity. And there are folks whose writing has directly taught me through conversation and through the advice that I have sought; there are folks who have taught me indirectly, like you’re saying, through their writing; some people who are no longer with us, who I will never meet but whose work is so important to me and also to so many other people and who I just feel really lucky that we live in a world where we still get to have their work in print and where books are relatively accessible, whether through buying them or through the library. I don’t know, how lucky am I to get to just read Toni Morrison off my bookshelf, to just get to read a Melissa Febos memoir and think about how I want to structure my next book? That’s a level of conversation with other creative folks that was not accessible even a hundred years ago.

One last question, and it has a little bit of a preamble. One of my best friends, who was also raised Catholic, and I are always joking about how Jesus was gay and we concocted this entire narrative about Jesus as a gay man and the real reasons why Romans saw him as a threat. When I was reading your book, I thought about how maybe this is just our goofball way of trying to navigate our own religious trauma. Or maybe that’s our way of reclaiming him for ourselves. I say all of this because the ending of your book, the very ending hit me so hard. I was like holy shit, yeah, Jesus was gay.

That is the takeaway of the book actually, is that is Jesus is gay.

The ending hit me like a freight train because earlier in that section you said you didn’t want to reclaim anything from Christianity, but then we get your reclamation of the resurrection. And I’m just in awe of this and I just love what you’re getting at with these lines: “This is the truth about queer people, we’ve resurrected ourselves, we’re born again, our tombs are empty, we are risen.” And I was just hoping you might talk about that a little bit just to cap off our conversation because I think that is such a wonderful, beautiful sentiment.

I’m so glad that was resonant. I will say, I actually wrote that section so long before the opening and final sections of chapter ten were part of the proposal for the book the second time around. They weren’t initially. I wrote them a full year and a half before I wrote the rest of the chapter, and they were part of a summary of the book actually. They were part of just the summary I had written for what I envisioned the book to be and so the last little bit of the book, those lines that you read was really just me going off in a book summary. But also, I remember when I wrote it because when I did write it, it was one of those moments where sometimes you feel like it’s just pure flow and then you look at what you wrote and you’re like, “What the fuck? Is this the best thing I’ve ever written or is this horrible?” But I felt like it was really good even though this is so not usually how I write. I sent it to my agent and asked, “Is this wild to end the summary talking about resurrection?” And my agent is Irish Catholic she was like, “This is perfect, this is exactly how it needs to end.” Then, cut to a year and a half later and I was working on the final chapter and my editor had just been like, “Let loose, tell us what you’re thinking about now.”

I was going off on all of these different tangents about spirituality and I had these visions of Jesus just really inconveniently during the process of writing the book that were really upsetting to me that I wanted to stop happening, so I included them in the chapter because I thought if I tell other people about them, they’ll go away. I went to that summary to try to ground myself again and I was like, “Oh shit, this is really good, I should include this.” To answer what it means to me specifically, again, I just know that every person in the [queer] “community,” all of our experiences are really individual and unique in so many ways. We’ve all got different corners and entirely different Venn diagrams going on. What I went through so felt like a death, it so felt like an ending and now, I’m not the same person at all. And when I think about writing those lines, it’s like well yeah, this is what it has felt like over the last ten years. I have been slowly in the process of resurrecting myself.

And ironically enough, I think that queer people can actually intensively relate to the resurrection story, which is fucking weird. But I think one of my favorite lines in that section is actually, “Do not look for her, she is not there.” It wasn’t directed at anyone, but when I think about it now,  there are certain people who did stay in my life in the initial aftermath and in some of the years following who were mostly blood family who continued to interact with me with the same expectations as if I was still the same. “Oh, well you’re gay now but you’re still the same,” and I was like, “Nah, I am a profoundly different person. I am rewired, I am rewiring myself, I am divesting from shit, I am rebuilding myself. And also just trying to unlearn, relearn how to be in relationship with the world around me, how I have benefited from and also participated in systems of oppression, how to not do that anymore. I am different and also trying to be better and trying to continue to be different.” With the version that I was then, it was in some ways really hard to try to recall and reconstitute from memory for so much of the book because she doesn’t exist anymore and she hasn’t existed in a long time. This is me now trying to remember her then.

Rainbow Reading: It’s a Good Time To Be a Sports Gay

Feature image photo by Peter Griffith via Getty Images

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey hello, everyone!

God, is it ever a good time to be a sports dyke. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get any reading done between all of y’all’s Rockford Peaches Halloween costumes, Portland’s NWSL Championship, and the ongoing and truly delightful World Series baseball livetweets. Am I even still literate, or is there only “Dancing On My Own” in my brain where literacy used to be? (Apologies in advance to any Houston fans — we can be friends again in a couple weeks 😉💖) It might be the perfect time to revisit Sally’s beautiful roster of queer sports romances, too!

I didn’t do as much reading the last couple of weeks as I’dve liked, and yet. Fall is always book publishing’s busiest season, my TBR looks like Kilimanjaro, and that’s just the way I like it. Whether you’re sneaking in a few pages here and there between innings, or curled all the way up with cider, blankets, candles, the whole nine yards, these books are home runs. (I know, I know, I couldn’t resist, I’m sorry, I can’t help being what I am.)

Okiedoke, let’s make like glow sticks and get cracking. This week on Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

https://twitter.com/_ryanruby_/status/1587393259248271360?s=20&t=LydaWMl57-DePQhaCPausA
https://twitter.com/SubtextBooks/status/1585395617396035587?s=20&t=Uy4fHVAFRh7k8uUrM95QbQ
This week’s Trashwina Banter Blurb of the Week Award goes to this masterpiece from a St. Paul bookseller. HALLUCINATORY FAULKNERIAN GAY GHOST STORY (WITH SNAKES) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“A memoir with the scope ofHereticcould easily turn into a tornado of outrage and despair… But there’s an intellectual precision and rigor to Jeanna’s fury. And found within its white-hot flames are engaging stories of sex and love and community care and deep friendships and tarot and astrology and Dungeons & Dragons.

— Heather in her review of Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

You already know that I’m going to say how great the books coverage is this week and every week.

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

Fatimah Asghar’s New Novel Is a Salve for My Reality of Grief

“We once-upon-a-time-ourselves. Once upon a time, there were three sisters. Or brothers maybe. Okay, okay: sister-brothers. Sister mothers. Once upon a time, they lived in a castle, up high. Once upon a time their father was gone.”  — Fatimah Asghar, When We Were Sisters (2022), p. 35

“Gone” is where Fatimah Asghar’s When We Were Sisters invites us to join orphans Kausar, Aisha, and Noreen in their journey of grief, growing up, and what comes after the loss of all you knew to be true and good. A queer Muslim poet, filmmaker, and creator of Brown Girls, Fatimah Asghar is a force in whatever she does. If this review (and your subsequent reading) of When We Were Sisters will be your introduction to Fatimah Asghar’s work — welcome, fam. You are in for a beautiful ride.

I have been a fan of Fatimah’s for a while. As a younger queer not-yet-writer in the mid-’10s, I stumbled across her spoken word on YouTube after meeting some of her homies at Furious Flower. Lines of her poems have held me on my hardest days and, some days, I rewatch her short creative work (like Brown Girls and her short film, “Got Game”) and find myself cackling and talking back to my screen. More than two years ago when “Got Game” dropped, our former editor-in-chief Kamala interviewed Fatimah, and I learned about this novel-in-progress. I have been patiently waiting ever since. Like all devoted fans of contemporary greats, I longed for whatever Fatimah would send out into the world — she ain’t no half-steppin’ GOAT. I knew this offering would be graceful in language, meticulous in form, and rich in narrative. What I didn’t know back then is how much I needed this book, how deeply I would exhale when reading these words, how many tears would fall on the pages of the advance readers’ copy I received at my doorstep earlier this fall.

I did not have to travel far to meet Asghar’s characters at their “gone.” Between Kamala’s interview with Fatimah and the book’s release, my own father died, leaving me and my own sister orphaned in a world continuing to crumble around and move beyond us. Unlike the novel’s primary narrator, Kausar and her siblings, my sister and I were not small children when our dad or mama died — we were grown but not quite growing. Well into my thirties, I still found myself crawling back to childhood to mourn, dream, and grow up all over again with Kausar, Noreen, and Aisha. The novel begins in 1995 with the murder of one man (the siblings’ father) and another man Uncle ▬▬▬▬▬ working toward his American dream. From the jump, Asghar’s prose urges us to embrace the complexities of family, race, obligation, dreaming, and grieving. Her characters are achingly human in ways that make life hard for the living and easier for the dead — they are layered, hurting, and doing what they deem to be their best (well mostly — looking at you, Uncle ▬▬▬▬▬). Sandwiched between the complex characterizations of the orphaned siblings and those around them are rich commentaries about religious identity and education, paternalism, home, queerness (oooh the queer depiction is so incredibly good), and desirability — oh and birds (yes, birds!).

When We Were Sisters is not just a good book from a well-established writer; it’s an incredibly stunning story. The book has already been longlisted for the National Book Award and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and fans alike. What makes it so incredibly special is Asghar’s use of language and form to distinguish narrative shifts, illuminate the book’s themes of grieving and growing up, and invite readers to experience deep intimacy with the characters (both living and dead).

Take the excerpt below from “her,” a section in the voice of Kausar’s long-deceased mother.

“there his beautiful, stupid
eyes look at me, lost
as always.

meri jaan. 

& he nods, the promise made

say goodbye to your mother. 

none  of my children move.
goodbye, my angels.

goodbye.”

Interspersed throughout the novel are reminders of the goodbyes that never seem to end — ghosts of those who once breathed and loved, who never really leave.

“Who are they going to believe?

[me] or [you].”

When I came to this page the first time, I read this over and over and wished I could reach into the novel, hold Kausar close and tell her I choose her, tell her she matters. Tell her she can take up all the space she needs, that I will love and believe her no matter what. Of course, she cannot hear me. She is only a character that Asghar has dreamt up and written on the page. So, I tell myself instead: You matter, baby. Take up all the space you need. I will love you no matter what. 

I repeat this to myself and commit it to memory while I finish reading. This book makes you want to fight like Kausar does sometimes, for Kausar sometimes, for Noreen and Aisha, for their dad so he does not die, for Meemoo and Aunty, for the people (and animals) who deserve better in the world Asghar paints for us.

You can’t though. So you may just end up remembering to fight harder for yourself. That’s the magic of When We Were Sisters — it reminds you that you (that we all) are worthy of a fight, of living, of grieving. It is full of moments and lines that you will want to hold onto for longer than you can. Amid the fast-paced news cycles and chaos of capitalism, I found myself slowing down and sitting with Asghar’s lines for days, my soul echoing them back to the pages, “make it last, make it last, make it last…” (p. 140).

Nothing lasts, though — not our parents, not our homes, not our relationships, not us. A month before my mother died in 2015, my parents were forced out of their rent-controlled house in the dead of winter. With my mom in the hospital, I organized our extended family to pack up their house of 30 years and moved my parents into a 2-bedroom apartment in a senior living complex that smelled like moth balls and peppermint. My sister came home from college to help. We said goodbye to home before we were ready. Weeks later, we said goodbye to mama. Seven years later, we did the same with our dad. I am seasoned at saying goodbye. I know that nothing lasts — even the best stories have page limits. I knew When We Were Sisters would end; I knew (like death) it would come before I was ready to say goodbye. So, I dragged my feet finishing it and then started again. I highlighted, underlined, and memorized Asghar’s lines until I could recite passages just like my grandmama taught me to do with her favorite scriptures.

“Once upon a time, they lived in a castle, up high. Once upon a time their father was gone. But once upon a time they knew their father would come back for them. Because once upon a time he was a king. And sometimes once upon a time, kings needed to do king things, like fight dragons. And wars. And stuff. But kings always came back” (p. 35).

Once upon a time, Fatimah Asghar wrote a beautiful story. Once upon a time, she wrote a story that made us cry and made us laugh. Once upon a time, Fatimah Asghar wrote a story that made us feel like breathing and fighting (like how kings fight dragons). And sometimes, once upon a time, stories make us feel both invincible and viscerally mortal at the same time. But that story also reminded us that we are still here and as long as we are still here and we have each other, we’re gonna be alright.

“My grief calls to me, and it is loud,” teenaged Kausaur tells us. I can hear it too. Lately, it is all I can hear amid the chatter of social media trends, pop culture, academic assignments, and unread messages from friends and colleagues.

Almost three years into a global pandemic, some of us know grief better than we know ourselves. We hear it when we breathe without the ones who have left this realm. We see it in the mirror when we look at our reflection and see similarities we never did before. We notice it as the calendar passes, as time goes on, as we move on and fight through sadness we were sure would knock us out cold. But death “makes you cold,” Asghar writes (p. 6). If we, the grieving and living, are sentenced to a chilled existence, may the pages of When We Were Sisters burn bright in the darkness of this cold, may Asghar’s words warm our hearts even as our tears fall, may the defiant survival of Kausaur, Noreen, and Aisha be a flame for our respective paths toward collective survival. May we make it. 

When We Were Sisters is a necessary read for all of us —
the alive and the ghosts we carry each day,
the grown and the ones not yet done growing,
The sisters, brothers, sister-mothers, brother-fathers, and siblings,
The “family” and the family,
The ones still looking for home and those who have found it within themselves,
& the grieving — yeah, especially us.

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar is out now.

When Survival Isn’t Just About Yourself

Feature image of Blair Braverman by Kiliii Yuyan

Blair Braverman is no stranger to the wilderness. A musher who learned her trade in the folk schools of Norway and once worked as a guide on a glacier in Alaska, Blair’s Iditarod-completing sled dog team with her partner Quince have become Twitter famous for their antics, athleticism, and sweet smiles. That’s how I first discovered Blair’s work — through her iconic Twitter threads about Braver Mountain Mushing and the sweet dogs that work together to pull sleds, explore the woods, and eat the occasional bear head!

As you might expect, Blair is also a writer whose work explores survival, gender, power, and the space we inhabit both in our communities and on the planet. After her memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, came out in 2016, Blair had the opportunity to go on Discovery’s survival reality show Naked and Afraid, and her experiences on the show had her wondering…what if?

The resulting novel, Small Game, was absolutely riveting. I read it all at once without putting it down, and then I read it again. It was suspenseful, it dealt with its themes with complexity and grace, and it was queer! Truly everything I want from a good read.

I had the opportunity to speak to Blair ahead of the book’s release, and I’m so excited to share our conversation with you!

This interview contains light spoilers about the premise of Small Game.

The same yellow dog sprawls on a wooden platform with her paws wide and a book between them, and her head slightly ducked

Flame with a copy of Small Game. Image from Blair Braverman’s Twitter account.

Darcy: First of all, I know my dog Milo would never forgive me if I don’t say hi to your “porch dog,” Flame!

Blair: Oh, wow! Please return the favor!

Darcy: Did you know you wanted to write about survival? Did you know that it was going to be fiction? Did you know you wanted to frame it around a reality show? How did all of that come up?

Blair: I knew I wanted to write about survival. After Ice Cube came out, my next book was going to be a nonfiction book about apocalypse preppers. I started following local preppers, and I thought I would follow how people prepare for the end of the world as we know it, and why. And then Trump got elected, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was just like “I can’t be in this world right now.” And so that project sort of fizzled, but it was always something I was interested in.

Darcy: Preppers are fascinating.

Blair: Right. But it was bleeding too much into malicious civil war stuff and I was like, “I just wrote a book about sexual violence.” I needed to write about puppies just to clear my palate and my brain a little bit.

Darcy: For sure.

Blair: But I’ve always been fascinated by survival. I grew up on survival books, I loved them as a kid, I love them as an adult. It’s always been a sort of parallel interest of mine. But I didn’t have a concrete plan for how to put it together, and then I was invited to go on Naked and Afraid, and it was very cool. I’m super glad I did it. I had a great experience. And it was nothing like the show in this book. Actually, they let me write about it in nonfiction.

Darcy: Yeah. I read your essay in Outside.

Blair: I asked before I went, I was like, “I’m going to want to write about this,” because you sign an NDA and stuff. And they were like, “Yeah, no problem.” So that was very exciting to me.

Darcy: Your essay was fascinating. I always thought the bugs would be the worst part and then that spider bite, or whatever that was, sounded so awful.

Blair: There weren’t a lot of bugs actually because we were in such a dry climate. But honestly, the ground was very difficult. You were just always on the ground and it was covered in bugs and you had nothing to protect yourself. I was surprised that the things that I thought would be hard weren’t necessarily the things that were hardest.

Darcy: That makes sense!

Blair: And then while I was out there I had a lot of time to think about survival shows, as one does. You’re not eating or anything. You’re thinking about food and survival. I had a great crew. I had a really good crew, and I was so hyper aware of if I’d gotten a bad crew we’d be screwed. We would be so intensely vulnerable.

And then the crew would leave every night. And I would just think, “What if?” Almost an intrusive thought, like, “What if something went wrong? We have no idea where we are and we literally have a pot and a knife.” How long would it take us to realize we’d shifted from an enactment of survival to real survival, even though every day would be the same? We’d be trying to figure out how to boil water, trying to figure out how to get food, but everything would’ve changed because we wouldn’t be there by choice anymore.

Darcy: That was a part that I had underlined where one of the participants, Kyle, says “This is survival.” And Mara says, “No, this is a survival game.” And then everything switches over for them.

Blair: Oh good. I loved that thought. It was so inherently interesting to me. And it stayed in my mind. I was there for two weeks, and then I had a weird infection and went to the hospital and it got better and went home. And I still had this idea in the back of my mind, I really wanted to know what would happen if things went sideways. If someone was doing something like this and it went from a game to the real thing. Because figuring out that line, how people would transition from play survival into real survival, felt like it would teach me something about what survival was and what we’re looking for when we go out there.

And I never set out to write fiction, at all. I love reading fiction and I love writing non-fiction, and I never thought of myself as a fiction writer. But I was so obsessed with this idea and I couldn’t make it happen in nonfiction.

There’d be no way to do it unless you were doing a highly unethical experiment on other people. But you can do the unethical experiment in fiction. So at some point, I realized that if I wanted to see this story out, if I wanted to know what would happen, I was going to have to answer that question for myself. I was going to have to write it. And that’s how the book was born was just this burning curiosity about a very particular situation and how it would play out.

Darcy: It’s such an interesting question. And then also I think with it being fiction, you were able to explore the gender and power dynamics all the way through. Like from the very beginning, Mara is taking care of people, even when she’s in this situation where she’s incredibly vulnerable. The way she knows to slip into this mode with the cast and crew so that she can take care of their feelings and get through it all.

Blair: Oh, I’m so happy those dynamics were interesting to you, because I care about them a lot and I think about them a lot. And the book hasn’t hit the world yet so I haven’t heard what resonates with people. But I’m happy that those things resonated with you because they’re important to me. I mean gender and power fuses everything we do.

And if you’re in a situation where things build two basic elements, food and water, and getting through the night, these elements of gender and power don’t go away. And in some way they are distilled too. You can see them more clearly because there’s less distraction.

I think Mara is an interesting character because I wrote a book about feeling very conflicted and sometimes afraid of gender dynamics in these very remote places with Ice Cube. But with fiction you get to write a character who isn’t you, which is very refreshing. And one of the things I find interesting about Mara is she sees those dynamics, but she’s not necessarily afraid of them. She sees them in a utilitarian way; she almost uses people’s biases against them. She sees what the crew member is doing to her and she’s like, “Here’s how I can use this”. And I think a lot of people, a lot of women, do that anyway, but it’s not something I always see a lot of conversation about. If you’re going to be in a fucked up dynamic, a survival skill is learning to use it to your advantage in whatever capacity you can, even though it’s still fucked up.

Darcy: I thought it was really interesting kind of going back to Mara’s parents, the way that they emphasized mutual aid and community care, but then they didn’t really have a community. Like Mara was basically on her own and felt really isolated and at the beginning it seems like she kind of views other people as, “They’re going to need something, or they’re going to want something, and I can figure out if I know what that is. And the person I can depend on is myself.”

Blair: Absolutely. I think Mara’s parents have some really great ideas, they’ve attached themselves to some really powerful ideas, but they’re governed by fear and that’s what makes the difference. So they are so governed by terror and, I don’t want to say…reclusiveness. Yeah. How do I say this? I’m glad you brought that up.

They’re governed more by fear for themselves than fear for their community. And because of that, they’re very self protective and they’re not able to have the mutual aid and the community living that in their minds they know they should aspire to if they want to have the kind of prepper life that they want to have. And that’s sort of a conflict with preppers. When I was doing prepper research years ago, there seems to be a conflict that a lot of people doing this apocalypse prep thing have. There is a lot of suspicion of the outside world in the prepping arenas that I’ve been able to have access to. And so a common topic of conversation is, “If I saved food for my family, how do I keep it, when other people are starving and ask for it and I don’t want to give it to them?”

It’s a very family and enclave-centered thing. I mean prepping is looking at the world and saying, “It’s fucked up, so I need to make sure my family’s okay.” And one can also look at the world and say, “It’s fucked up, I need to make sure everyone’s okay to the best of my ability.”

If you’re going to be in a fucked up dynamic, a survival skill is learning to use it to your advantage in whatever capacity you can, even though it’s still fucked up.

Darcy: And community really requires trust, which is something that just isn’t there.

Blair: Yeah, absolutely. You’re looking at your neighbors and thinking, “people are starving and they’re going to storm my compound.” I remember reading on some prepper forum this elaborate plan someone had to build a fence, a big fence no one could climb over, but then make these Ziploc baggies with protein powder and antibiotics in them and fling them over the fence when strangers came by.

Darcy: Oh wow.

Blair: So it’s altruism, but without having to interact with them or have the risk of interacting with another human who might want more. Mara’s parents aren’t quite that bad, but there’s a little streak of that and that’s what she was raised with.

The original title of the book was Civilization, which is the name of the reality show in the book. And I’m very glad we changed the title, but one thing I appreciated about that working title was that I also told the story of the Civilization of Mara, like Mara learning to live with other people in a way she never has before.

Darcy: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a really sweet little queer love story in there too.

Blair: There is! It wasn’t planned, but then it started coming together and I was very happy.

Darcy: And there was a line that I underlined, “It’s really hard when you’re hungry to believe you’ll ever be full”. And it’s such a queer line. It’s so full of longing. Did you know that Mara was going to fall in love? Did you know she was going to fall in love with Ashley? Or how did that all come about?

Blair: That line felt very queer to me when I wrote it, so I’m so happy that it felt queer.

Darcy: Oh yeah.

Blair: Originally, when I was thinking of characters for the book, I was thinking of archetypes of who we expect to be on reality shows, and you have your Eagle Scout, and you have your grizzled mountain man. These are just characters we think we know. You have your girl who wants to be famous. Mara is a little bit less of an archetype, but she’s still basically the competent one.

And so originally, I didn’t know how their interactions were going to play out, but the thing about archetypes is like no one is actually an archetype. You could fit into that category, but once you get to know someone as a person they’re always infinitely more complex. When I first wrote down the categories of people I wanted to have represented, I didn’t know how they were going to interact with each other yet. I didn’t know who was going to get along and who wasn’t, and what their conflicts would be. And then as soon as I started getting to know them as people, I just felt like Mara and Ashley chose each other.

Darcy: Characters can do that!

Blair: I didn’t plan to write a love story specifically, and I wasn’t thinking of love interests when I started designing the characters. But as I started writing, it felt like Mara and Ashley chose each other. Or found each other, I guess, when they expected nothing but needed each other most. Which is how love has played out in my own life as well.

Darcy: Yeah, it’s a really good time to have queer love stories out there because it’s such an odd political time generally for so many of us. And I think the more really good queer stories out there, the better.

Blair: Always. Absolutely. I certainly didn’t grow up with any queer survival stories, so I’m happy to add to that genre. I’m sure there are some, but it’s not one I’ve had the pleasure of reading a lot of.

Darcy: Oh, I wanted to ask you, what was your favorite survival story when you were growing up?

Blair: Oh gosh, this is horrible. No, it’s fine. It’s great. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

Darcy: My dad read me Hatchet! I loved Hatchet as a kid.

Blair: It’s so good. But the book that I love the most, which in retrospect I’m like, “Oh, this was the only survival book that I really read as a kid that involved girls where girls were the ones surviving wilderness”. Everything else that I read was a boy. And I know there are some with girls, I just hadn’t found them as a child. It was a book called Baby Island.

Darcy: (laughs) Oh!

Blair: It’s an old book. My mom read it growing up and she gave it to me. And it’s these two girls who are stranded on a desert island with a lot of babies.

Darcy: Oh my gosh.

Blair: And they have to learn to deal with colic and teach the babies to respect the Lord’s Day.

Darcy: I think there was a Babysitters Club book that ripped that off. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like it would’ve been 100% up my alley.

Blair: Yeah, it has a lot of problems. But I gave it to a friend recently and she was like, “Where has this been all my life”?

Darcy: Yeah! Ok, getting back to Mara, it feels like Mara did end up finding her community and by the end she… I mean she always kind of felt this way, but she says, “There’s no reason to make life harder. There’s no reason to make life hard at all”. But it felt like by the end she felt that about other people, whereas at the beginning she kind of just felt that about washing machines.

Blair: Say more!

Darcy: It seemed like she was able to connect with people by the end of the book in a way that she just really hadn’t learned how to do previously in her life.

Blair: I think so. I think she really did. I think that was the first time she’d been in community in any sort of real way, any sort of inter-reliant community. And I think she went on the show to change her life and she’s going to go out of there a lot better. The wilderness has prepared her for the world of people, in a way she certainly never expected going into it, because she didn’t know that she needed the world of people.

Darcy: Amazing. I really loved her arc!

Thank you so much for speaking with me, Blair!

Blair: By the way, I just want to say Autostraddle means so much to so many people. And it’s meant a lot for me in my life and in my journey! I just know the work you do for so many people and having a place and having the content you put out, it just makes such a big difference. So I’m in awe of all of you. You do such an important thing for the world. Thank you.

Darcy: Oh my goodness. Well, thank you. I feel so honored. They were very, very important for me as I was going through my journey, and I feel really, really honored to be able to be a part of that. And I agree. I’ll pass all of that along! It’s so kind.

Blair: Yeah, absolutely. They’re lucky to have you and we’re all lucky to have them.

Small Game by Blair Braverman comes out tomorrow, November 1.

A+ Read a Fucking Book Club Q&A with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

If it’s one thing we do well at Autostraddle, it’s holding spooky season in our hearts well after Halloween. There’s nothing like a ghost story in December to add layers to the chill in the air, to make you question whether that draft on the back of your neck is because you’re afraid to turn the heat up or something less sinister, like the deathly breath of a poltergeist.

And this December, we’re going to kick off the third year of The13 Days of A+ (as defined as “like the 12 days of Christmas + the Devil” by Riese, but which is 13 days of saying THANK YOU to our members) with an A+ Read a Fucking Book Club Discord Q&A with our very own resident published horror author, Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya! She wrote lesbian ghost novelette, Helen House, which I was honored to interview her about and which Stef reviewed and which we are all just really excited by! Want to get into Kayla’s head? Want to tell her that the book appeared in your dreams? This is your chance!

The details:

How do I read Helen House?

You can buy it from Bookshop to support Autostraddle and indie bookstores! If you want bonus points (that you can exchange for hauntings), this is far enough in advance that you can request your library get a couple copies!

How do I get on the pop-up Discord?

First, you’ll need to make sure you’re an A+ member! A+ members support everything Autostraddle does, and they get all kinds of bonus content as thanks — now including access to the A+ Read a Fucking Book Club!

A post will re-appear on the day of the event, behind the A+ paywall, with the link and join widget, about fifteen minutes before it starts at 4:45pm PST, so that A+ members can join.

When is this again?

It’s taking place on Tuesday, December 13, so you have plenty of time to dig into the book! It’s happening from 5pm PST to 6:30pm PST. Times in some other zones are as follows:

  • 8 – 9:30pm, Eastern Standard Time
  • 1am – 2:30am, London, UK
  • 2am – 3:30am, Berlin, Germany
  • 8am – 9:30am, Tuesday, December 14, Hong Kong
  • 9am – 10:30am, Tuesday, December 14, Australian Central Time

What if I can’t make it? The time doesn’t work for me :(

I’m sorry (especially if this is in the middle of the night where you are)! This is always so hard. We have to host most events within times that are reasonable for the team working them and the author participating. However, I will publish the transcript the following week behind the A+ paywall, so you will still be able to catch up on the chat! AND ALSO this is on the A+ pop-up discord which I am telling you right now is going to be up and running for the whole 13 Days of A+, so you’ll be able to read back in the channel where the book club happens and Kayla may pop back in to answer further questions, too!

P.S. If you’re in Europe (truly being hit the hardest by the time zone situation here) or anywhere else where this is straight up in the middle of the night for you, and you have a question you’d love to see asked, you can email me at nico[at]autostraddle.com with the subject line BOOK CLUB QUESTION and I’ll collect them all and ask them on your behalf, and then the transcript will be available the following week for you to check out! I know it’s not a perfect solution, but when it comes to events with live humans who go to sleep at night within their respective time zones, it’s the best we can do right now.

What will the event be like?

It will be a text-based Q&A within Discord. I (Nico) will be there to moderate / help with flow. Basically, read the book (or as much as you can), bring your questions for the author, and ask those questions in the chat! Kayla will be there to talk with everyone and can you tell I’m shaking with a combination of terror and excitement? I am shaking!

Accessibility

We want Autostraddle events to be as accessible as possible and we opted to go with a text-based chatting format via Discord in large part because it was one of the most accessible ways to hold this virtual event, not just in terms of audio/visual accessibility, but also because we know it can be hard to ask a question out loud or know when to jump into a conversation. We hope this helps things go as smoothly as is possible for a virtual event. That said, if there are accommodations that would make it easier for you to attend this event, please reach out to me at nico[at]autostraddle.com to let me know. Also, here’s a link to a guide on using Discord with a screen reader. 

Ciara Smyth’s Queer YA Books Remind Me of Being a Teenager

I’m starting with my thesis right off the bat here: Ciara Smyth is one of the best authors in queer YA right now. Granted, she’s only two books into her career — The Falling In Love Montage (2020) and Not My Problem (2021) — but both are as hilarious as they are moving, with a very authentic and empathetic feel to her queer teenage characters. There are few YA authors whose characterization truly reminds me of being a teenager myself and who show that they really know and respect today’s teens, but Smyth is the real deal!

I recently finished Not My Problem, berating myself for being late to the party, as it was published in May last year. It is quite simply contemporary (queer) YA at its finest. I closed the book (metaphorically, since I was listening to the audio version) declaring that I would follow
Ciara Smyth wherever she and her writing went from now on. Not My Problem is laugh-out-loud funny, make-you-cry sad, and everything in between.

The novel is about 16-year-old Aideen, an Irish lesbian in her transition year who is struggling to keep the pieces of her life together. Her friendship with her longtime best friend Holly has slowly been deteriorating, with Holly becoming increasingly distant and indifferent. Her single mam has been left (again) by her piece of shit dad — who’s married and has kids with someone else — and is coping by starting to drink again. Aideen is falling behind and getting increasingly bad grades in all her classes. She feels responsible for taking care of her mam, and it’s cutting into her responsibilities at school.

This sounds like a lot; it is a lot. But Not My Problem is far from heavy. Partly because Aideen is such a wonderfully funny character, whose sarcastic jibes can compete with the best. But it’s also that Smyth refuses to wallow in the bad stuff and allows Aideen to be a well rounded teenager who’s not defined by being poor, or “at risk,” or the kid who’s had social services involved in her life. The book features ample high school shenanigans, queer crushes, new friendships, and an entrepreneurial endeavor with a very teenage feel.

It’s this entrepreneurial endeavor that is the catalyst for the plot. Aideen is minding her own business, having gotten out of gym with yet another parental note, which of course she writes herself. In the bathroom, she runs into Maebh, the principal’s daughter who is the definition of overachiever. Maebh is having a breakdown because of her overwhelming schedule and the pressure (external and internal) to excel at everything. She can’t possibly do it all, but the idea of quitting anything is laughable. When Aideen makes a joke that she’ll just have to break her ankle so she can quit all the sports teams and skip gym class, Maebh jumps on the idea, until she’s begging Aideen to just give her a little push down the stairs. When Aideen finally scrunches her eyes closed and relents, it’s a success: but only a sprain, luckily. It’s a bizarre yet bonding beginning for a burgeoning romance between Aideen and Maebh, as well as a very cute friendship trio between Aideen, Maebh, and Kavi, a guy who’d been sent to find the two girls and couldn’t help overhearing what happened.

Overachieving Maebh is mostly reviled at her school, though, for being too smart for her own good and for having too much earnest enthusiasm about stuff like environmental activism and school politics. Aideen first sees her as an enemy, and that’s not just because Maebh is the academic and athletic rival of Holly, Aideen’s best friend. Maebh has a reputation for being, well, annoying. She knows better and is cleverer than almost everyone and she doesn’t hide it. Of course, there’s a vulnerability in her that Aideen first glimpses in the bathroom and that is slowly revealed as the girls get to know each other. Although they first laugh it off, they later discuss how serious it is that Maebh was willing to harm herself instead of talking to her parents and cutting down on her insane schedule.

But back to Aideen the teenage entrepreneur. Kavi, although he faithfully keeps the promise of not repeating any details of what happened with Maebh and Aideen, does pass on the idea that Aideen is a cool kid who is up for doing unorthodox favors. Cue the teenage shenanigans I mentioned earlier. Soon her classmates are vying for Aideen’s favors, for which the only payment she asks is an unspecified favor in return in the future. Being the do-gooder at heart that Aideen is, she mostly uses these payment favors to do favors for the next teen who desperately needs her help, whether it’s buying the morning-after pill for someone whose dad is the chemist (pharmacist for us North Americans), breaking into the school to delete sexts off a confiscated cell phone, or helping a kid with super strict parents sneak out of the house and go to a party.

Aideen initially wants to orchestrate the favors all by herself, wanting to minimize the risk of others getting in trouble. But one of the lessons she learns over the course of the book is that it’s a sign of strength to ask for help when you need it. It’s a deeply moving journey that Aideen does not make without multiple stumbles. But even when she’s making big mistakes and pushing people away because she’s internalized the idea that she can only depend on herself, Aideen is effortlessly lovable. I wish I’d had a cool lesbian friend like her as a teenager!

Aideen’s also learning how to make new friends and evaluate what makes a good friend. There is a friend breakup scene in this book that was so real and sad I had tears streaming down my face as I was reading. But I’m always thrilled to see friendship breakups given the gravity they deserve. At the same time, Aideen’s burgeoning friendship with Kavi and Maebh, brought together by the favor business, is a true delight. A particularly memorable scene at a party has the three friends sitting in a bathtub wearing only towels while their rain drenched clothes and underwear dry in the host’s dryer. A heart-to-heart of the kind that can only occur when you’ve been through the kind of wild adventure that they just have and are essentially naked and vulnerable ensues.

Smyth’s first book, The Falling In Love Montage, similarly gives the spotlight to an Irish lesbian teen who is having difficulty being vulnerable. It follows the protagonist Saoirse for the summer after she graduates from high school. She meets a girl staying in her seaside town named Ruby. Ruby is a rom-com aficionado, and she convinces Saoirse to embark on a tour through the tropes of rom-coms — hence the title — like going to a fair and having a phone conversation where neither of them want to hang up.

Saoirse is determined to keep the relationship light and fun, despite her growing feelings for Ruby. There are a lot of reasons: her best friend turned girlfriend who she thought she’d be with forever broke up with her recently. Saoirse is terrified of having her heart broken again. The fallout soured her friendship with their mutual friend too.

But most of all, it’s the fact that her mom has early onset dementia and lives in a full time care home. Saoirse visits her every day but her mom no longer remembers who she is. Her mom’s condition is genetic, and it’s making Saoirse feel like it’s not worth investing in anything: a relationship, or the conditional acceptance she’s received to Oxford. She’s also furious at her dad, who wants to get remarried.

As you can tell, The Falling In Love Montage isn’t the lighthearted rom-com the cover might lead you to believe, although rom-com fans will enjoy all the references sprinkled throughout. If you’re looking for an HEA, this is not your book. Instead, though, Smyth opts for an equally sad, funny, and thoughtful story that feels very true to an older queer teen’s experiences and mistakes.

If you haven’t had a chance to pick up either of Ciara Smyth’s YA books, I highly encourage you to! If you are not Irish, like me, I recommend the audiobook format so you can luxuriate in the Irish accents and relax knowing that people and place names are being pronounced as they should be. Have you already read The Falling In Love Montage (2020) and/or Not My Problem (2021)? Join me in the comments to talk about them!

Quiz: Which Sapphic Asexual Book Should You Read This Ace Week?

Happy Ace Week everyone! Have you been looking to read more ace books? I’ve got a quiz for that. Answer a few simple questions — like what you would sell your soul for and who your favorite superhero is — and I will recommend a sapphic asexual book for you to read! Options include YA, essay collections, graphic memoirs, fantasy, romance, and science fiction! If you just can’t get enough of ace lady-loving ladies, check out this list of books with bi- or homoromantic ace women characters I made a few years ago.

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Jeanna Kadlec’s “Heretic” Is a Memoir for the Witches Who Grew From Good Christian Women

In the 2008 vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin — former Alaska governor and John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s white evangelical Jesus — called upon Americans to remember their destiny as a City On A Hill, a shining light of unapologetic Christianity for all the world to see. She attributed the metaphor to Ronald Reagan, which makes sense because it was the former president’s favorite phrase to trot out every time he needed to justify… well, anything. We are God’s chosen people, are we not? A lighthouse of His righteous judgment, withstanding the world’s storm of godlessness. Of course, it wasn’t Reagan who coined the phrase; that honor belongs to Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop, who roared it on the bow of his ship in the 1600s as he and his Puritan pals set sail for modern day New England. In one hand: a Bible. In the other: The official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which depicts an American Indian in a loincloth begging, “Come over and help us!” Once he arrived, Winthrop established the first slave-holding colony in New England, and he and his son and grandson all became judges in the witch trials.

This is the history of the United States of America. Racism disguised as charity. Misogyny disguised as protection. Violence disguised as peace. Paranoia disguised as a Word from God.

Enter Jeanna Kadlec’s new memoir, Heretic, a deep, sprawling, incisive indictment of the Christian cancer that eats away at our souls. Heretic is part memoir, part cultural critique, part political analysis, and part history, all viewed through the queer lens of a woman who grew up in the Midwest trying her hardest to be a Good Christian Girl, before finally accepting she’s a lesbian and nearly gnawing off her own arm to escape before she could be burned at the stake by her personal Winthrops, including her abusive ex-husband. It’s personal, visceral and harrowing. And it’s academic, pulling on disparate threads, from pop culture to political punditry, and weaving them together with Maddow-esque precision to reveal the gory workings of white Evangelicalism.

Jeanna grew up in rural Iowa, an overachieving daughter of parents with varying, evolving degrees of commitment to their faith. But not Jeanna. She strived to be everything Jesus wanted her to be, to grow into that kind of Proverbs 31 woman the church reveres. The problem is: she was pulled to the way that wife of legend “speaks up for those who cannot speak for themselves,” and less drawn to the way she gets out of bed before the sun and goes back to bed after everyone in her family is clothed in garments she knitted with bleeding fingers and fed with food she grew and cooked with burnt hands. The boys in Jeanna’s youth group abused and harassed her. The men in her church condemned her outspokenness — and her femininity. She was admonished to be pure, while being treated as a perpetual object of lust. She had no desire to submit to her husband as she did to the Lord, the way Paul commanded, but she married a man anyway, because it was what she was supposed to do. Church was her life. Her faith was grounded in its teachings, most of her friends were similarly devout, and her husband had planned out her future with his God-given authority.

When she finally accepted her sexuality and came out, she didn’t just lose her marriage — she lost her whole community and the tentpoles of an identity she’d spent an entire life building.

A memoir with the scope of Heretic could easily turn into a tornado of outrage and despair. The point is: Christianity didn’t just try to destroy my life; it has — and always will be — intent on destroying everything of actual value in this world. But there’s an intellectual precision and rigor to Jeanna’s fury. And found within its white-hot flames are engaging stories of sex and love and community care and deep friendships and tarot and astrology and Dungeons & Dragons. There is a hard-won hope that permeates even the darkest moments and a genuine belief in the power of queer humankind. It’s a story about taking back your life by no longer consenting to be shamed.

When I heard conservative critics calling Heretic “inflammatory,” I laughed until my stomach hurt. It’s the oldest and most ironic play in the Puritan handbook. It’s claiming that it’s worse to be called a homophobe than it is to be a homophobe. It’s alleging that being held accountable for bigotry is its own kind of “intolerance.” It’s building a ship and sailing 20,000 colonizers across the ocean to inflict a genocide on native people so you can make money and be the new king, and calling that “fleeing religious persecution.”

It’s calling a woman a witch for practicing the art of healing.

Pat Robertson, the Religious Right leader who is thought to be responsible for Reagan’s whole city on a hill thing, once proclaimed that the ​​feminist agenda encourages women to practice witchcraft and become lesbians. This memoir lays bare the hypocrisy and pure evil of Robertson and his ilk. Weirdly, though, he was correct about the witches and the lesbians. And thank God for that. Thank God for the heretics, for the Jeanna Kadlecs and the Jezebels, for the Bridget Bishops and the Anne Hutchinsons. For having seen what’s invisible, and for revealing it, so we no longer fear what any man can do to us.

Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec comes out October 25 and is available for preorder.

A Queer Woman’s Place Is in the Horror Story

Let me set the scene. I’m 15, a sophomore in high school, and I’ve just been assigned to read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” I look at the title: boring. I see when it was published (1948?!): my hopes for a good read are low. I begin reading, expecting a droning story about a Lotto-esque sweepstakes, some commentary on luck and money and maybe the Great Depression–

I am terribly, deliciously wrong.

For those unfamiliar with Jackson’s seminal short story, “The Lottery,” it’s about a community that, every year, chooses one person through a lottery system to be stoned to death. That year’s victim is wife and mother Tessie Hutchinson, who protests the lottery’s unfairness up until that first stone strikes. Its themes are echoed in more recent media, from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games to dystopian film series The Purge. It’s a wild ride masquerading as a simple tale about a farming town’s summer traditions, a seemingly innocuous story that morphs to horror only in its final lines.

To say I was foaming at the mouth after reading “The Lottery” would be dramatic — but not inaccurate. Though I’d loved horror my whole life, starting with the Goosebumps books in kindergarten, I’d never seen a scary story told quite like this. Jackson’s work was my first foray into domestic horror, and it opened the floodgates. And as I continued reading the genre, as I devoured Jackson’s oeuvre and branched out to other authors, as I got older and came to understand my sexuality, I realized, wait a second — domestic horror is gay as hell.

Domestic horror, the way I’m thinking about it, has a broader definition than simply “horror of the home and family.” It’s about unsettled mundanity: everyday, routine events in a world marked by patriarchy and heteronormativity that are laced with a building unease that gives way to ultimate creepiness. We’re talking “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jane Eyre. (We’re not actually talking about those works today, but both are also very queer. I’m certainly not the first person to say so, but I will talk to you about it at length if you let me.)

Going back to Jackson, she’s pretty much the queen of this genre. The Haunting of Hill House, her thrice-adapted haunted mansion novel, immediately comes to mind. A classic set-up: Four characters meet at the decaying Hill House to participate in an occult scholar’s ghost hunt, and paranormal events begin to consume their lives. The two most important characters, in my opinion, are artist Theodora, who has a “friend with whom she shares an apartment” (read: girlfriend), and reserved, misanthropic Eleanor. The two are drawn together throughout the novel, experiencing various ghostly encounters and a lot of sexual tension. Though the women never have a big kiss or other explicitly gay moment (and it’s sometimes implied that Eleanor is attracted to one or the other men in the novel) there’s no doubt to how their interactions are coded. There’s a moment in the middle of the novel, for example, when Eleanor is lying in Theodora’s bed (!!!!!) and watching the other woman paint her nails. When Theodora paints Eleanor’s own toe nails, Eleanor freaks out, feeling “wicked” and dirty and too visible. Panicking about your sexuality much?

If you are so inclined, you could even read this book as Eleanor’s queer awakening, as she grows attached to Hill House despite its dangers. Yes, the story ends with her sort of kind of losing her mind, forced to leave the house, and driving her car into a tree, which we must assume ends in her death, and of course we love our lesbians alive and kicking. But consider that The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1959. Being gay or being a woman left you with pretty bleak prospects in the 50s; being both was even harder. Perhaps Jackson was commenting on what she perceived to be an impossibility for such a queer relationship to exist in the real world, or in this case, outside of a dark and twisted haunted house. We know that Jackson herself was in a largely unhappy marriage with a cheating misogynist, so maybe she herself wished for a Theodora to sweep her off her feet, but was continually faced with the alleged impropriety of such desires.

One small win for the gays, though: Mike Flanagan’s 2018 TV adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, set in contemporary times, gives queer women a moment in the spotlight. Though it takes major liberties with the plot, like making Eleanor and Theodora sisters, the series does portray Theodora as the raging lesbian we queer Jackson readers knew she was all along.

Jackson’s focus on women in terrifying situations is a throughline in all of her work, and while the queerness of her characters is not always immediately obvious, it’s definitely there. Take her final work, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, an eerie whodunnit about two sisters with dead parents that one of them may or may not have poisoned. When their male cousin shows up to help them out, the women ultimately reject his presence and find strength in each other. Not explicitly gay, because, like, sisters, but queer in the sense of women refusing a man’s guidance and striking out on their own. Then there’s Hangsaman, which follows Natalie Waite, freshman at a historical women’s college, as she enters a perilous limbo between a fling with her married professor and a quickly intensifying friendship with fellow student Tony. While it’s not a traditional horror text — no ghosts or monsters, no slashers or sadists — Hangsaman is unrelentingly eerie. Natalie and Tony’s relationship snowballs into increasingly dangerous encounters, culminating in a familiar situation for many queer girls: an epic and catastrophic friend breakup. Once again, we see a tortured and complicated woman unwilling, or perhaps unable, to accept her queerness.

We get it! I hear you yelling at your screen. Shirley Jackson writes tragic gay horror! And as much as I think that can never be emphasized enough, I’m not just here to point out every gay moment in Jackson’s body of work. But I do want to continue thinking about domestic horror, and specifically, the inherent, inescapable queerness of the genre.

So let’s talk about Rebecca. I first encountered Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic gothic novel through its 1940 Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of the same name and immediately had to get my hands on the book. Nevermind that I was a relentless horror kid with a penchant for eerie women; this story was bewitching for its exploration of jealousy and grief, as the narrator — an unnamed new wife to a widower whose beautiful first wife died in a sailing accident — contends with the haunting memory of her husband’s dead spouse, Rebecca, and the hatred of Rebecca’s housekeeper and childhood nanny, Mrs. Danvers.

There’s a lot to say about queerness in this novel, not least that du Maurier herself was both confirmed bisexual and possibly trans, having said multiple times throughout her life that she felt like a boy on the inside, a “half-breed” caught between genders. Her own life is something of a queer domestic story, as she played the role of dutiful spouse while falling in love with her publisher’s wife, who made her feel like “a boy of eighteen again.” Similarly, the narrator of Rebecca refers to herself as “a sort of boy” and develops a fascination with the deceased titular character, daydreaming about the other woman’s body and possessions. Mrs. Danvers, too, has long been read as a lesbian, her love for Rebecca veering into romantic obsession. But perhaps the queerest character in the novel is the one who doesn’t exist in its present: Rebecca herself. Later in the novel, it’s revealed that Rebecca’s death wasn’t an accident, that her husband, Maxim, had caused the boat wreck that killed her. Why? Because Rebecca’s role as dignified lady of the house had been a sham, he said. She played the part, but was all the while pursuing pleasure in the city with any number of suitors. Maxim describes her as a woman incapable of love, a woman who was “not even normal.” If that’s not coded language, I don’t know what is. It certainly wouldn’t be a leap to assume that Rebecca was described in this way because some of the subjects of her affection were also women.

Repeated in these older domestic horror novels is the idea that queer women are incompatible with a fully lived life, not because they don’t deserve to exist but because the world of the novels, and of mid-20th century society, couldn’t fathom a reality with them in it. And it’s not just stories of the mid-1900s; contemporary authors are still struggling with this dynamic. I’m thinking about Carmen Maria Machado’s short story that started my obsession with her fiction: “The Husband Stitch.” Its plot is based on “The Green Ribbon,” the equally creepy story from Alvin Schwartz’s book for young readers In a Dark, Dark Room and my personal obsession as a child that, now that I think about it, might have catalyzed my love for horror. In both stories, the main character has a green ribbon around her neck that her husband longs to untie. When he finally does, her head falls off. Machado expands the tale to include other women, all of whom have ribbons tied around some part of their body, and turns a spare spooky story into a haunting meditation on the violating asks (sometimes demands) that men make of the women they’re intimate with and the stories we tell about those women.

An interesting thing about this story, especially amidst the very gay collection it’s part of, is that it’s really quite straight: Machado once described it as “a horror story of heterosexuality.” The narrator enjoys sex with her husband; she genuinely finds him nice. Apart from a briefly mentioned fascination with another woman from her art class, which isn’t explicitly romantic and which she openly shares with her husband, it’s harder to pinpoint sapphic attraction in Machado’s story than in Jackson’s or du Maurier’s. But the queerness of “The Husband Stich,” like those novels, once again lies in its main character’s fragile grasp on life outside of the domestic norms of husband, wife, and child and her attempts to exist beyond them. She spends her married life trying to keep her husband away from her ribbon, only for him to eventually betray her wishes. The patriarchal, heteronormative haze of her society prevents her from keeping anything for herself, just as Eleanor can’t continue a life outside of Hill House, Natalie cannot stay sane in a friendship with Tony, and Rebecca cannot fulfill her “abnormal” desires.

Another woman suffering from the confines of domesticity is Ogechi in Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short story “Who Will Greet You at Home.” I think this story is gorgeous, and it’s different from the others I’ve introduced because of its distinct absence of male characters. Instead, the world Arimah invites us into is full of women who, in order to have a child, must create baby-shaped creatures out of found objects, have them blessed by their mothers, and keep them alive for a full year before they transform into real human babies. It’s queer in the autonomy of its women, but also, in my opinion, because it explores gender and what it means to be feminine. We find main character Ogechi in the throes of babymaking, scorned by her community for her insistence on making a daughter out of soft, fragile materials. “Bring me a child with edges,” her mother tells her, destroying Ogechi’s attempts made from cotton and paper. When Ogechi makes a child from scraps of hair, something she’s always been warned not to do, its insatiable hunger leads her to a harrowing decision. Here, again, is a story about a woman’s desire, this time for a “pretty and tender” child, and about her child’s desire for, well, human flesh. Both wants are stymied, but this time there are no men involved, no all-consuming patriarchy. Instead, Ogechi, a woman formed from “pedestrian items,” is struggling against her society’s insistence that she make a sturdy child that can handle a difficult life. This, she thinks, is at odds with her want for a child that is “worthy of love,” which, in her estimation, is one built delicately, from feminine materials. A body like hers, rougher and removed from femininity, will not receive care in the same way, even in a world seemingly absent of gender roles. In the space between the child she hopes for and the one she eventually makes out of clay is Ogechi’s reckoning with gender, femininity, and her own perceived lack of loveliness. (You can also read this story as a subtle but effective commentary on class, but that’s for another essay).

I want to look at one more work together: queer and nonbinary author Sarah Gailey’s 2021 novel, The Echo Wife. To summarize briefly, narrator and clone scientist Evelyn Caldwell discovers that her husband Nathan is cheating her with Martine, a replica wife made of Evelyn’s own DNA — except more obedient, subservient, and willing to give him a child, which, critically, Evelyn is not. When Martine defies her coding and kills Nathan, the two women are brought together to keep his death a secret by creating a clone of their own. It’s more sci-fi thriller than horror, but very much creepy and decidedly domestic, as Evelyn helps Martine play house to keep up appearances. Already, Martine being a clone of Evelyn carries echoes of queer replication — lesbians who look alike and queers that dress the same — but there is also Evelyn’s fascination with Martine’s physicality as a mirror image of her own. The pair never have a romantic or sexual relationship, though it’s interesting to think about the ethical implications of that — Would it be autoeroticism? Incest? — but at the end of the novel, they do run away to Evelyn’s childhood house, where the three of them (Evelyn, Martine, and Martine’s baby, Violet) become a sort of family unit, hidden from prying eyes. Gailey’s novel is deeply queer from start to finish, if not because of explicit relationships then for Evelyn’s refusal of motherhood, Martine’s murder of her partner and creator, and most of all the distorted domestic partnership the two women form in order to keep each other safe.

Now that I’ve spent a nice long time literarily analyzing the queerness of several works of domestic horror, I have to say I’m not just trying to convince you that these individual novels and stories are gay but wish to point out a pattern in the genre. What it all boils down to is that domestic horror is queer whether or not its plot or characters show explicit queerness. It’s queer, inherently, because of the subject matter it grapples with. The women of this genre yearn for something beyond the confines of home and heterosexual family, and what is more queer than wanting what society says you cannot have? The terrifying parts of these stories are not the women themselves but what their worlds, our world, have defined as a normal life. Traditional domesticity is exposed for the repressive, sometimes dangerous sham we queer people have long known it to be; the characters, regardless of their on-page sexuality, defy the mold just like we do, and often suffer for it just like we have. But more than anything, domestic horror reinforces the idea that the ideal life for queer people, and likely for all people, is incompatible with so-called normal home and family structures. In order to achieve the lives the women in these stories (and some of their authors) cannot, we must reimagine our world, build another in its place whose focus is our collective liberation.

Horror Is So Gay is a series on queer and trans horror edited by Autostraddle Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya running throughout October.

Rainbow Reading: So! Many! Queer! Books!

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey hi hello, friends!

I’m one lucky gal. Last week, I got to interview thee Sadie Dupuis of sad13, Speedy Ortiz, Wax Nine, and fucking-good-poetry fame about her latest collection Cry Perfume, and in a beautifully unplanned twist of fate, I was in Cleveland Ohio visiting family over the weekend just in time to catch the final stop on her book tour with the brilliant Michael DeForge! It was a perfect night —even though my beloved baseball team lost, there’s nothing that some breathtaking bar-basement literary hijinks (and Halloween-themed cocktails afterward!) can’t cure.

I also want to congratulate our beloved Kayla on the launch this week of Helen House, her beautiful queer horror novelette! If you haven’t taken a look at her interview with Nico about it or Stef’s beautiful review, get on in there! You can get your copy of Helen House here <3

Okiedoke, this week’s roster is a long’un so let’s make like disco and boogie! This week on Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

https://twitter.com/gendereveal/status/1580022223976673280?s=20&t=QSJbZNQDGSHYmnpyc5YBmA
Loving reminder to my fav cool trans writers, artists, and organizers — the Gender Reveal grant deadline is coming up!!
https://twitter.com/sharpegirl/status/1577694319435075598?s=20&t=OED54fv-1T-bIRnpOhjtew
Important thread here about predatory presses for marginalized creators ~

“The narrative itself is a fresh take on the haunted house/haunted person story, which makesHelen Housefeel especially extraordinary. But what is truly special about this big little story is the way Upadhyaya builds profound atmospheric tension in a small amount of space and flips certain tropes in stunning directions.”

— Stef Rubino in their review of Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya’s Helen House!

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

I KNOW I SAY THIS EVERY WEEK BUT IT’S NOT MY FAULT I’M ALWAYS RIGHT: It’s been a rad couple of weeks for books coverage here at Autostraddle, our team of (hot, charming, brilliant, wonderful) readers is on their absolute A-Game, and now’s your time to get all caught up on the goodies!

https://twitter.com/queergirlblogs/status/1581701788461281280?s=20&t=P6s5IisLXGtH0Hv6XPONAg

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

Chance and Error Are Friends to Sadie Dupuis’ Writing Process

When asked about my (deep, profound) fan love of Sadie Dupuis, it can be hard to know where to begin. From her musical projects Speedy Ortiz and sad13, to her sly and sparkling poetry, Sadie Dupuis is one of the most invigorating and original creators working today, so I joke that she’s one of those people who is simply too good at too many things. Leave some genius for the rest of us, Sadie!

But my dumb little joke belies the deep care and generosity at the heart of Dupuis’ oeuvre. Her latest collection of poems, Cry Perfume (out now from Black Ocean), is a powerful collision of recollection and reaction. It ranges from the ways that technology has reshaped the music industry, to the backstage realities of performing life, to the grief and galvanization that comes from losing loved ones to overdoses, to the ways that our memories can open doors into our futures if we are brave and gentle enough to make positive change. What’s the opposite of a sophomore slump? On the heels of her glittering first collection Mouthguard, Cry Perfume is a triumph.

For this conversation, lightning struck twice: I caught up with Sadie while she was on the road book-touring with her friend Michael DeForge (whose beautiful book Birds of Maine is out now from Drawn & Quarterly), chatting about poetry and perfume. Little did I know that, flying homeward a few days later, I’d be in Cleveland in time to attend her last tour stop and continue IRL our conversation about Veronica Mars, harm reduction, and comedic artistry!

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Yash: The collection is collected into five sections, each named for a compound phrase containing the name of a color (“Blue Hour”, “Red Arsenic” etc.). How did you arrive at this structure, and how would you trace the collection’s trajectory from each color-section to the next?

Sadie: The poems in my last book, Mouthguard, received a lot of feedback as they were in progress — through workshops, gauging reactions at live readings, through friends and my editors at Gramma. It was valuable to consider many other readers while still writing, but I wanted to try something new on my next collection. So I wrote Cry Perfume in more of a vacuum, typically busting out a poem a day on different stretches of touring between 2016-2020. As lockdown began, I realized I had a ton of poems that had barely been through an editing process. I was able to identify certain themes I’d returned to — grief, music work, the encroachment of tech, harm reduction — and revise with those ideas in mind. And literal isolation did lend itself to editing in solo mode!

Oh absolutely, I can imagine. 

When I finally shared the in-progress manuscript with some friends, I got essential feedback from Dorothea Lasky, who basically told me — I’m paraphrasing — that I’d frontloaded too many quippy poems and then had too many long bummer poems feeding into one another. She suggested I write down every theme I observed in each poem and try to section according to those themes. My apartment was a mess of papers scribbled over incoherently, but I settled on “death, sound, mirrors, euphoria, and night.” Which aren’t very fun section titles! With the collection named Cry Perfume, finding perfumes that correlated to those themes seemed a more fitting route. A couple perfume head friends pointed me toward fragrance blogs, which I perused for a few weeks. I flagged (and in some cases slightly modified or mistranslated) names of perfumes that evoked the section’s major theme. A lot of perfumes happen to mention colors, and I liked the way both scents and colors summon emotion well. (Plus I am usually always wearing a ton of loud colors at once, and I liked that my book could, too.)

Oh my gosh, perfume names! L’heur Bleu! What a perfect connection. We see so many books that draw on visual art, and smell feels like an often underutilized sensory mine. What are some other ways that fragrance (as symbol, as image, whatever) informed this collection? 

Yeah. I have a funny relationship to smell in that I had broken my nose a couple times as a kid, and my septum was so severely deviated that my nasal pathways were almost entirely occluded until I had surgery a few years ago. I had no sense of smell until around 2018. When I started, I had been able to smell things as a kid and I could smell things very faintly, but on tour, if everybody else was like, “Oh God, it smells awful in here,” I would have no idea what they were talking about (which is a blessing in many ways).

I think for many people, smell is really tied up in memory. People will recall a cream that their grandmother used and that will evoke a flood of memories. For a book that is so much about grieving and memory, I liked being able to evoke this other sense that is so often strongly correlated to memory and the past. Even though scent is not the sense that I’m relying on most of the time (I’m very sight oriented or sound oriented), I like being able to weave it in this way with perfume titles, which are so dramatic and evocative, and in this case, colorful.

Sadie Dupuis on tour for Cry Perfume, sitting on stage with two other performers

Yeah, especially for a sense that is so far removed from language. I think with sound, we have speech and with sight we have texts, but with smell there is so much less connection to language. I thought that was a really, really cool leap.

After those thematic ways I’d oriented the book, I was like, “I can think of a better way to talk about night, to talk about mirrors, to talk about loss.” Perfumes just often have quite dark or sad sounding names, because they are playing off a spectrum of feelings and memories. It was perfect to be able to go through these blogs and mine them for names that felt right.

In “Fuck No To All That” you begin with this couplet: “I’m not adventurous in my work today./ I’m not diving into the skin of horrors.” Elsewhere, you say “I can’t write memoir, I’m scared/ the men in my life will see themselves.” I loved these moments! For such an emotionally rigorous and reflective collection, this is an interesting deviation from confession. How do you transform biographical material into this collection to “transcend time and place”?

My artistic impulses tend toward misusing the creative process like therapy — and with much of this book centered around grief, oops I did it again! Having to explain my projects after they’re released can be retraumatizing, but I just don’t learn my lesson since writing is tightly woven into how I make sense of my world. Writing more broadly about the communities of which I’m part, it’s impossible to erase empathy and care from my work (or anger and derision) if those feelings are tied into the events I’m recalling. But the experience of losing friends to overdose — a preventable death that U.S. drug policy exacerbates — isn’t unique to me. And the experience of an arts worker lamenting exploitation in their industry, especially when tech is involved, isn’t unique to me or to music. So my presumption is that those personal feelings do transcend my personal history.

The “I can’t write memoir” poem you mention came out of my work teaching writing. On maybe three different occasions I had students imply to me they felt they could not broach a topic or genre because men in their lives would take that writing personally, which would put these students’ wellbeing at risk. I guess I wrote that one from a place of mourning. However many years ago, writing songs and poems helped me understand I was in an abusive relationship, and helped me to leave it. It infuriated me on these students’ behalves that they could not even feel safe working through their feelings privately in writing.

That’s heartbreaking. When your craft has offered you doors out of tragedy and harm, it’s devastating to see those doors shut on others like your students. Are there other moments or ways that your teaching has informed this collection?

When I was teaching full time, I think it was really informative for me as a writer. I would always have my students share with me and with one another things that they were excited about. We would do a lot of “here’s a Tumblr I love, we’re going to look at it as a class for ten minutes.” I think I like to pull from so many corners of media and entertainment. My students were really inspiring to me, in that you’re never more excited about checking out the things around you than you are when you’re 18. In that way, they were incredibly wonderful to work with and work alongside.

Especially with poetry workshops, I find that a lot of students (especially in that last-high-school-early-college age group I’m describing) only have experienced poetry as it was taught to them in high school. I didn’t have a particularly wonderful experience with poetry in high school. I thought I probably hated poetry based on the way it was taught, which was to analyze every single line in one specific way. “There’s one meaning you’re meant to derive from it. Write an essay on that for a score.”

It’s funny, on this tour with Michael, I’ve had a couple people come up to me telling me that they’d never bought a poetry book before this reading because they only had that one kind of experience with it. Stepping away from that very formal approach to literary criticism or analysis has made me a lot more excited about writing and reading. I like to read things! I’m not a Jungian, but I like to read things and let them watch over me and see what sticks out! I’m not doing a close analysis of every single line, but then I can revisit and find new things the next time.

It’s not a passive activity, but this kind of reading feels more like pure enjoyment of an art form in the way that I would watch TV or walk through a gallery. It’s been really fun to work with students who are coming to poetry by way of excitement and enjoyment for the first time after the very formal only-looking-at-a-certain-kind-of-canon structure. I feel like that is always really rejuvenating for me as a reader, just seeing students get excited about writing and trying out new forms and not feeling like they’re beholden to analysis.

That’s so true — I think a lot about the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”. So often, we’re taught a mode of reading in school that isn’t always a resonant or realistic way to engage with art.

Yeah, but some people don’t realize that. Some of the people coming up to me are probably closer to my age. I’m 34, and they just never went back to poetry because the school system didn’t inspire them to. I think it’s always very exciting to witness people experiencing poetry in that way for the first time, whether they’re young or have had a couple decades away from reading poetry.

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. And getting to return poetry to people after it has been so thoroughly rung out by conventional education is really, really rewarding. That sounds like a really beautiful process.

I’ve had a couple people who are like, “Who are you reading?” And I’ll get to write to them, in my dedication, like, “Check out Morgan Parker!”

Several readers have commented on your playfulness with language; it brought to mind Patricia Lockwood’s idea of being struck by “pun lightning” at the moment that some play on words occurs to you. What kinds of words and slippages of meaning strike you with lightning?

Chance and error are friends to my process, whether that’s in recording music or in writing poems. If I hit a “wrong” note while composing, that often becomes my favorite moment in the song. I used a hodgepodge of writing methods for Cry Perfume, since I was traveling, and if any of them produce a glitch in my intention, I go with it. My handwriting is atrocious and if something I scrawled is ambiguously readable, I’ll opt for the weirder word choice when I’m transcribing. If I did some voice-to-text to write a poem, I won’t fix the misinterpretation. And my fingernails are very long for guitar-playing purposes, which makes chaos out of typing on the phone — autocorrect is a really good co-writer! Since the editing process was so far removed from the initial writing, I can’t remember what’s “mistake” and what’s intentional, which makes it fun for me as an editor, working to make new meaning when the first draft was in many cases a few years ago.

“A glitch in my intention”! I love that idea, that’s such an interesting way of introducing chance into such thoughtful work. (And I love the idea of autocorrect as cowriter!)

As far as the stuff that happens on purpose on purpose… I feel pretty governed by my ear for “music” within poetry and am always chasing that high of syllabic rhythm and words that feel nice to say out loud. That’s annoyingly vague, but it’s more intuitive for me than an explicit set of rules — more akin to noise music or making abstract visuals than it is, like, pop songwriting.

My turn for some pun lightning, because couldn’t “noise music” just be another name for poetry? I would not immediately have connected noise as a genre or a practice to poetry until you mentioned it! Are you a ‘poetry is meant to be read out loud’ kind of writer? Do you read your poems out loud to yourself? Obviously, you’re reading them out loud now on tour, but I’m so curious about how sound filters in for you and how you see sound working in poetry.

Yeah, I do read them out loud to myself, but it’s a different voice, you know what I mean? I’m mumbling through them to myself to make sure I didn’t fuck something up or that it won’t be really annoying for me to read it out loud in two years. For the last book, I had read all those poems out loud a million times because I was doing readings all the time, and I had been able to edit them from that; on the other hand, this book’s editing process was so entirely in the pandemic that I really hadn’t read these poems out loud. That performance aspect just wasn’t available to me during that time, and I had this bleak feeling like, “Well, I’ll never tour again.” It’s been really fun learning them in this new way by reading them aloud on this tour every night. And I’ve been trying to read totally different poems each time, which has been fun.

But overall, I do feel like the sonic component, even if it’s just represented in my head, is a big part of it for me. That’s not dissimilar from how I work on music. I often get into trouble in the arranging process because I’ll put so many layers in there that would be impossible to replicate live or I’ll put production moves in that can’t happen live because I’m really a headphones-listening-to-records-at-home-first person. It’s not dissimilar for poetry. The number one thing I’m thinking about is the experience of sitting at home with a book and then the book tour is the fun chance to try things out in a different way.

Around the time that I was first doing readings, I was starting to go to more high-concept noise shows where people are crawling around on the ground wearing masks or putting contact mics on a drill. I feel like in my ideal world, there should be more crossover between those audiences with the poetry world, because I feel like poets are doing similar things. I feel like I know a lot of poets who are very interested in that sort of high concept noise performance stuff, but it can be a really tricky thing getting musicians of any genre out to poetry readings. It kind of cracks me up — like, “you guys can sit through an hour of people pitch shifting and delaying their screaming sounds and you can’t hear 10 minutes of a poem!”

I also would love to see poetry readings given the production and special effects of musical performance. Like, where are my poetry arena shows with all the big lights and pyrotechnics?

I do always think that I want to bring props into my readings. I had this idea on the last book. I was like, “I’m going to do a tea party every single night. I’m going to bring a little table and I’m going to have a frilly tablecloth. I’m going to get a teapot just for this and I’m going to pour little cups of tea as I read.” It doesn’t happen, but in my mind I sort of have the idea of what I would like to happen during the reading. I did bring a bingo ball on tour this time, because I thought I could pick poems out to read that way, but I wound up relying on other methods of randomness, a lot of polling my friends who are at the readings for numbers. Michael was rolling dice for me to pick some poems at some point.

Now that I’ve kind of read through all the poems, I’m relying on that a little bit less and can kind of tailor what I’m doing to what I feel is the mood of the city, if that makes sense. I’m like, “All right, I know what I have to do here.” I have been having the audience pick a number one to five at the end of every reading and I’ll go to one of the sections based on what they say and read a couple things from the top of it, which has been fun. I like letting people feel like they have… I’m not huge on participatory elements in music performance, but I feel like just saying, “Give me a number,” lets people feel like they have some agency in the reading in a way that is low stakes for me, as the person who has to read the stuff.

Which is such a fascinating way of reintroducing chance — a lot like how you mention using autocorrect as a co-writer!

Yeah. I feel like that can make things really feel fun for me where they might otherwise feel… It can add a levity to reading, especially a book that at points can be kind of heavy.

Yeah, that levity you mention is actually such a perfect segue to my next question. There’s this magnificent stanza where you conjure “this imaginary/ feminist pro-harm/ reduction sex/ worker advocate cop/ in this small/ town crime procedural”. You’re clearly having fun with the enjambment on this one! How do you combine humor with deeply-and-sincerely-held principles (around social justice, harm reduction, and community organizing, etc)  in your poems?

I’ve always used humor as a coping mechanism and deflection tool, in my personal life and in my written work. I can’t easily access an earnest tone of voice without feeling wrong, even when I wholly believe the things I’m describing or defending. But when dealing with and working around some of those topics you named — the ones I can’t stop writing about as they occupy so much of my thinking — I would find it crucial either way to latch onto moments of fun and funniness so I don’t burn out. Plus it’s gratifying, reading poems about topics that might otherwise feel heavy, to get a few laughs from and with an audience. And a lot of my favorite poets are experts at striking that balance between funny and devastating. David Berman is one I’m always citing.

I can absolutely relate to earnestness feeling difficult to access. I find humor helps me look at painful or profound things a bit more in-the-eye without getting frozen in some Medusa effect! It’s ironic, too, when so much issues-based or “activist” poetry is, if anything, overearnest. What do you think writers have to learn from humor?

We did a reading in Pittsburgh at a comedy club — it was sponsored by a great bookstore called The White Whale and they did it at this comedy club called Bottle Rocket. The audience was incredible! So often with poetry, people are afraid to laugh or they think that it has to be this high-minded thing. The comedy club audience was laughing at the parts that were funny, and sometimes the parts that are funny are woven with the parts that are the most fucked up in terms of the processing grief and processing what the fuck is happening in this world. I found that reading wonderful!

Dorothea Lasky is someone who was really inspiring to me when I was figuring out what I’d like to do in poetry. She’s just so funny, even when she’s describing something that’s just awful. I think that’s how she’s able to find her way in. CAConrad is also like that, but the person I’m about to cite is Mark Leidner, who I met when I was living in Western Mass. He would go to open mic standup nights and just read his poems there and they were… He would always be the best person at the comedy night! It was a really awesome way to get to hearjust a difference in audience perception, because they’re not looking at how it’s formatted on a page. They don’t even know he’s reading a poem. For them, it’s a conceptual joke performance and who’s to say poetry can’t be that, too? I think seeing how his poems could work in that setting really inspired me to inject some of that into my work and not always be going for the highfalutin Sylvia Plath worship.

“Who are you? That’s my favorite question/ When it’s said in awe/ When I’ve escaped or when I’m caught” has really stuck with me. It builds on an earlier phrase, where you say “The more you perform / the quieter you become” and it feels like such a twist on Winnicott’s saying that “it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” How does your poet-self escape from or catch your musical self? How do these two creative/performing identities coexist or inform each other?

The same concerns and influences impact both my songwriting and poetry, but I tend not to be working on albums and books simultaneously, which helps me feel like I’m not re-treading the same exact stuff (unlike the TV show Nashville, which I’m currently re-treading).  When I wrote Mouthguard I was weirdly self-conscious about being perceived as a “musician” poet, rather than a poet poet, and shied away from writing about music — even though music supplied so much of my joy, friendship, work life, thoughts, and world. For Cry Perfume, a lot of the poems were about live music as an industry and written while working full time in it, so music performance’s conventions and settings were inescapable. And, in moments of fatigue about music work, I would feel overcome by joy at reconnecting with music as a listener, and didn’t fear writing about that pleasure in a way I might’ve on the last book.

My PDF of the collection is highlighted to hell — but what is your favorite line from the collection? Which lines have stuck with you since writing it?

As I’m on tour, I’m still getting acquainted with which lines feel best out loud vs. which ones looked the most exciting to me while proofing. Generally the lines I’m most proud of wind up titles, and I like ones that frame the poem in a surprising way, evoke a world on their own, or offer a clear view in. And I guess I like to use this space to refer to other works as well. A couple favorites from this book: “Fuck No to All That,” “Yes Tears Left to Cry,” “Weird Touch I Spat As She Spidered,” “Bowling a 666,” and the poem which opens the collection, “Fake Blood on a Fake Fur Coat.”

“Yes Tears Left to Cry” was such a good one! I really loved those cheeky little homage riffs. When you use allusion and reference like this and you leave a door in the poem open to external works, does it change the way you relate to the media you consume?

I think I’m so used to doing it. I wouldn’t say it lessens my fandom or interest in art to be figuring out ways to refer to it. I think I’ve always liked media that is referential like that. I love when I see a movie, and I know I’m immediately going home to look up every single Easter egg I might have missed. So, similarly, I think I’ve always really enjoyed putting my own Easter eggs in poetry or songwriting, especially referring to my friends’ projects. If I hear a huge pop song and think there’s an opportunity to play with the title, that’s very fun for me. I probably heard No Tears Left to Cry more than any other song the year it came out, so it would be hard to not refer to it in a book.

Oh absolutely, I loved that magpie sensibility. Song titles or certain lyrics absolutely do become really specific touchstones for me, in the same way that people talk about smells. You hear certain parts of a song and immediately it’s like, “Oh, that’s October 2018.” It’s a really special way of engaging with and enjoying art, and that enjoyment is another thing this collection captures so well. Your line “I don’t review art/ When I like it I like it/ embarrassingly,” is such a lovely manifesto in favor of that vehemence of artistic enjoyment. What are some books/music/television/movies that you’ve “liked embarrassingly” lately? What do you recommend we read or listen to or watch after finishing Cry Perfume?

It’s dorky to shout out my tourmate and friend Michael DeForge but whatever—his work always blows me away and his newest book Birds of Maine does too. If you like talking birds, socialist utopias, and the ideologic possibilities of the early internet as represented by fungal networks, this is a graphic novel you should grab. Beyond the nepotism, some fiction favorites I’ve read this year are Monarch by Candace Wuehle, Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min, and Darryl by Jackie Ess. On the poetry front, I’ve especially loved collections by Alison Lubar, Arisa White and Rachelle Toarmino. And the essays in Raquel Gutiérrez’s Brown Neon blew me away.

This bar I’m typing in right now (Providence’s The Hot Club!)  is playing “Powerful Love” by Chuck & Mac which always makes me cry! I’m trying really hard not to do that on top of my laptop. In the car with Michael we’ve been listening to Guerilla Toss, Illuminati Hotties, Queen Bee, Garcia Peoples, and 311 came on the radio today to much delight.

My TV taste is bad and that’s fine for me (less fine for my partner who’s forced to watch along). The closer something feels to Riverdale, the more I’m suckered in. Search Party and Barry fall more into the “other people also like this show” category of my fandom, but I love them both. Paranoia Agent and Veronica Mars are the all time faves. And I’m really glad for the return of Los Espookys.

Oh gosh, I love this — I’m also a Riverdale and Veronica Mars kid, so I deeply relate! 

On the movies front, all five Screams are top of the pops and cutesy meta horror is the corner I won’t get out of. Unfriended, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and Uncle Peckerhead are a few other semi-recent ones in my personal canon. Lately I’ve been on an “underappreciated John Carpenter movies” streak and Christine is my current fave. Michael and I got to screen Josie & the Pussycats in New York last weekend, one of our mutual greatest hits. Last night, I was up until 4:00am watching a movie called Nerve, which had Emma Roberts and Machine Gun Kelly in it.

Those four in the morning movie experiences are always very intense for me. Even if the movie is terrible, I’m like, “This is the most profound experience I’ve ever had.” How was it?

I think that I would have to say that it’s good! It’s a fun, high-stakes game of social media daring.

Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis is out now.

The Polyamory Workbook Offers Practical Tips for Navigating Any Relationship

I have always loved workbooks — black and white pages prompting me to write, draw, imagine, and reflect bring me so much joy. If I think back to when eight-year-old me was happiest, it was when I was holding some sort of workbook or novel to occupy my ever-racing mind. That happy feeling tracks for present-day me as well, so I was excited to review The Polyamory Workbook by Sara Youngblood Gregory.

Like the most successful polyamorous relationships, Sara Youngblood Gregory’s workbook is a true community effort, which saves the book from being just another self-help book authored by a white woman with too much privilege and so many damn “answers” for all of us. It’s 2022, and the last thing we need is another white woman telling us how to get free, so the inclusion of other (read: BIPOC and trans) voices in this workbook feels like a breath of fresh air. Youngblood Gregory fuses reflections on her own experience with interviews with folks like Sam (Shrimp Teeth) and Crystal Bird Farmer (Black and Poly), plus dialogue with her own polycule. Nestled between these rich conversations are prompts for reflection and practical tips for engaging with the wonderful (and sometimes messy) parts of polyamory.

Almost a decade into navigating polyamorous relationships, Youngblood Gregory suggests that “freedom [within this context] looks like dealing with the difficult parts of yourself — the jealousy, the pettiness, and the insecurity — and looks toward compassion.” Her prompts, glossaries, and examples guide readers down what might be a rocky road to better understanding ourselves, our desires, and our partners. In true workbook fashion, it seems only appropriate that I leave you with a list of my biggest takeaways and wonderings after reading The Polyamory Workbook:

1. This book is for everyone, not just those interested in or involved in polyamorous relationships.

I opened up The Polyamory Workbook happily engaged, in a monogamous relationship, with a firm desire to continue in that relationship for the foreseeable future. I finished reading the book in the same place. However, the workbook provided prompts that helped me explore my understanding of monogamy, trust, and boundaries, and those insights have already changed how I approach my platonic and romantic relationships. The crux of Youngblood Gregory’s argument about polyamory is this: like most fulfilling things in life, polyamory requires intentionality, commitment, and reflection on your development. This workbook is for anyone who wants to be more intentional in how you move through and within your relationships, whether you’re polyamorous or not.

2. What if we just all operated from a place of abundance?

The third chapter, “Making the Switch from a Monogamous to a Polyamorous Mindset,” offers prompts and examples for folks wanting to truly interrogate their scarcity mindset and shift towards an abundance mindset in their relationships. Recalling her conversation with Sam, Youngblood Gregory reminds us that an abundance mindset allows us “to recognize that constraints are about perspective…You give each other freedom to choose when and how you allocate resources, knowing there will always be more opportunities to share love, time, attention.” Reading through a queer and abolitionist lens, I so appreciated this reminder of the abundant and infinite nature of love that can guide how we see, shape, and engage in all of our relationships. Living in this world, it’s easy for us to default to competition and scarcity mindsets. Youngblood Gregory urges us to “let go of entitlement, fear, paranoia, and defensiveness, and lean into freedom.” After reading this book, I’m definitely learning hard into a more liberatory mindset of abundance in my everyday life.

3. Narratives that conflate queerness, freedom, and polyamory leave little room for those in monogamous relationships to experience “freedom.”

For Youngblood Gregory, “feminism, queerness, and polyamory are inseparable.” And I get it — we all have our own journeys toward what makes us feel whole, seen, and affirmed on this wretched earth. However, there’s this growing narrative in the larger queer community of polyamory or non-monogamy as the ultimate queer freedom-dream, and I’m not buying it. I want to make clear, the author doesn’t outright say this, but sometimes her sentiments in the workbook suggest that engaging in polyamory is the pinnacle of living the queerest, freest, radical life. While reading, I found myself wondering, where do the rest of us fit? Is there room for us monogamous folks within these ideas of radical living, queerness, and freedom?

4. If we all completed the exercises in The Polyamory Workbook, life might be less messy and more honest.

There is a ton of research coming out these days about how our social skills have shifted throughout the pandemic. I have found my own social battery to be forever on “E,” and I (like most adults I know) struggle navigating the awkward terrain of moving from acquaintances to friends.

When I was trudging my way through The Polyamorous Workbook, I found myself making connections to the topics’ relevance in how I navigate friendships, community-building, and even work. For example, in Chapter 7, Youngblood Gregory invites readers to think critically about the boundaries we want to put in place for ourselves in relationships. As I completed the reflection on boundaries, I couldn’t help but think about all of the times in my life when communicating my boundaries would’ve saved me from some intense arguments, hurt feelings, or misunderstandings.

What really hit home for me was the discussing on vetting in Chapter 10. Now of course, I won’t be vetting anyone for a romantic or sexual relationship any time soon, but these days, I have a limited capacity for engaging in any type of relationship — so vetting and/or being really intentional about the people I am committed to supporting and loving is definitely something I want to explore.

I wish I could send pieces of this book to all of the people I have ever loved. We all need to learn how to communicate our needs and desires more honestly.

5. Community over everything – FOREVER.

Youngblood Gregory makes it very clear that polyamory is about more than just sex. She argues that polyamory is a way of making it (and maybe even thriving) in this world, “a way to build a network of care, support mutual investment, and aid.” This workbook is a testament to knowing yourself, finding your people, loving fiercely, and making it through.

Sara Youngblood Gregory’s The Polyamory Workbook comes out on November 15, 2022. You can pre-order The Polyamory Workbook now.

In “Helen House,” Sorrow Is an Inescapable Specter That Transforms Our Lives

Ghost stories are so ubiquitous in our culture that — if you’re interested in the concept of ghosts in general, like I am — it can feel difficult to find truly original ones. The worst ghost stories simply prey on our most basic, primal fear of not being able to overcome something potentially more powerful than us. The best ones, though, operate on a whole other level. The best ones take that fear and the tropes of typical ghost stories and upend them. They turn our terror and discomfort into entirely different emotions and twist our understandings of ourselves and the people around us to reveal something very real (and often dreadful) about the state of living through the inevitably of loss and heartbreak.

In her debut novelette, Helen House, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya expertly crafts a ghost story that is a thrilling, erotic, and unnerving example of the latter. Set about a year into a relationship that the unnamed narrator isn’t even sure she wants, Helen House begins with a revelation the narrator doesn’t expect just days before her and her girlfriend, Amber, are about to embark on a trip to meet her girlfriend’s parents: Amber’s sister died when they were young children and Amber’s parents, Pam and Arnold, are perpetually trapped in the cycle of grief that began all those years before. This propels the narrator into a spiral about her own grief — as the narrator also lost her sister just four years before the novelette’s beginning — and disappointment over the fact that Amber hadn’t shared this information sooner.

Before we even get to Amber’s parent’s house, the narrator divulges some secrets she’s also been holding onto. We learn how her sister’s death catapulted her into using sex and her relationship with Amber as coping mechanisms that she doesn’t want to fully escape from. At Amber’s parent’s house, there’s a strange feeling in the air that the narrator can’t really put her finger on. This family is very obviously still deep into mourning their lost child and lost sister, but the narrator doesn’t judge them for it. Instead, she resolves to be the “best” girlfriend she can be and goes along with the peculiarities — the sweltering heat of the house, the weird wifi password, the way Amber’s parents treat Amber as if she could be both Amber and Helen for them at the same time — the ensuing days have in store for them. Helen’s death haunts Amber’s family in their dreams, and similarly, the narrator’s grief is part of every situation even if the other characters can’t feel or see it. As time passes, the interactions between the four characters get more and more discomfiting. It all builds to an ending (or maybe it’s not an ending at all?) you couldn’t possibly see coming.

The narrative itself is a fresh take on the haunted house/haunted person story, which makes Helen House feel especially extraordinary. But what is truly special about this big little story is the way Upadhyaya builds profound atmospheric tension in a small amount of space and flips certain tropes in stunning directions. In a pivotal dinner party scene, we see how ingeniously Upadhyaya does both of these in tandem.

As Pam and Arnold realize that Amber didn’t tell them she was recently promoted at her job, the narrator notices the ambience of the room changing and says, “Pam and Arnold’s warmth leaked away. […] Pam nodded, but she didn’t look up from the spindly, naked pheasant bones on her plate. Arnold forced a smile, and I decided, no, he wasn’t good at acting after all. The silence was larger in the heat. I noticed the walls sweating condensation behind Arnold’s head. It was odd, the walls so slick and glistening. Was it because it was so cold outside? Did they have a leak? Was I seeing it right? I wanted to reach out and touch the wall.”

Helen House is filled with moments we expect in horror, moments where we question why the narrator isn’t acting on the strangeness of what she’s experiencing, moments where we can see a clear out for the narrator, alongside her, and yet she is frozen in place. These scenes provide some frustrating anxiety over where the narrator’s story might be heading, and then, every time, Upadhyaya draws you back in and shows you that — much like grief itself — not all bizarre circumstances are as easy to get out of as they may seem: “Here’s what I knew then: I knew we were both unwhole. I knew we were the living ones but that we were also the ghosts. I knew death was a sieve, full of holes that can’t be plugged at once. […] I didn’t tell her I fuck away the pain, and I never would. I would never tell her I almost ended things the second we started having less sex. I only didn’t go through with it because I did care about her and did get more than sex out of our relationship and couldn’t bear to lose her because of my own shit I hadn’t even begun to untangle because oh god untangling this shit wouldn’t be worrying a knot unloose, it would be another destruction.” The self-awareness that Upadhyaya grants the narrator in these moments imbues the narrative with a sense of dread about the way we carry hauntings within ourselves in the forms of shame-filled withholding and secrets about who we are and what we want.

At the end of the Helen House, we’re left with more questions than answers about where the characters’ lives are going (or not going) after the events of their time together. But what is not left up for interpretation is Upadhyaya’s ability to craft a ghost story that both feels thoroughly new and exciting and also reminds of something that’s hard to forget or run away from: “We all do things to keep the dead with us.”

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is out now.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the Managing Editor of Autostraddle.com but was not involved in the creation of this review.

These Queer Books Databases Make It Easy To Search for Your Next Favorite LGBTQ+ Read

Feature image by Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images

I am prone to reminisce about the many hours I spent in the local library of my youth, where it took the entire span of my teenage years to sniff out precisely three books with queer characters. Contrast that with the library where I sit right now that has dedicated stacks for LGBTQ+ books, each title adorned with a little rainbow sticker for extra gay assurance. Queer lit blogs abound these days, chronicling releases across an expanding array of genres. Every season, Casey’s book previews have more and more titles. There is, quite simply, too much gay to keep track of.

The joy of the Information Age is that it only takes a few steps of wading through a data swamp before someone gets the urge to collect, catalogue and cross-reference the shit out of it. Enter, the queer book database!

What exactly do I mean by database? Well, I want it to be something that can be queried or filtered; it’s not just a long book list, and searching isn’t limited merely to title or author but allows you to interrogate every intersection of queer interest. Too many times, I’ll have gone through thirty reviews on a mainstream site when finally someone mentions a book has lesbian pirates in it. I want this vital information front and centre when it comes to making my reading decisions (spoiler: none of the databases below include “pirate” as a queryable field, so someone should really get on that).

Considering that Goodreads and Storygraph are themselves giant databases of pretty much every book published, they obscure a lot of control over search terms in favour of recommendation algorithms or seeing what your friends are reading. This is fine! I’m open to every avenue of queer book discovery, and the list of databases below just compliments that, allowing you a little more control over the direction you want to take. Most importantly, because these databases were created by queer people for queer people, there’s an understanding about what kind of stuff matters to us. And, hopefully, no straight books ever!

And while not filterable in the same way as a database, don’t forget to browse the Autostraddle Literature section for your LGBTQ+ book needs!

Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Database

The Queer SFF database lets you search across a plethora of sub-genres within sci-fi and fantasy, with filters for intersecting identities and a whole heap of miscellaneous tags. Do you want a space opera in a homophobia-free world where your WLW protagonists are over 40 and guaranteed alive and together at the end? This database will find that book! Individual book entries link to longer takes by trusted queer reviewers. 

Queer Comics Database

This comprehensive database of comics and graphic novels has filters not only for queer rep, but for art style, tone, and genre. You can also search for free online comics — with direct links! Reviews tend to be from mainstream publications like Kirkus rather than queer bloggers, but there’s plenty of info about each title to help you find out if it will be your thing.

The YA/MG Trans & Nonbinary Voices Masterlist

This filterable list focuses on YA and middle grade books about trans and nonbinary people, written by trans and nonbinary people! A labour of love from author Ray Stoeve after realising how hard it was to find this information, this happily growing list also includes upcoming titles to note in your calendar. 

The Mombian Database of LGBTQ Family Books and More

Last year, this long-running queer parenting blog added a huge database of LGBTQ family books and other media. There are a few defined categories for reading ages and book type, but it’s really the breadth of tags that will help queer parents find books on any topic, from adoption to drag to gay uncles!

The AroAce Database

This character-focused database is a great resource for digging out books for less well-represented queer identities. By assigning characters an “importance” tag, quantifying the level of rep, and filtering across a range of aro-ace identities, it’s easy to work out whether a book is doing their protagonists justice or there’s just a token side character.

Lesbian Science Fiction

This is my very favourite kind of internet thing: a long-running list of stuff that someone just wants to share with the world! Compiled by one particularly voracious sci-fi reader, this regularly updated book list has tags according to the queerness and prominence of characters, with a telling one-liner about what the reader really thought about it! I like that a lot of older titles are included, and it’s possible to search on when a title was added, meaning it’s easy to return every so often and see what’s new on the list.

Queer Books Database

This one is all about the data! Essentially, it’s a giant Google Sheet of every queer book going back to Carmilla (I’m guessing Sappho never got an ISBN) with 50-150 added every month. Although a little trickier to search and navigate than the other sites on this list, the huge benefit of this database is that all the data is freely available (and encouraged) to download and share!

There’s info on the queerness of main characters, with some notes about identities, side characters and other tags. If you’re a spreadsheet demon, I have no doubt you could do wicked things with this humungous data set!

Queer Books for Teens

Attempting to catalogue the 500+ YA books with queer content published between 2000-2020 is no mean feat, but this site has done it! Although no longer actively updated, this is a great resource for sifting through two decades of YA lit, handily filtered according to characters’ gender, orientation, location, ethnicity and more.

Special mention:  LGBTQ Reads

The most comprehensive blog out there in terms of the number of books featured, LGBTQ Reads doesn’t quite meet my definition of a book database because it’s not possible to query across genres, identities and other queer specifics. However, the way it groups the books in each category does make it easy to home in on certain sub-categories that are certain to pique your interest. 

Bonus: That Spreadsheet Riese Made of Her Own Personal Library

The little-advertised best perk of being an A+ member.

Interview With a Tranpire

I did many embarrassing things in my teen years, but none may be more cringeworthy than the fact that I used to watch remakes before originals. I know — I’m a disappointment. Teenage me was exactly the kind of person that slick Americanized remakes were made for. And this is how I first came across Matt Reeves’s 2011 film Let Me In. I was aware at the time that this was not the first version of this tale of love and friendship between a young boy, Owen, and a centuries-old adolescent vampire girl, Abby, but I had loved Reeve’s other monster movie Cloverfield, so I ignored the fact there was supposedly a better version of it lying out there. And the result was good. Nothing truly exciting, but it was a well shot vampire tale that I enjoyed and quickly forgot.

It would be almost five years later, during a Taco Bell-fueled late-night horror movie marathon with my brother that I finally saw Let the Right One In, the original 2008 Swedish film. On first glance, the two movies are remarkably similar. If anything, outside of some slick cinematography, Reeves’s take maybe adheres a bit too close to the source material to justify that it needed to exist in the first place. That is with one big exception. During a particularly vulnerable moment between boy and vampire, Oskar and Eli this time around, Eli disrobes and reveals a snaking castration scar across their pubis. Where the American version of this story featured what was clearly a heterosexual relationship between a boy and cisgender vampire, Let the Right One In is inescapably queer. And what struck me, being a closeted trans girl with lots of gender feelings rumbling around in her head, was just how intentionally fluid and undefined Eli’s gender is. Castration, of course, does not negate male identity, but Eli seems to comfortably shirk their masculinity. While they do insist to Oskar that they aren’t a girl, Eli spends most of the film dressed as one and letting the world think of them as one. In some ways, this helps them in their hunts for human prey, but it’s hard to watch their interactions with Oskar and the other characters and not see that Eli exists outside a gender binary.

In a way, we see Eli in conversation with one of the longest running themes in vampiric narratives. While it certainly didn’t invent the vampire, Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula undeniably defined much of our contemporary understanding both for its title character but also for all his blood-sucking ilk. While it is perhaps better known for its many adaptations and the tropes it inspired in future takes on the character, Dracula is a novel bursting with anxiety about gender and sexuality. This manifests both in its discomfort with the monstrous women who shirk Victorian gender roles but also in the homoerotic acts of seduction carried out by its title character. Stoker, by many scholars believed to be a closeted gay man, makes Dracula, both novel and character, a personification of these fears both of the enforcement of gender roles and also the consequences of shirking them.

“When I first reencountered Dracula in grad school, after I had moved through my feelings of revulsion and anger about the text, I started really thinking about the role of femininity in these characters that Bram Stoker wrote,” says poet Chase Berggrun. Berggrun, a trans woman, is the author of Red, a book of erasure poetry that uses the text of Stoker’s novel to reclaim and refocus its women characters. “What is perhaps most terrifying about the vampire to Stoker is that it doesn’t conform,” Beggrun says.

This extends not only to Dracula’s portrayal but also the women of the novel, primarily Lucy and Mina who offend through their sexuality and competency. Berggrun’s Red responds with: “Women all their lives are interrupted    considered hysterical / summoned to make children for the strong and manly / and for his sake must smile and not speak / Now this man I began to think a weak fool.”

The vampire as a manifestation of gender panic is thankfully a trope that has faded over the century-plus since Dracula terrified the hell out of Victorian England, but the queer themes present in this ever-popular species of monster remain and, if anything, are becoming more prominent as trans storytellers are given their chance to play with the vampire canon. And this comes in both the reclamation of harmful tropes but also in the manifestation and redirection of that gendered anxiety.

It’s not hard to see the connection that trans readers and storytellers can find in vampire media. Vampires are beings that exist outside a binary of life and death, and their status as creatures of the night and underground certainly feels familiar for people who have so often been forced to live in societies margins. Even the transformative nature of vampirism feels intertwined with transness. The bargain of a temporary death for a former closeted self in exchange for an eternal life as a hotter, stronger, and more powerful version feels all the more tempting. Hell, there’s a reason why the term “deadname” is so common among the community.

Berggrun points to how writing Red not only helped her to challenge the misogynist themes of Dracula but also helped her come to terms with her own identity as a trans woman: “In like the weirdest, most uncomfortable way, I have Stoker to thank for moving me in a particular way. Because I was writing this book while I was sort of figuring out and learning to define and understand my own womanhood. Part of that was sort of [rebelling] against this really oppressive and saltifying version of what it means to be a woman and realizing that whatever woman I was to become was never going to fit into these kinds of boxes and learning how to really exalt in the possibilities of that.”

Alex DiFrancesco performs a similar act of reclamation in their short story “The Pure,” which appears in the collection Transmutation. “The Pure” depicts a romance between a runaway trans man and a trans woman vampire who takes him under her wing. Here, DiFrancesco’s characters view the transformation from human into vampire as an extension of their own gender transition and a way to further express their personal identity. The titular Pure refers to a force of conservative propaganda and mistruth, which in this instance lumps vampires and the queer community into similar enemies against a supposed safe and undiluted America. DiFrancesco was inspired by a real world alt-right Facebook meme depicting a clawed hand labeled “the LGBT” reaching out to attack at a white, straight family and wanted “The Pure” to give form to this monstrous view of the queer population supposedly threatening the bastions of right wing values. In this case, that means that vampires are a haven for displaced queer people and a means to fight back against the forces of transphobic hate.

We see a similar move in the 2019 indie horror comedy Bit. Starring Nicole Maines of Supergirl fame, Bit follows an all women group of vampires who feed on the bad men of the world. Maines’s Laurel becomes the team’s newest recruit, which not only lets her thrill in the battle against patriarchal evil but also offers her a sisterhood with other, mostly queer, outcasts. To Laurel, a trans girl and recent high school graduate, there’s a certain fulfillment in how naturally her fellow vampires accept her as a woman and a fellow member in their crusade. Laurel’s difficult transition during her teens also allows her to have a blasé acceptance of the revelation that vampires do in fact exist. “My life’s already been kinda like a horror movie, well most of it,” she quips. She even does battle with an evil male vampire who is a not so subtle stand in for Dracula. And while Bit may muddy its message a bit at the end, it’s all the same a fun rebuttal to Stoker’s anxieties and a delightful trans power fantasy — especially for one written by a cis man.

In contrast, Morgan Thomas’s short story “Transit” uses vampirism as a window into themes of misgendering, dysphoria, and dysmorphia. While no living vampires appear in Thomas’s piece, Blue, the story’s nonbinary narrator, is mistaken for one by a stranger during a long-distance bus ride. Blue, having just left a treatment house for girls with eating disorders, plays along with this case of mistaken identity to refuse an offer of a shared snack and also almost as resignation, knowing that this woman with her emo-band haircut is going to insist that they are a vampire no matter what.

According to Thomas, one of the major themes of “Transit” is “the sort of ridiculousness of looking at someone and thinking that you know something about their internal identity and sense of self.” In this sense, Blue is misread as a vampire in the same way they are misread by the world at large as a girl and not nonbinary. “The light misgendering that happens to me still is such a fabric of society in a way that I don’t think is often commented upon or recognized in day to day life and [“Transit”] felt like a way to access that experience,” Thomas says. Similarly, Blue, like Thomas during their own grappling with gender, is more confident in admitting what they are not rather than what they are. In this case, Blue knows for sure that they are not a vampire, even if their gender identity is something they haven’t quite figured out.

There are also more complicated and murky pairings of trans identity and vampirism. Isaac Fellman’s novel Dead Collections follows Sol, a trans man vampire archivist, and his attempts to balance work, a new relationship, and the logistics of living with long term vampirism. What’s unique about the world Fellman creates in his novel is how known but also unknown vampirism is within the rest of society. It’s a known affliction, but the world isn’t built to accommodate bodies that cannot enter sunlight. When Sol runs afoul of his job for hiding from the sun in the archives during daytime, his employer expresses sympathy but not practical solutions. Where Dead Collections is less clear is how the reader is supposed to view vampirism in tandem with Sol’s literal on-the-page trans identity. It offers a symbolic reading that doesn’t always connect with the totality of Sol’s character.

KM Szpara’s horror novelette Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time succeeds a little bit more readily in this regard. Like Dead Collections, Szpara’s story also follows a trans man vampire in a world where vampirism is a publicly known and regulated health condition but instead uses its protagonist’s transformation as an explicit commentary on the medical establishment’s almost willful ignorance of trans healthcare and how self-administered medicine is, for many, a necessity.

Part of the joy of vampire mythology is just how flexible but also iconic a subgenre it can be. Despite what some nerd boy whining about Robert Pattinson’s bedazzled skin might have you think, vampires are a more fluid and versatile monster than we may give them credit for. They have strict rules — until they don’t. They are monstrous until we want to screw them. They are evil until we want to them to be heroic. They are sad until we want to fix them. Vampires do whatever the storyteller needs them to do, whether that be horror, action, comedy, or romance. Sometimes we have masterpieces, and sometimes we have Morbius. Cisgender writers have had well over a century to play with Dracula and his ilk, but given the queerness that’s so essential to the genre, it feels only right that we hand the bloody mic to trans storytellers. Reclamation and empowerment are rightfully at the forefront, but I can’t wait until we start mining the genre for more. I want trans Vampire Diaries where a blandly attractive trans girl must compete for the attention of a rogueish trans masc vampire and his do-gooder enby sibling. I want big gothic mansions filled with pissy and petty tranpire roommates. I want a trans vampire hunter who kills cisgender vampires. I want to see the genuinely unnerving and body-churning horror that I know only trans writers really get. I want something me and my brother can watch while chowing down on way too many Crunchwrap Supremes.

Horror Is So Gay is a series on queer and trans horror edited by Autostraddle Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya running throughout October.

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