For Hala Alyan, Art Is Not A Replacement for Policy Change

Posted on by Jo Lou

Palestinian American writer and poet Hala Alyan’s latest poetry collection is an inventive play with language and form as she writes into grief, infertility and a familial legacy fraught with the trauma of displacement and exile. Hala is warm when our call first connects and I launch into a confession: I’m intimidated by poets. She laughs and I tell her, it’s true because there’s something so powerful about maneuvering language, making the words mean, at once, what you want them to mean and what the reader would want them to mean.

In The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala offers the reader more control with such meaning-making through interactive poems. In “Key”, she tells the reader, “Fill in the blank with a suitable word from the right” and proceeds to give us a table with incomplete sentences that we get to fill with the word that resonates with us, from a list that resonated with her. In verses broken by columns and line breaks, Hala captures splintered memories of displacement from homeland, family, and body. There is rage—“I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count”—as the poems contend with what it means to be Palestinian, what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter—sometimes, all at once. 

“When my mother bought a patch of land & tried

to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me

because my name is my father’s name

because he was born in Palestine and so

impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t

have me you know the way our mothers did”

Hala has published four award-winning poetry collections (including The Twenty-Ninth Year) and received accolades for her novels, Salt Houses, and The Arsonists’ City. Hala tells me her writing practice is instinct-based. It is evident from the way she expertly finds her way within frameworks, both given and self-imposed. We talked about finding liberation in the constraints of structures, steadfastness in the face of erasure, the parallel between houses, bodies, and femininity, and much more.

Bareerah Ghani: I want to start with the imagery of house that you’ve used in conjunction with themes of grief, body, and matrilineality. In the opening poem, you say, “My favorite house is my mother. The heart muffled like a speaker.” Later, you write, “A good house can carry anguish and this is how I think of bodies now too.” To me, these lines are intertwined, highlighting the sacrifice and suffering inherent to womanhood and motherhood in cultures such as ours where women have historically been treated as inferior. Can you share what you were thinking and how you envision the house as body as mother?

Hala Alyan: These poems were written during a period of time marked by a lot of infertility for me, and also marked by losing my grandmother, who was one of the core figures of my life, and always will be.

I lost a matriarch while I was simultaneously grappling with what it meant to be in a body that did not always behave the way I wanted it to behave, and that ultimately was not able to be the house that I wanted it to be. I was grappling a lot with what it meant to carry and what it meant to house something at a time when I was also feeling like the connections and the roots that I had to these places that I loved, one of them being Lebanon and Beirut, where I spent a lot of time, were slowly being severed through the deaths of elders, but also through the circumstances of these countries and what was happening there. For me, there’s something in the container, and how a thing can carry and contain you. 

There’s a lot of places that I don’t have access to anymore, that my family throughout our lineage no longer has access to. And I think of how the women in my family, in particular, have kind of had to be the carriers of those places and those rituals, traditions and those memories. 

BG: I can’t help but see that your poems have containers. 

Real active protest begins first in the mind, on an interior level. It begins with conversations we’re having with ourselves.

HA: You’re pointing out something really interesting. This is the first collection that I play with form and structure to this extent. The other collections, they’re  structurally very basic like my poems are usually just prose poems. So a block of text or couplets. This is the first time that I was like, okay, I’m gonna play with this thing. And it actually felt very liberating to have constraints, which seems contradictory but there’s something safe about being like, you know, you’re gonna play with a form like ghazal. And the ghazal tells you where you’re gonna go, or maybe it doesn’t always tell you where you’re gonna go but it always tells you where you’re gonna end. So you can have this migratory movement through a poem where you travel all over and go to all these different places but you’re always gonna land in the same place. And there’s something about knowing you’re gonna land there, something about knowing the home of that word at the end of each stanza that I was finding very comforting at the time, which makes sense, because if it’s a chaotic time, finding structure wherever you can find, is gonna feel useful.

BG: I wanted to talk a little bit about the places where you mentioned your grandmother. It’s beautiful, but also so heartbreaking. In one place, you say, “It’s beautiful to speak for her; she’s dead.” In another spot, you write, “My chest rising to steal her dialect.” This got me thinking about matrilineal linearity and writing into a legacy. Can you talk about what legacy and inheritance means for you especially as a Palestinian right now?

HA: I think particularly within the Palestinian tradition there is so much around this idea of inheriting memory, and not forgetting, and that plays on the theme of, I will not leave. I will return, I will remain steadfast—the concept of Sumud, صمود‎‎, I’ll remain steadfast in this land, which for people in the diaspora translates to, I will remain steadfast in my connection to that land, I will remain steadfast in my reaffirmation of that identity, not forgetting what my lineage has gone through. The inheritance within that tradition has a lot to do with, again, being holders of memory. So there’s the people that are on the land, that are steadfastly holding onto the land and what’s left of it or what they have left of it. And for the rest of us, what we’ve inherited are the stories we’ve been told, and, to be frank, the traumas that people have experienced and that we’re all still sort of experiencing. There’s something in the idea of remaining rooted that feels very much like a Palestinian tradition.

In general, I think of lineage in that way—how do we not forget that which needs to not be forgotten? How do we not forget that which must remain remembered? And what do we do with memory which is one of those silk-like emotional fabrics that changes every time you touch it. And so every time you tell a story, that story shifts, and every time you return to something, it shifts, and what do I make with the memories that I’ve been told, that I didn’t even live through? How can I do right by them and respect them and inhabit them, but also recognize that I’m taking liberties? And that’s a big thing in writing—how do you kind of operate in both of those spaces at the same time? It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.

BG: How do you contend with the erasure of Palestinian culture and identity as an American, living in a country that is supporting that erasure?

HA: It’s deeply painful. It’s very hard to exist within a system that is enacting and participating in this level of violence and systemic erasure, and that has engaged in it against indigenous communities to whom the land belongs, against Black people, queer and trans people. It’s too easy to look at the contributions of violence elsewhere but they begin here. They’re not just things happening on “foreign soil”. So for me, it isn’t just about Palestine. It is about contending with what it is to sort of exist within spaces. What does it mean when elected representatives no longer represent their constituents? What do we call when a system, a government, an entity, etc, no longer serves the interest of the citizens, no longer serves the values that it espouses? And then what do we do with the possibility that it never really has—how do we make sense of those things? Those are sort of the questions I’m interested in. 

Of course, on a personal level, it’s horrific. I’ve been watching people that are my kin, that share my identity, be attacked on the ground and here, in different ways. Obviously, there’s no comparison to the ways people are being slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank but I think there’s something to be said for students who were walking around wearing Keffiyeh and talking in Arabic and got shot.  A boy was stabbed many dozens of times. What’s so wild about this moment that we’re living in is that the saturation point of horror has reached such a tipping point that, quite literally, people forget stories of things that have happened, that alone should have stopped everything.

As a person, in general, I’m more interested in asking questions. I feel that way as a therapist, as a writer, and certainly feel that way when I’m trying to engage with people who have been exposed to ideas that I think they should consider letting go of. In my experience, it’s more effective to just invite people to consider certain things. Like, here are some ideas. Here are some questions, invitation for all, myself included, to engage in them. And we’ll see if that shifts anything for people.

BG: Open up dialogue? 

Art is not a replacement for policy change. Liberation and equal rights must exist for everybody, everywhere.

HA: Well, I don’t need to be part of that conversation. Because that kind of goes with this heroic archetype of, I need to go around changing people’s minds. I don’t need to do that. I think my task, other writers’ tasks, other people who are engaging in different kinds of thinking or creating, our task is just to be like, here’s a question. Here’s a possibility. Here’s an invitation to an imagined future. Real active protest begins first in the mind, on an interior level. It begins with conversations we’re having with ourselves. 

BG: There is a recurring theme in this collection—of being denied love, being denied motherhood, safety, and homeland. And the poems sway in how the narrator can be at times resigned, accepting of how things are, have been in their lineage, and then at other times, you see the language is maneuvered in a way that it almost feels like the writer is speaking through gritted teeth. It’s remarkable. And those are the moments where the writer is really putting up a fight. Where do you draw the line between fight and surrender?

HA: I always think of that expression, Let go or be dragged. And I think there’s been a few inflection points in my life, one of them was getting sober, where I got to be up close and personal with this concept of surrender and what it really means. Ideally, we work through our lives towards a place where we can surrender quicker and quicker, and we can recognize quicker and quicker what calls for surrender and what calls for fights. I struggle with that all the time, in life and in writing. For me, the tension point comes with getting more adept at recognizing earlier and earlier where it is worth fighting and recognizing that surrender, a lot of times, requires more courage than fighting, because it usually means that you’re radically accepting something you really don’t want to accept, or you’re accepting something about yourself—for other people or the world—that you really don’t want to be the case. 

I love that you caught that in my work because that’s just in general a tension point in my personhood. I’m somebody that enjoys fight, I mean, there are certain places and certain topics and areas in my life where I really get energized by showing up for a good argument, a good debate, I find it to be very life giving. But it does mean that I often find myself in situations where I’m like, I could have saved that energy, you know? I could have put it towards something that was of more value. And I’m trying to get better, as I get older, at recognizing earlier when those moments happen.

BG: In “Half-life In Exile”, you write, “Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.” How do you keep your relationship with writing in the current reality where it feels like writing as an act of resistance is falling short?

HA: I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last six months—this idea that art is not a replacement for policy change. Liberation and equal rights must exist for everybody, everywhere. Period. There cannot be exceptions when we say that, or else we don’t actually mean those values. Art is not gonna be a replacement for the idea that those who have the power to make those changes need to make those changes. Art is still crucial. Art has saved my life multiple times. Even more than that, it has saved my imagination, my hope, multiple times. Art allows us to replenish ourselves and fortify ourselves, because pleasure and beauty, and being moved, matters—they help us rest, take a beat and return to the things that matter to us. That’s why collective care is important. Art is part of that.

I belong to a family that’s been displaced multiple times over. I find home in that family, in my community, in making art and writing…

Also, art can be a place where you can sharpen your thinking both as the creator and as the person taking in the work. Writing about everything the last few months has helped me clarify how I think about things, how I feel about it. It’s helped me put language to it. It’s helped me take a beat, organize my cognitions. In the same way, when I read, it helps me be like, oh, yes, this is why this matters. I was reading something by Audre Lorde the other day where I had read the line before and when I read it now at a different age, in a different stage of my life, I was just like, yes, now I feel it in my bones. And so I think it also helps us build community. There’s this whole thing about how being an artist is a very solitary life, and I mean, sure, to an extent. But I never feel alone when I’m writing. If I’m writing fiction, I am surrounded by the characters that I’m interacting with. If I’m writing poetry, it’s the voices, the people, the memories. So for me, it’s a very cluttered process, not a lonely one at all.

BG: Displacement and exile haunt your work, your language. You begin a poem by asking, “Can I pull the land from me like a cork?” How does one wrestle with their sense of belonging when they’ve been exiled?

HA: If I had an answer I wouldn’t have to be writing all these goddamn poetry collections. To go back to this concept of Sumud, صمود‎‎, steadfastness. I think you find things to root yourself in. And you do that for as long as those things are aligned with your value system and serve that purpose. I think you can root yourself in a relationship, you can root yourself in a new city, in a craft, in your family. Some of those things won’t be forever, they will shift. Some of them will no longer resonate, but there will always be something to take that place. That’s something that brings me a lot of comfort, this idea that we’re not as alone as we think we are. There’s something in really asking myself, what are the places where I have felt at home? I belong to a family that’s been displaced multiple times over. I find home in that family, I find home in the family that I have sort of built over the last few years. I find home in my community. I find home in making art and writing, and also in reading other people’s work, and engaging with other peoples’ photography, film, ideas and music. That’s kind of what we meant when we said, don’t forget where we come from. Take it with you where you go—that’s been the assignment. And that’s what I think we’re seeing happen beautifully all over the world, right now.

7 Books About People Accused of Being Witches

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I first started what became my novel The Witches of Bellinas, there were no witches, no witchcraft at all. I had wanted to write about a beautiful village that seemed perfect but had  hidden secrets after spending a summer in a beautiful, remote area near San Francisco that I later learned had a reputation for attracting cults, among other rumored strangeness. At some point while drafting, magic became the bridge in the narrative between the awe-inspiring beauty of the landscape and the secret, ugly acts committed by people. 

Being a woman alone in an eerie place made me wonder not only why women would turn to magic, but why wouldn’t they? What happens when people claim the mantle of witch, and what happens when there are different ideas of what that means? What makes a witch? What is magic and what is simply (or rather, intricately, mind-bogglingly complexly) nature at work? These are all questions I wanted to explore in The Witches of Bellinas. 

There’s that slogan you see on bumper stickers and T-shirts sometimes: “We’re the granddaughters of witches they didn’t burn.” As others have pointed out, that line sort of misses the point: Most people accused of witchcraft, across all genders, were not practicing witchcraft. They had slighted neighbor; they owned some land or livestock someone wanted; they had cured a patient the village doctor failed to. The books on this list are not just about being a witch—they’re about people who have been accused of being witches—and what that happens afterward. Who is considered a witch, and why, reveals more about those accusing than the accused, and these are books I turned to when trying to construct a community that might conspire to use magic, but that could also turn its use into a crime. 

The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore

This novel perfectly illustrates what a woman living alone risks when she has agency, means, and a mind to follow her own path: In 17th-century Manningtree, an English town where men are scarce following a war, a strange man dressed in black arrives calling himself the Witchfinder General. Soon, witch trials are underway, and Rebecca West, the narrator, must navigate suspicion, accusations, and worse. 

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

A mother offers her testimony after a neighbor accuses her of trying to enchant her with a potion in Germany in 1618. What is Katharina Kepler’s real crime? Is it the success of her children, especially that of her eldest son, Johannes Kepler, the famed mathematician? A gorgeous contemplation of science and superstition, and a stark reminder that it’s not only men who serve the patriarchy.

Witches by Brenda Lozano

This multi-perspective novel unfolds in narratives from Zoe, a journalist investigating the murder of a curandera—aka a healer, or a witch—named Paloma in a small town in Mexico, and Feliciana, Paloma’s cousin. Paloma was a Muxe, born a boy and living as a woman. The safety of anyone living outside of the patriarchy’s norms is ultimately at the whim of whoever’s in charge.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Told from the perspective of one of literature’s oldest and most famous witches, Circe narrates her life story as an immortal sorceress: From growing up in the house of her father, the sun god and Titan, to life as an exile on the island where she’s been confined. A celebration of the magic in nature and in life as a solitary woman, we also get cameos by heavy-hitters from Greek mythology, including Circe’s setting the record straight on what happened when Odysseus invaded her island and why his men deserved to be transformed into pigs. 

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Dreamy, terrifying, and engrossing, Melchor, a former journalist, tells the story of a small, impoverished town in Mexico where The Witch has been murdered. Born a man, she was known for providing abortions to those in need. A brutal read that’s often compared to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for the depiction of violence and drugs, The Witch is a victim of a system that uses up everyone in town in different, tragic ways. 

Witches of America by Alex Mar

This is a memoir-history-anthropology hybrid that chronicles the author’s encounters, and participation in, with various covens and with witches across the United States. She pairs this first-person spiritual search with the history of witchcraft and what it means to be a witch and to practice witchcraft in the modern world.

I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox

The witch novel of all witch novels. Condé has taken the life of a real woman, accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, and rendered her into a compassionate, fierce, magical woman who yearns for love and is in turn only returned hardship. Tituba narrates her life in beloved Barbados, how following the wrong man led her to become enslaved by Samuel Parris and taken to the Salem colony, and what she must do to return to her homeland.

“Housemates” Is a Queer Road Trip Across Pennsylvania

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s novel Housemates begins with a heartbreaking address from The Housemate, a 70-year-old lesbian who grieves her beloved and who, like so many queers throughout history, has been erased from the public record of the person she built her life with. Through imaginative leaps, The Housemate follows Leah and Bernie, two twenty-something queers who embark on an artists’ extended road trip to capture Pennsylvania during a time of political and cultural discord. Bernie, an incarnation of Bernice Abbott, often unaware of her innate talents and blind spots, yet called to capture the world in large-format photography. Leah, an ambitious writer inspired by Elizabeth McCausland, yearns to really live, stop “scratching around,” and bucks against “editors who did not want truth that had been true a long time but had only wanted things that had recently become true.” The question, night after night on the road, of course, is will they or won’t they? And at the end of this endeavor, what will they mean to one another? 

 As a reader, I found myself rooting for these two young queers (much as The Housemate does) and often wanting to befriend them—by the end of the book, feeling as if I had. Overshadowing the adventure are some grim political realities, including the legacy of a post-Trump America and Daniel Dunn, Bernie’s former teacher and “one of many old art world men who’d finally gotten busted after years of impunity” and multiple Title IX complaints of sexual misconduct. The two friends face threats—real and perceived. Housemates is written in crisp lines and unfolding dialogue, and is reminiscent of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X in its stark portraits of a divided America. We are reminded that there is something radical about two queer women taking to the road alone. The pair witness, as anyone in America must, instances of homophobia, fatphobia, racism, classism, misogyny, and manage somehow to end up at a rural gay bar named Rock Candy. At heart, Housemates is a joyous novel that bubbles with the effervescence of queer youth, celebrates the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd queer culture of West Philadelphia, and chases down young love.  

Emma Copley Eisenberg and I are friends in West Philadelphia, where we are members of The Claw, the salon for women, nonbinary and genderqueer writers. For this interview, we talked via Riverside and at Renata’s, a favorite West Philly establishment.  

Annie Liontas: One of your characters, Bernie, practices large-format photography, a form painstakingly achieved over many hours, and which the artist cannot ever be really sure of until the image is developed. Is Housemates, in its own way, a large-format portrait of America? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Damn. What an amazing way of seeing the book. I mean, yes? Yes. I did a ton of research into large format photography for the book, mostly shadowing a practicing female large format photographer named Jade Doskow but also reading essays and watching talks by accomplished large format photographers like Baldwin Lee, Stephen Shore and others. (I also spent a lot of fruitless hours watching videos of gear and home developing by longwinded photography bros). What kept coming up over and over again is surprise, that you don’t have control over all the elements of the photograph, because a large-format camera’s “eye” actually sees more and in more detail than the human eye can. I find this to be a really resonant metaphor for writing a novel. I tore this novel apart and put it back together so many times; the book readers will hold in their hands is different in every way than the novel I sold. America and what those years from 2018-2020 meant also kept changing as I wrote, years where things were starting to turn but we didn’t yet know how much worse everything would get. The novel knew more than I did, and could see more than I did. 

AL: The novel always knows more than we do, doesn’t it?  

Housemates, at its heart, is very much a celebration of queer relationships, women’s bodies, fatness, art–topics that, as your friend, I know you care deeply about. In your acknowledgments, you write that with this work you “celebrate and mourn the lives of the queer ancestors” who came before you. Why is it important, ultimately, that this story is told through the lens of Ann Baxter who  is mourning an unnamed Housemate, who was never recognized as the widow of a lesbian partnership, and who tells us that Bernie and Leah helped her remember herself?

ECE: This would certainly be a simpler or easier book if I had just written about two young queers of today, staying close to them, in their POVs. But we can only write the novel we have to write.

Philly is a city that is not often seen in literary fiction, even though it is a major American city and fascinating to behold.

The spark for this novel came from reading about real large format American photographer Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland, and a real road trip they took in 1935. Both left for that trip single and creatively adrift and came back very much together romantically and with a clear sense of the collaborative artistic work they wanted to do. I became obsessed with finding out what happened on that trip, not factually, but emotionally, novelistically—why did going out into rural America change their lives so much and staple them together? But the project they made together was suppressed and ruined, stripped of its queerness and political radical ideology and made into a kind of tourist guidebook (though it has been finally published in its original form) that made Abbott kind of famous but left McCausland behind. McCausland was fat and butch and just cut an odder and less socially acceptable figure at the time than Abbott, though Abbott too was clearly gay and unwilling to play the art world’s game. 

But I knew I did not want to write a historical novel, even as I wanted to pay homage to Abbott and McCausland and resurrect their courage, their love, and the ways that their partnership transformed both of their lives. I wanted to write a novel about what it is to be a queer person now, an artist now, and a person who is looking for love and truth in America now, a place that is so fundamentally hostile to both queerness and artmaking, but a novel that still thought aloud on the page about time, about generational gaps, and about queer lineage, inheritance, and erasure. I played with a lot of different ways of creating a novel that had two layers, the then and the now, but in a moment of weird magic that has never become before or since, the first person voice of Ann Baxter who ultimately narrates Housemates just appeared to me and wanted to be heard. Who is this? I thought. I kept writing to find out. 

​​AL: It’s easy to think that Bernie is the one gifted with sight. But it is Leah who has vision—who is the architect of this collaboration and who sees what Bernie might become. Leah has the foresight to get research funds, and then to imagine the scope of their project. Some critics in the fictive art world of Housemates suggest that without Leah’s “playful, elliptical, even strange voice” Bernie’s art would be “pretty pastoral images.” What does Leah see that Bernie doesn’t? 

ECE: In this duo, Bernie is kind of the shinier, flashier one. She has the charisma that people respond to. She is one of those people who just has a kind of natural instinct for an art form, which some people call talent. Bernie is also emotionally submerged when we meet her, a stranger to herself, to her body and to her art (we later learn some reasons why) which makes her withholding and tough to love, a thing that hooks a lot of people. But if Bernie has sight, Leah has insight—a deep understanding of what the two of them are trying to do and the ability to articulate it. Leah also can see love and sex, is invested in care, intimacy, and togetherness in a way Bernie is afraid to be. Plus Leah can see the body; is profoundly struggling with her fat, beautiful body throughout the whole book, really grappling with it, touching it and feeding it and taking pleasure in its strength and trying to figure out why the world has such a problem with fat bodies. This impresses and activates Bernie. I got really excited to explore how what Bernie can see that Leah can’t bumps up against what Leah can see that Bernie can’t. I think maybe you’ve helped me identify that this is at the heart of this book and maybe every artistic collaboration? What do you think?  

AL: Yes! Sight versus insight! That differentiation feels very important and true to them as individuals and practitioners, and, as you note, might be essential to artistic collaboration.  

I love how you’re describing for us, as part of Leah’s insight, her interrogation of the world’s relationship to fatness, but most of all I love how you celebrate Leah—both her mind and her body. Throughout the novel, she grapples with her family’s expectations of thinness and weight, as well as the scrutiny placed on her by classmates and strangers. We’re told that “fatness changed her gender somehow, made her into not a girl to these boys, maybe not a human being…a strange feeling to know that there is no man in this world to whom your body is sacred.” What does it mean to you, as a writer advocating for a paradigmatic shift around fatphobia, to write a queer character seeking—and often embracing—embodiment? 

It’s a particular fuckery to be a fat person in your thirties now and see the ways that the culture has both profoundly changed and not changed at all.

ECE: Arguably, I’ve been preparing my whole life to write the character of Leah, so it means a great, great, deal. She shares some of my biography, and I share some of her body. I share her fat folds and her big boobs and her deep grief about the ways her large body is not sacred and was not cherished she was a child. It’s a particular fuckery to be a fat person in your thirties now and see the ways that the culture has both profoundly changed (more than half of Americans are now considered fat, there exist books like Thick: And Other Essays, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia) and not changed at all (all forms of bias in American life have gotten better in the last 10 years except for fatphobia which has gotten worse, there are so few positive or even neutral representations of fat bodies in literary fiction). It’s also a particular fuckery to be a fat queer person, and be in spaces of predominantly white, thin queers and just see how clueless and dismissive queer people are of fatness and disability liberation. So Leah is grappling with all these things and also just really trying to make sense of the way her body is loved, is joyful and sexy and attractive but at the same time reviled and discriminated against. The novel has a lot of constant discussion, back and forth between Leah and Bernie about the relationship between the mind and the body, and this is a discussion that was urgent and urgently unfolding for me in real time as I wrote this book over the course of about five years. 

AL: Gorgeous answer! The novel is personal in other ways, too, and seeking to do advocacy in the world in the ways only good fiction can. In 2017, you filed a Title IX complaint against University of Virginia professor and award-winning writer John Casey. How did that inform your writing of Daniel Dunn in Housemates?

ECE: I did, it’s true. Google is free so I won’t rehash the whole thing here but that experience did inform the novel for sure. What I felt most haunted by was the idea that I was taught what good writing is by someone who did not see me as a full human being. If art is supposed to be a mirror of life, reflecting back true things that we wouldn’t be able to see without it, the influence of a toxic artistic mentor warps the mirror. I was interested in that. Can the mirror ever be unwarped? Can you ever trust your own eyes again? This is especially potent for Bernie in the novel because she is a photographer — mirrors and light and eyes are all she has. Daniel Dunn is her professor in college, and he nudges her away from being a graphic design major and toward being a fine art major, a thing that changes her life, and later in the novel he gives her a gift that changes both Bernie and Leah’s lives. Bernie and Daniel Dunn do feel a real kinship, I think, as they both come from working class white families in rural Pennsylvania. I wanted the relationship between Bernie and Daniel Dunn to be complicated in all the ways that real professor-student relationships are, with their mix of awe and resentment and careerism and ambivalence and vicarious living. Daniel Dunn isn’t sexual with Bernie, though he is with other students; Bernie is a lesbian, which protects her to some degree and lets him be more authentically vulnerable with her. But for people who have not learned how to love without harming, vulnerability isn’t always a good thing. The most painful thing that a boundary-crossing artistic mentor can do is not always sexual — the things they say about you and your work can stay with you for a lifetime. 

AL: You write West Philadelphia with such precision, acknowledging racial and socioeconomic divisions, capturing versions of the city that once existed but no longer do, and making just a little fun of the West Philly queer scene (with a nod to Philly’s Lesbian Haunted House). What was important to you about getting Philly onto the page?

ECE: Philly is a city that is not often seen in literary fiction, even though it is a major American city and fascinating to behold. This is changing, with the publication of gorgeous novels like Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Asali Solomon’s The Days of Afrekete and Disgruntled, Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties, Sara Novic’s True Biz, and many more, though there is no novel before mine as far as I am aware that is about a queer West Philly group house (though I have heard that parts of Nell Zink’s Nicotine are based on West Philly).

Vulnerability isn’t always a good thing.

I think as we get older, we become more aware of the reasons why we write. In that old George Orwell essay, he says that one of the reasons some people write is “Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” I think this is true of me, that in addition to things like having fun and aesthetic impulse for beauty and political purpose, I am drawn to render what is around me simply to say, this happened, this was here, and it mattered. Group houses exist everywhere that people paying rent exist, but there is a particular kind of queer group house—which can be a mix of white people and people of color but are usually white dominated, a salient thing in a neighborhood that is historically Black—that happens in West Philly that I lived through in my twenties that can become this really interesting pressure cooker of intimacy and queer intragroup political jockeying born of the shame of participating in gentrification in a way I just found fascinating and funny and tender and I didn’t see it depicted anywhere. But the more I wrote about the neighborhood, the more I realized it was also essential on a plot level. Both Leah and Bernie are feeling grumpy, disillusioned and burned out by the groupthink of their group house and queer West Philly, a significant part of the plot that helps propel them out the door and onto their road trip. 

AL: What’s the best road trip you’ve ever taken? What were your must-haves and must-dos?

ECE: A little known fact about me is that after I left my job in southeastern West Virginia that I wrote about in The Third Rainbow Girl, I legit didn’t know where I wanted to live or what I wanted to do. So I took the money I had and drove about 10,000 miles over the course of about three months by myself. I slept a lot of those nights in the back of a little pickup truck. I basically did a huge oval across the country —west through the midwest and northwest then down the west coast and then back through the south and southeast. Some highlights: a fried chicken place in Kansas where they slather the chicken in honey, lightly stalking Annie Proulx at a cowboy bar in Wyoming, the Redwood Forest, The Grand Canyon in a whiteout snowstorm, a house show after a bookstore reading in Oxford, Mississippi. Must haves these days include: Dairy Queen blizzard with heath bar and cookie dough, a lot of audiobooks, and a car neck pillow because I’m old now. 

I Can’t Be a Father Who Leaves Behind a Child, Nor a Son Who’s Left Behind

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

How to Build a Father by Danny Goodman

Things I use to reconstruct my father:

  • Merit cigarettes, brown-yellow pack
  • Red Datsun 310 GX, driving around Danbury, Toto IV on the radio 
  • Mustache, naturally perfect, in the style of Don Mattingly
  • New York Jets Garan, Inc. t-shirt, circa 1988
  • Butterscotch Krimpets, Tastykake 

I could add to the list—his wide, scoundrel smile; the mix of patchouli, tobacco, and Brut on his skin—but it would go on forever. For now, these are the things I remember most about my father. It has been thirty years. This is how I keep him alive. I wonder if I will ever forget. 

My best friend’s second child, M, is nearly two years old when I first meet him. Born during the COVID-19 pandemic, M makes a habit of stealing his father’s phone and pressing it too close to his face as we chatter back and forth, his gibberish no less real than anything I say in return. I met his older brother, FC, as a baby and again a few more times over the years. Uncky Dinny, he calls me, his voice high and lilting. As I sit in the living room of their West Coast home, I am immediately overcome by how precious these boys are. They’re a wonderful combination of their parents, two of my closest friends: Jack, who I met early in college and have loved every day since; and Ashley, who found me nervous and elated that first day of graduate school and helped me survive those wild years. The punch of their laughs fills the house. Later, the boys will be screaming, as children do, but for now they are light and bouncing and their energy is enough to power a city.

I’ve traveled here to see these boys but also to celebrate Jack, whose birthday is this week. A few months apart in age, we both wear gray in our temples and beards, constant reminders of time that has passed. Throughout the week of my visit, we talk about getting old(er). We reminisce about the wonderful horrible decisions we made in our twenties. We feel grateful to have survived, to be alive, we both say.

Late one night, stretched out across from Jack on the couch and sipping peppermint tea instead of bourbon, it strikes me that, with this birthday, Jack will be three years older than my father was when he died. I tick through the math in my mind. The boys are about the age my siblings were. My stomach drops at the thought. I can’t escape the intensity of the realization, the ease with which it carves through me. I tear up, explaining to Jack. We’ve cried together countless times before, a closeness of more than two decades shaped into something like soulmates, but this time feels different, in a way I don’t understand then. Slowly, though, I’m beginning to. 

My father is tall, and so much taller in my mind. Thin, athletic. When he runs—his denim shorts cut off mid-thigh, striped socks pulled up to his calves—he’s all legs. I want to be just like him. I’ve always been short, and I wonder now what we would look like standing next to each other. Sometimes when I trim my beard, I leave my mustache long for a few moments, just to see. Sometimes I catch fragments of his smile in my own. There’s no sort of photograph to capture this, so I close my eyes and take a breath and hope it’s enough to leave an imprint. 

The honeyed mint of my tea fills the living room, and Jack pours himself a bourbon after all, something to soothe what we’ve scratched open. 

With this birthday, Jack will be three years older than my father was when he died.

Are you afraid? Jack asks. I mean, is that why you’re afraid to have kids?

I don’t want kids, I say, or repeat, since over the years, Jack has heard me say those words again and again—in college, before and after my first marriage, in both the dark and happy years that followed, and still after FC was born and I held him, my best friend’s child, in my arms, his little fingers wrapped around mine. I have the cats, I say, half-joking, and sip my tea.

Jack doesn’t accept this as an answer. 

I don’t know, I say. I mean, of course I’m afraid. 

He nods, and I think he understands more than I do. Of what, he asks. Do you know?

I wouldn’t know where to start, I say, as if in my mind the list is so long as to be insurmountable. And maybe that’s true, maybe that’s part of it, but in reality, I don’t know where to start. I have no fucking idea. 

On October 22, 2020, I officially outlive my father. Fifty-one days later, I will turn forty, a milestone he never reached. Years ago, despite how morbid it felt, I’d figured out the exact day. It’s not a competition; I simply don’t want to die. Not at all, not ever, but somehow and absolutely specifically not before he did.

I mark the occasion by driving to a nearby grocery store and buying a box of Butterscotch Krimpets. I eat a two-pack in the parking lot and empty what I’ve been holding in all day. The artificial sweetness flushes my skin.

When my younger brother, Andrew, tells us they’re having a baby, I’m immediately overwhelmed with joy. For them, for our family, for our mother who finally gets to be a bubbe. I can’t imagine them as a father, but that will soon change. When the time comes, when their partner’s labor turns from hours to days, they’re by her side; when my nephew arrives—little CK—my brother sends us photo after photo, and in each, though I’d not expected to, I see our father reflected in them.

Finally, I say to anyone who will listen, finally I’m an uncle. My lifelong dream!  

I’ve wanted to be an uncle for as long as I can remember, to carry on the tradition of my uncles—my father’s brothers, who were a constant support in my life both before and after my father was gone. 

Uncle Danny.

Almost immediately, people ask if I wish it was me having a child. I can see their skepticism in my response, though I’m certain of my feelings. I’m happy to be an uncle. Just an uncle, someone repeats—editorializes—and I correct them. Not just. I’m happy. 

But, in truth, I am jealous, in a way I’m embarrassed to admit. Maybe jealous is the wrong word. Sad? I don’t know. Maybe embarrassed is the wrong word, too. Terrified, perhaps. It’s the photos I can’t shake. His face, my father’s. My baby brother and their newborn and our father. They are together somehow, in a way I can’t grasp. For that—that connection across time and space and universes, without me—I am bereft. 

When my younger brother, Andrew, tells us they’re having a baby, I’m immediately overwhelmed with joy.

People tell me I can’t control life or what happens. You never know, they say, and they mean well. Life, it’s true, is unexpected. But if I don’t have a child, if I keep that door closed, I can, at least, control that. I can control not bearing that responsibility. Not losing myself in fatherhood. Not leaving my child fatherless. Not everything that comes after, the way it threatens to erase all that came before. I can control at least that.

Andrew is five when our father dies; our sister, Denise, 18 months. Alongside our uncle (our father’s older brother), I tell my brother what has happened as they play in the den, a mix of sadness and an inability to understand washing over their face. They cry, and we take turns holding them. They ask questions, trying to make sense of things. I respond the best I can, and I know—even as a child myself—I can’t break down. I need to be strong, whatever that means. But I pretend I know. 

Looking back, that moment feels like the last of my childhood. The last before I become a kind of makeshift, practicable parent. The early mornings and late nights. Diapers and crying and tantrums, lullabies and sharing my bed after nightmares. Within a few years, through high school, I’m working nearly full-time. I choose a college in Orlando, close to home. I bring my siblings—the kids, I call them—up on weekends. We visit Disney World and Universal Studios, pretending to be a British family on vacation; we eat dinners at theme parks and hibachi restaurants. I want to be a bastion of fun for them, their big brother as opposed to their father, but the lines frequently blur. I accompany my sister to her elementary school father-daughter dances. I teach them both how to drive. When I move away after college, I miss them constantly. I fly them up north; we gallivant around New York City. I visit them in South Florida often, despite my desire to escape the memories of a life there. I am not what they deserve, but I try my best. 

They are adults now, the kids. I don’t feel responsible for them in the same ways anymore. I remind myself I’m not their father, and I love being their brother.

Yet, every now and then, when I think about fatherhood, I find myself back in that room. Eleven years old, my little brother in tears. Daddy died, I say. They don’t understand. Neither do I. 

In the morning, Z wakes me at sunrise. She presses her face to my beard, the sound of her purrs a vibrating song filling the room. I scratch beneath her chin, and she collapses against my chest. Eventually, after demanding many pets, she drifts. Her little body rising and falling as I breathe, though I otherwise try not to move. 

I know it’s not the same. I know. But most days it doesn’t matter. It’s more than enough, that love. 

At his apartment in Brooklyn, Gregory, one of my closest friends, tells me about his stepson. He’s three years old, and squeezably adorable. A little monster, too.

One minute he’s yelling he hates me, Gregory says, and then we’re walking to school and he’s on my shoulders and he kisses my head and when he runs away from me to go inside he looks back and, dammit, I’m a mess! 

He’s happy, I can tell, if exhausted. He loves his stepkids like they’re his own, even as they run him ragged. I’ve never seen him happier, though, and I know those kids are a big part of the reason why. I don’t know if he always wanted children, or if circumstances simply presented him with a life like this and he grabbed hold, held it tight. I wonder, as we share Chinese food in the kitchen, the floor peppered with toys and drawings, crayons loose on the tabletop, if I would’ve made the same choice. 

Gregory was raised by a single mother, a fact we bonded over early in our friendship. It changes your perception of the world, especially during your teenage years. I know I viewed women differently than my male counterparts in high school, in ways that make me grateful, fortunate even, twisted as that may sound. But I know Gregory understands; we’ve shared the sentiment with each other more than once. I don’t know how that upbringing affects him as a father, but I’m certain it does. Because I know him and love him, and I see the joy he brings his family, it makes sense to me that he’s an amazing father. That he pours the whole of himself into it. I worry sometimes he gets lost in it, but he embraces it, lovingly and long-headed. And as we sit together at this table, the sugared saltiness of our meal filling the air, I’m certain of something else: that I would be lost, ever so lost, were I in it, too.

In my fiction, fathers are missing or dead, mostly dead. They die tragically, shockingly—one is attacked by a shark and killed right in front of his teenage son—leaving grief and trauma in their wake. 

He loves his stepkids like they’re his own, even as they run him ragged.

I rarely, though, write about my father in nonfiction. His death is not spectacular; rather, it is slow and painful, cancer consuming his insides. I can’t imagine what it was like for him, wasting away, watching himself turn to skin and bone, a transformation that takes barely a year and ends a month shy of his fortieth birthday. 

When I reconstruct my father, I ignore this version of him. It’s a luxury, having this distance. A box constructed long ago where this version of him can hide away. At peace, at rest.

Though nothing is truly hidden, I know. Not anymore. Because when I see these wonderful men in my life, so in love with their children, the box shakes, ready to burst. Ready to release what I’ve worked so hard to keep out of sight. 

When I think about having a child of my own, the box tips over. All at once, I remember what it feels like to watch my father wither, to both understand and not. To know I am losing him. To hold his hand in hospice (a word I also didn’t understand), his fingers like icicles. To hear him say my name—Dan, he calls me, a name now only used by my brother—his voice barely able to catch.

I remember these things and more, but something else, something new, happens. When the box is open, and all of this is loose, suddenly I am him. I am my father, watching my son’s heart break. Wanting to live not for myself but for him, for them, and knowing I won’t. There is almost nothing left of me, and I know soon I’ll be gone. But the way he’s looking at me, I want to live forever, if only to end his pain. To keep him from knowing the grief I knew as a child, a grief he will soon carry with him, scars that will never heal.

This heartbreak, I understand as the child. And though I’ve long felt I’ve been some version of a father to my siblings, I’m not a father. These realities collide in me when I consider having a child. Being both a son and a father. I look at these men in my life, and I’m scared for them. It’s my baggage, not theirs, but I’m terrified nonetheless. I understand what I want to say to Jack, to answer his question. What I’m afraid of. I’ve long found it impossible to find the words. But suddenly, the box is open, and I am my father, or I fear I’m him, and what’s open cannot be closed.

I can’t be a father who leaves behind a child. I can’t be a son left behind. Around me, and through me, I’m beginning to understand fatherhood, and what it means, and how frightened of it I truly am. The box is open, and all of this is loose. 

Andrew and their partner send us daily photos and videos of CK. These images are a happy place for me, each one filling me in a way I hadn’t thought possible. CK’s eyes, full and blue, are tidal waves of perfect. 

In a recent video, CK jabbers as if in full conversation. My brother talks back, tickling his belly. They’re beaming. Dada, they’re certain he says, or something like it. I hear it, regardless, intangible as it feels. 

I’m beginning to understand fatherhood, and what it means, and how frightened of it I truly am.

Over the years, the ways I reconstruct my father have changed. I’m reminded of him on so many occasions—even these decades later—and it surprises me sometimes. The smell of cigarettes, lingering on fabric. A Mets game on the radio. Cinnamon buns on an autumn Sunday morning. The sterile hollowness of hospital corridors. The taste of colonoscopy prep. Signs for Danbury, next exit. Turning forty. My closest friends becoming fathers. My little brother, bearded cheeks curved in a smile, eyes beaming at their firstborn son. 

These reminders, they are gifts. The imprint, the echoes, of fatherhood. The depth of that love, that loss, across time and space and universes.

7 Books Teeming with Aquatic Life 

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

If the sea is the master metaphor for the depths of the individual and collective subconscious, the creatures within implicitly represent so much about our desires, fears, instincts, memory, and perceived connections to both the womb and the afterlife. What’s down there? seems to be a question we’ve always been asking. Look back to The Old Man and the Sea, back to Moby Dick, even all the way back to The Odyssey: the literary imagination has a way of colliding with aquatic life, both realistic and fantastical. 

My debut novel, The Sturgeon’s Heart, is a contemporary monster story set along an inland sea–Lake Superior. Throughout the book, an ancient fish appears to serve as omen and guide.  The spark for my novel began at a lake sturgeon conservation project along the Milwaukee River. Every summer for the past eight years, I’ve been able to brush the backs of newborn sturgeon with my fingers, monitoring their growth, maintaining equipment, and preparing their diet as they grow strong enough to be released each fall. In becoming a part of my personal mythology, this ancient fish ultimately powered my first book into being. 

Truly, all writers have to be a little fishlike, sinking into emotional depths, breathing in fluid, subconscious waters while we evoke the reflections and reveries that become fiction. But some of us take that literally, letting a few full-sized creatures swim brazenly between the pages. 

Consider these seven books that will reawaken your latent marine biology dreams.  

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

Aquatic life highlighted: Gray reef sharks and other unnamed sharks

Off the coast of Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i, seven-year-old Noa falls overboard. When a large shark gingerly carries Noa back to his mother in its jaws, she senses something important shifting. The collapse of the sugar cane industry on the island brings financial hardship, but the family leans on Noa’s strange new abilities to provide. Jealousy among the siblings breeds competitiveness, and they grow up quickly and ambitiously, scattering to different states on the west coast. Tensions string tightly between Hawai’i and the mainland as each family member pursues a way to define themselves, never fully severed from the magnetic pull of the islands. Sacred energy vibrates through Kawai Strong Washburn’s jaw-dropping prose, via sharks, storms, and the soil of the islands themselves.

Lungfish by Meghan Gilliss

Aquatic life highlighted: Lungfish, green crabs, razor clams, lobster, and others

Tuck has barely enough money to feed her two-year-old daughter, Agnes, let alone herself, after her husband Paul’s opiate addiction has depleted their every resource. The family squats in a residence on an island off the coast of Maine, hopeful that they can remain undetected, but a fog of lies and hunger obscures Tuck’s capacity to challenge her erratic husband. As Paul tries to get clean, Tuck relies on the Atlantic Ocean and the island’s unforgiving shore to produce enough sustenance to keep Agnes and herself alive. Framed within the central symbol of the lungfish–an evolutionary master of protective adaptations–this book is both dreamlike and nightmarish. The dual question at the heart of the story is one so many of us have worried at–How can you believe an addict? / How can you accept that the hurt they’ve caused is real? Gilliss approaches the answers without forgiveness, but not without tenderness.

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

Aquatic life highlighted: Lumpsucker (specifically the titular fictional species)

In a near future where costly extinction credits must be spent by companies who eradicate a species, animal behaviorist Karin Resaint makes a discovery about the venomous lumpsucker that distinguishes it as the most intelligent fish on earth. When Mark Halyard, a disinterested executive from the extinction industry suddenly finds a very urgent reason to care about the fate of the fish, he and Resaint embark on a desperate mission to find any last vestige of the venomous lumpsucker population. Written with razor-sharp wit and dark mirth, Neal Beauman’s novel seethes with commentary about the impact of human industry on the natural world. 

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

Aquatic life highlighted: Great white shark

Mere weeks after their wedding, young couple Lewis and Wren have to contend with a life-changing diagnosis: Lewis has a mutation that will gradually turn him into a great white shark over about a year’s time. He will largely retain the mind of a human being, but physical transformations will make life on land progressively more difficult, in addition to increasing his newly developing primitive, violent impulses. In a race against time, Lewis and Wren work to make their lives, and their love, mean something. Emily Habeck takes a magical concept for kindling in this novel that burns with hypnotic energy and familiar truth. Life’s hardest roles are those of inevitability and release, and Habeck casts them brilliantly in this moonlight-drenched, ocean-wide love story. 

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

Aquatic life highlighted: Sperm whale, giant squid

Carrying the weight of scuba gear and his own massive guilt about his father’s suicide by drowning, Jay Gardiner embarks beneath the waves of the Pacific in an attempt to recover his father’s remains. The dangerous dive becomes drastically increased when Jay encounters a giant squid near the dropoff. When a sperm whale arrives and swallows them both, Jay has an hour’s worth of oxygen to decide how to use his final moments–to escape the whale’s belly or, at the very least, make peace with himself. Science and poetry take turns shining through Daniel Kraus’ visceral writing, plunging readers into terrifying literal and metaphorical depths. The age-old battle between two titans of the ocean mirrors conflict between father and son, destined always to grapple for the understanding of the other.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Aquatic life highlighted: Giant Pacific octopus

Mourning both her late husband and her son, Erik, who disappeared at age 18, widow Tova Sullivan takes up a job at the Sowell Bay Aquarium to keep busy and cope. There, she forms a kind of friendship with a mischievous octopus named Marcellus. Through Marcellus’ point of view, we learn that his immense intelligence finely attunes him to the feelings and actions of his human caretakers. When Marcellus uncovers the truth about what happened to Erik, he desperately works to communicate it to Tova before his short life comes to an end. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a wonderfully cozy place for readers to land. It’s a love letter to the Pacific Northwest, the enigmatic octopus, and people with one simple desire: freedom from past wounds. 

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aquatic life highlighted: Sea star, whale shark, crayfish, scallop, and others

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fourth poetry collection Oceanic is tenderly personal and intentionally global at the same time, unified by marine motifs that come in and out like tides throughout. Metaphors from the natural world serve revelations about identity, as in these lines from the opening poem, “Self-Portrait as Scallop”:  I’d rather be set like a jewel in your nest / a sweet surprise after the sun dissolves / into the Pacific like a gold ghost / sugaring my coffee. By then I will have / opened up to you. Nezhukumatathil’s clear voice is the sea in which these poems scuttle and breathe. Oceanic is a perfect initial exposure before moving into her celebrated book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments.

Lilly Dancyger’s Book Is a Love Letter to Her Women Friends

Posted on by Jo Lou

Pop culture feeds on romantic couplings, but we all know the truth about who keeps us alive. Our friends, what would ever we do without them? It is passionate platonic friendship that concerns Lilly Dancyger in her second book, First Love: Essays on Friendship.

A collection of personal and critical essays, First Love began when she was writing her first book, Negative Space, a memoir about grieving her father, later selected by Carmen Maria Machado for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. “I was writing a chapter about my teenage life, when I was getting into drugs,” Dancyger tells me. “And there just wasn’t room to go into the relationships that were so important in my life at that time.” She promised herself she would return and write about them later.

Today that project is here: it tastes of whiskey and smells like cigarette smoke, and inside, reveals a tender heart roaring with loyalty. Each new essay on friendship reads like its own little universe, “with its own history and customs and themes and flavor,” she says. 

I spoke with Dancyger via phone about why love is softness, the problem with murder memoirs, and that gush of pleasure we get when a book all comes together at the end. 

Amy Reardon: I love this sentence: “We snarled and bristled, puffed ourselves up and bared our teeth, but only to protect the softness we’d made for each other where no one else had.” Can you talk about the tenderness and softness at work in this project? 

Lilly Dancyger: In that piece, I’m talking about the group of friends that I had as a teenager. We were the bad kids, we were degenerate getting into trouble, drinking a lot, shoplifting fighting. We were like dirty, grungy street kids that I don’t think people generally associate with softness, and softness was not what we showed to the world. I wanted to remind people or tell them, for the first time if they had never thought about it, that kids who act out like that are doing it for a reason. They need that softness. Those friends and I made that for each other. That was lifesaving. 

AR: In the essay, “Partners in Crime,” you write about two young girls who create themselves around each other. So much so that they start to look alike. Why do you think? 

We figure out who we are in the world in the context of our friends.

LD: It’s an experience that a lot of people have. We figure out who we are in the world in the context of our friends. First you have your family of origin, and that’s the beginning of learning who you are and how you fit in the world. But then a big part of growing up and developing is differentiating yourself from your family. Striking out on your own, you find your peers. It’s also a dangerous time for a lot of kids. That’s what peer pressure is all about. Kids get into all kinds of trouble and sometimes go down destructive paths because teenagers really want to fit in with their friends. That’s often talked about as like a kind of a psychological weakness in young people, but I think it’s inevitable and natural because how we establish our identities in the world. Ideally, or hopefully, there’s another phase of differentiation later when you realize you don’t have to go along with a crowd, and you figure out who you really, truly are as an individual. 

AR: In “Portraiture,” a photographer friend sends the narrator a mini-essay about why she shoots photos of her so often. Here she is describing years before, when the narrator was a bartender: 

“You kicked out grown men, and they complied. One night, some guy I’d been talking to eyed you from across the bar, cocked his head and commented on how hot you were, as if he was the first person to ever notice, like he’d discovered you. I wanted to laugh in his face.” 

Her words sort of took my breath away. How did it feel when you read that and why did you choose in include it in the collection?

LD: That took my breath away too. I thought it was so lovely, and also unexpected. That’s not what I asked her for. We were talking about collaborating on a photo project, and I thought she was going to send me some ideas for some images. And she sent me this really loving and seeing description of a past version of myself. It also got to the heart of a lot of what I was trying to talk about in the whole book, which just how clearly we’re able to see each other, even when nobody else can or nobody else wants to. She sent me that and I was like, well, shit, I’m falling short in all these other essays. Nothing I wrote in the rest of the essays is as perfect as this. That’s a good feeling.

AR: I love how this book is about mostly straight women, with all kinds of loving and hurting and hooking up going on, and the men are never the point. I’m guessing that was  intentional?

LD: The book is not about them. I do have some really close friendships with men too, and there was a point where I was like, should I write about them? Or maybe even put one essay in here about my closest guy friend who was my best man at my wedding. But it took away from what I was really trying to talk about, which is the love between women and all of the different shades of it.

AR: The scenes in this project are rendered so sensually—they actually taste like whiskey and smell like cigarette smoke. 

LD: I really wanted to write something about the role of alcohol in my social life. It was only when I [was editing and] zoomed in that I really realized just how often I mention whiskey. But I left it in because that’s authentic to my experience. I was a pretty heavy drinker from the age of 14 to about 27ish. 

AR: Then at the end of the collection, the narrator’s going to bed early, sober with a cup of herbal tea. 

There’s always kind of a scary vulnerability to putting something so personal out.

LD: That sharply declined when I quit bartending. And now I actually haven’t had any alcohol in over a year. It definitely has changed my mode of socializing and being in the world. And yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t quite reconciled that yet. I’m still thinking about what that means. There’s definitely a lot of upside to it. But also something that is lost undeniably. I sometimes miss a late night at the bar. I just don’t think I can physically handle it anymore.

AR: My friends and I have started to say we love each other at the end of conversations. What a treasure. Why didn’t we discover this sooner?

LD: I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but I’m lucky, I guess, to have had that for a long time. These friends that I met when I was 13, 14 years old, we always told each other, we loved each other, and we always were very unabashed in our devotion to each other. And I’m really grateful to have had that for so much of my life and to still have it. And I hope to hold onto it.

AR: So for people reading this, how do you create that? 

LD: I don’t know because it’s not something I went looking for, I just, I found the right people.

AR: Or, maybe it’s you?

LD:  It wasn’t like something I sought out in an intentional way. I met these people, and they became my family. I loved them, and it was important for me to show them that I loved them. If you feel that closeness with somebody, I think a lot of times we get shy or embarrassed, and we don’t want to scare people away.

AR: Yes…

LD: But I think that just going out of your way to do something nice for somebody or sending them a present out of the blue or telling them that you love them or whatever. Being open makes space for them to do that too. Once that’s been established and been said out loud, then it’s easier to live that. Rather than being like I don’t want to text her too much. Maybe she’s busy, or whatever.

AR: I’m obsessed with the final essay in the collection, “On Murder Memoirs.” Why does the book end here, after beginning with Sabina, your cousin who was tragically murdered in her early 20s?

LD: Yeah, I mean, the whole book is about her in a way. I think of all the rest of the essays as overflowing out of that first essay about her: talking about loving her is also talking about loving my friends. Because it’s all this mode of being that I think you were getting at with the last question—this openness and willingness to love in that way.  In the essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” my whole point is that it’s not true crime, and that I’m going to write about this person who I love who was killed. I’m going to write about her and about that experience without writing a book about murder. So it’s not a book about murder, it’s a book about love.

AR: At the end, I got that pleasurable rush in my brain, the one you get when you’re reading and suddenly everything comes together. Then I went back to the first chapter, and of course there it was, this line, “This is not a crime story, it’s a love story.” Did you have to go back and rewrite the first chapter after you finished? 

LD: No. You know what? Actually, that was already in there. As I was getting to the end of the last essay, I found myself kind of arriving at that same idea that I had started with. I love a full circle moment.

AR: I love that too.

LD: Yeah, it happened organically, but then once I wrote the ending of the last piece and realized that it was intended to kind of direct you back to the beginning and recast the whole book in a way. To revisit a moment, but have it feel completely different.

AR: How does it feel to finish a project that is such an act of love, and to put it out in the world? 

LD: All the things. There’s always kind of a scary vulnerability to putting something so personal out. Especially doing it twice in a row in such quick succession. I published my memoir, and I felt really just kind of flayed by the experience. Then it was like, why am I doing this again? It’s a drive, I don’t think it’s a rational or sane thing to do. To publish something so personal. But I feel compelled to explore these things on the page. Once I’ve written them, I’m proud of them, and I can’t help but want to put them out into the world, like a cat dropping a dead mouse in your shoe: there you go.

Meet the Transgender Fiction Finalists for the 36th Annual Lambda Literary Awards

Posted on by Jo Lou

A short story collection of queer Gen Z women in Michigan navigating their twenties. A novel about an Irish woman in Copenhagen who receives an unexpected visit from an ex from her pre-transition life. Stories following the hopes, dreams, and struggles of a group of Black queer and trans friends in Montreal. A novel exploring how a relationship between two gay men in London changes when one of them comes out as a trans. And a work of fiction set in a municipal dumpsite on the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border that interweaves the lives of three very different women. These 5 books are the finalists for the 36th Annual Lambda Literary Awards‘s Transgender Fiction Prize, taking place on June 11th.

Centering trans characters at the heart of their work, these writers explore questions of identity, race, and gender. Whether in Kuala Lumpur or New York, the tie that binds these books together is the quest to find love, acceptance, and belonging in a world that’s hostile towards their very existence.

We talked to finalists Emily Zhou, Valérie Bah, Soula Emmanuel, Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, and Nicola Dinan about their books, their path to becoming a writer, and their trans literary influences.

Emily Zhou

Tell us about your path to becoming a writer and publishing your book.

I joined The Michigan Daily as a junior in college and wrote a few dozen essays, reviews, and pieces of criticism for the arts and culture section, and gradually realized I had taught myself how to put together a coherent piece of writing. After I finished school, I tried my hand at writing short stories and put them on a Substack newsletter for a few friends and people on the internet to see. When LittlePuss Press got started, the poet Stephen Ira nudged me to submit what I had written so far as a partial manuscript, and to my complete surprise they accepted it. In the subsequent two years, I vastly reworked the stories I had already written and wrote the remaining stories. 

Tell us about your book.

Girlfriends is a collection of realist short stories mostly about trans women in their early to mid twenties. It’s set in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where I grew up and went to college), and in New York City (where I have lived since 2021). My goal was to depict life in these places in a naturalistic but forgiving way, and show how young trans girls make their ways through social worlds that uncomfortably and incompletely accommodate us. Most of my characters are a few months to years into gender transitions that coincided with broader coming-of-age points in life, and are usually engaged in figuring out what to do next and experimenting with their senses of self. It’s a chatty book, light on plot, mostly pretty understated with a few moments of heightened emotion and drama. 

What books by trans authors have been influential to you and why?

One of the things that made me want to write fiction was my discovery of Topside Press’s catalog. In college I read a lot of queer theory, and I had become accustomed to primarily looking at transness as a sociopolitical phenomenon, examined from the outside. The Topside writers wanted a different way to write about trans people—not merely “telling our own stories,” but making art out of them and in so doing asserting agency over the domain of culture. In particular, Casey Plett’s book A Safe Girl to Love made me realize that I had something to say. (Casey later became the editor of Girlfriends at LittlePuss.) Her stories have a sort of understated, resonant emotional depth that I still aspire to in my own work, and they’re closely focused on the meaning locked in ordinary experience, memory, and friendship. I continue to learn a lot from her work. 

When I moved to New York I came to understand that there was a much wider world of experimental trans writing that had sprung up after Topside folded. One of the books that people told me to read was hannah baer’s memoir Trans Girl Suicide Museum, which made a big impression on me. Close to the beginning, she writes that she isn’t trying to write a “good book” or polish her thoughts to make them more coherent and digestible, and I think the spontaneous, thinking-out-loud quality the book has works in its favor—it feels like having a long, freewheeling conversation with a particularly intelligent and sensitive friend. (And despite what she says, there are some jaw-dropping, bravura passages in it.) In Girlfriends I was frequently trying to capture the quality of in-the-moment thinking and processing (particularly in the final story, “Gap Year”), and I took a lot of cues from baer’s book. 

Soula Emmanuel

Tell us about your path to becoming a writer and publishing your book.

I wrote Wild Geese during Covid, in 2020 and 2021, so it has the pensive and slightly claustrophobic feel of that time, when we couldn’t see each other but it also felt like the world was about to change. I was feeling slightly stuck between two versions of myself then, between the part of me that wanted to change and the part of me dominated by anxiety—all of that is reflected in the novel. Then things moved quite quickly: I won a mentorship place with a literary agency in the U.K. in 2021, and the book was published in 2023, so, ever the anxious person, I didn’t quite have time to have second thoughts about it.

Tell us about your book.

Wild Geese is about a trans woman, Phoebe, who has moved from Dublin to Copenhagen and is about three years into her transition. One evening she is visited by Grace, her ex from before her transition, who shows up unexpectedly at her door. They spend the weekend together, weaving their personal stories into the streets and old buildings of Copenhagen, and it becomes an exploration of how people change, how we can run away from our pasts and how we carry with us different versions of ourselves. It’s kind of a twist on the old Irish emigrant story too: instead of the main character going home, home comes to them, in a very 21st-century way. It has been compared to a trans Before Sunset, which I think is pretty accurate!

What books by trans authors have been influential to you and why?

My favourite trans novel is Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante—a former Lammy winner in this category!—and I love the way she interplays transness with other topics like grief and fandom, to bring out the humanity and nuance of her characters. I also love the writing of Juliet Jacques and Garielle Lutz.

Valérie Bah

Tell us about your path to becoming a writer and publishing your book.

Franky, I’ve had exceptional support! My path to publication started with a fierce ass literary collective and collection called “Les Martiales” conceived by Stéphane Martelly, a poet, scholar and painter who assembled a community of Black women and femme writers. Honestly, she’s doing the Lorde’s work in a very white literary landscape in Québec. 

Also, shoutout to Metonymy Press, a small gay publisher co-founded by Ashley Fortier and Oliver Fugler, who hosted the translation by the artist Kama La Mackerel, who so generously envisioned bringing the book to an anglophone readership. 

Tell us about your book.

The Rage Letters, translated by Kama La Mackerel, explores the intertwined lives of a group of four Black queer and trans friends living in a Montrealish city. it’s also an experiment in narrative structure, tracing the patterns of their lives through cross sections of their joint experiences. Also, in the original version, I had fun circumventing the conventions of literary French.

What books by trans authors have been influential to you and why?

Love me some Awkaeke Emezi for their unapologetic voice and cosmology. We should all be so daring. Honestly, it was a game changer for me to see them doing their thang. Also, Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (also published by Metonymy!) is so real and precious as an intricate love letter to her younger self. That’s very much how I approached The Rage Letters.

Nicola Dinan

Tell us about your path to becoming a writer and publishing your book.

I don’t think I gave myself permission to call myself a writer until I started writing Bellies—a mistake! I’d always loved writing, but never felt “qualified” enough to write a book, until one day I did. The first draft of Bellies came together in seven months, and after another six months of editing I found an agent, and a few months after that there was a book deal on the table. Looking back, it feels like I wrote it in a flurry and with a real sense of urgency—maybe because I hated my day job and loved writing, or maybe because I was scared that there were a million other people with the exact same idea. I write a bit more sensibly now. 

Tell us about your book.

Bellies is the story of Tom and Ming. Tom’s an awkward white boy who had a privileged upbringing in South London (though he’ll do his best to hide it), and Ming is an ebullient playwright from Malaysia who struggles with OCD. They meet at a university drag night and fall quickly in love, as you do when you’re twenty, but when they move to London after graduation to start the next chapter of their lives, Ming comes out as a trans. A relationship seemingly between two gay men becomes something else, and Tom and Ming have to negotiate what that means for them, and where their love for each other goes. 

It’s a story about a relationship facing a potentially insurmountable hurdle, but it’s also a novel about the mess of being in your early twenties. 

What books by trans authors have been influential to you and why?

I wish I had more trans authors to list, but through my own failings, and maybe more critically those of mainstream publishing, I lacked exposure to a wide set of trans authors to draw inspiration from. Detransition, Baby was influential in the sense that I strongly believe it has made the publication of books like Bellies more possible. 

In the lead up to and since publishing Bellies, I’ve read so many more trans authors who inspire me. K. Patrick, Jordy Rosenberg and Kai Cheng Thom, to name a few. 

Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny

Tell us about your path to becoming a writer and publishing your book.

I started teaching literature for high school students in the early 2000’s, I had always been an avid reader and, I guess, a storyteller. I liked writing short-stories and would publish some here and there back in Mexico, where I am from. Becoming a writer was not something I was pursuing, I like believing is something that happened to me, something that I started doing as a need to put my creativity (and my anxiety!) to work. 

I moved to El Paso in 2010 to do my MFA, and the program but most importantly, the life at this border gave the tools, the space, and most importantly, the motivation to write this novel. It was first published in Spain with Tránsito Editorial, but I knew I wanted to see it in English with Deep Vellum, I admired their catalogue and their work; they sorta knew me because of The Everything I Have Lost, a novel I wrote in English and published with Cinco Puntos Press. Deep Vellum proposed JD Pluecker to translate this book, and it was the best decision ever because JD had long conversations with me and involved me in the process in more than one way.

Tell us about your book.

Trash interweaves the experiences and voices of three very different women whose life or work moves around the municipal dumpsite of Ciudad Juárez, México. A teenager orphan who has always lived and worked at this place, a scientist who is researching the site, and a transwoman who manages and cares a group of sex-workers become the protagonists of this attempt to observe the complexities of survival, love, violence, at the Mexico-U.S. border.

What books by trans authors have been influential to you and why?

I read Las Biuty Queens by Iván Monalisa Ojeda, a short-story collection/episodic novel when I had the first draft of Trash. My novel is all about voice and characterization and Ojeda does a great job in recreating the life of the cuir latina community in New York.

Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques is probably the first memoir I read about a transwoman, it is a coming of age that brings attention to the loneliness, the struggle, and the violence trans and in general LGBT + community endures; but at the same time, it is an example of love, resistance, and community.

13 Queer Thrillers and Mystery Novels You Should Be Reading

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In the past few years, books written by and about queer characters have become more visible to the general reading public. Gradually, straight, cisgender readers are discovering the pleasure of reading books by authors whose identities are different from their own. This is true in the mystery and thriller reading world as well. 

In my new novel, Hall of Mirrors, a mystery set in 1954 Washington, D.C., about two gay writers who co-author hard-boiled detective fiction under the macho moniker Ray Kane, I explore writing from the closet, the complexity of inventing a false persona to sell books, which in the 1950s was often necessary to find broad appeal to consumers, not to mention to avoid being discriminated against and persecuted. Thankfully, today, things have changed (for the most part), and readers of all types are reaching for queer books precisely because they want to read LGBTQIA+ characters (assuming a book ban doesn’t block their ability to access these books). 

Of course, prejudice still exists, and the grooves of unconscious bias take time to change; the specious idea that queer books are inferior is lodged deep in some. Book lists, however, should be made from a place of hope, so with that in mind, I’ve culled a list of the most influential queer crime novels published in the past four years. As with all lists, this one is incomplete, and I’ve had to leave out great writers. For more recommendations, check out Queer Crime Writers, an organization I co-founded to promote community among queer crime fiction authors and celebrate LGBTQIA+ crime books.  

Each of the novels below is by a queer writer about queer characters. I selected them because, in some way, they speak to the history of queer mysteries and thrillers, tell us something about crime fiction today, and of course, because they are great books. Dig in, start anywhere. You won’t be sorry. 

The Lost Americans by Chris Bollen

Bollen’s most recent stand-alone thriller follows Cate Castle as she travels to Cairo to investigate her brother Eric’s suspicious death, a fall from a hotel balcony that the local authorities have deemed a suicide. Eric works for a shady corporation, Polestar, that supplies missiles to authoritarian governments. When Cate orders an autopsy on Eric’s body, the result points to foul play, and despite Polestar’s intimidation tactics, she heads to the Middle East. In Egypt, she teams up with a gay, Western-educated Egyptian, Omar. They work together to unwind the mystery, which has the ambiance of a Graham Greene novel, the twists and turns of an Agatha Christie tale, and an ending with lasting emotional resonance. It’s a compelling exploration of how it feels to be queer in a country where widespread legal and cultural discrimination is the norm.

Whereabouts Unknown by Meredith Doench

In this police procedural about missing teenage girls in Ohio, Doench creates memorable characters in Detective Theodora (Theo) Madsen and her pregnant partner, Bree. When Theo gets injured during a routine interview, she must navigate convalescing, her new role as a parent, and, of course, finding the missing girls. One of the missing girls, Annabelle, a point-of-view character, is trapped in a terrifying situation, keeping the tension high and storytelling brisk. Doench carefully constructs her characters to reveal their humanity, give the reader compelling insight into lesbian parenthood, and deepen our understanding of Theo’s ability to do her job despite the physical challenges brought on by her injury. We’re invited to think about ablism and chronic illness and how those limitations play out in professional crimefighting.

Real Bad Things by Kelly J. Ford

Ford’s Real Bad Things is a queer homecoming novel and gritty rural noir. Jane Mooney fled her hometown of Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, to Boston after she, as a teenager, confessed to killing her abusive stepfather. His body was never found, so she was never convicted; she wasn’t even believed. Now, a body has surfaced after a flood in the Arkansas River and is suspected to be the stepfather’s. Jane returns to surrender to the police and do her time, a penance she feels she must pay. Of course, it’s never that simple: she must confront her vengeful mother, who rejected her, reconnect with other estranged friends and family, and reunite with the woman she once loved—getting to the truth of what happened means, as it does for many queer people, confronting the past. Indeed, you can go home again, but if you do, watch out.  

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy

In Douaihy’s first in a series, Sister Holiday, a tatted, chain-smoking nun, steps forward as a genuinely original queer protagonist. Set in New Orleans, Holiday teaches music at Saint Sebastian’s, a school adjacent to her convent, retreating from the chaos of her life as a punk rocker. When an arsonist strikes and someone is killed, she discovers she has a knack for solving crime, a nose for corruption, and a strong desire for justice. It’s easy to see what makes Holiday singular on the surface, but the juxtaposition of the narrative’s noir sensibility—a fatalism the subgenre is well known for—and Holiday’s earnest spirituality blends Philip Marlowe’s tough-minded, world-wear outlook with something akin to Christian existentialism. The result is a queer character full of contradictions, emotional complexity, and—you guessed it—surprises. 

Survivor’s Guilt by Robyn Gigl

Gigl’s second in the series, Survivor’s Guilt—named one of Time Magazine’s best mysteries and thrillers of all time—continues her legal thrillers anchored by the transgender defense attorney, Erin McCabe. When millionaire businessman Charles Parsons commits suicide, it seems like an open-and-shut case until a voice recording implicates his adoptive daughter Ann, who confesses and pleads guilty. Even after McCabe and her law partner Duane Swisher discover that Ann is a trans woman, they’re reluctant to take the case. Lucky for us, they do. After convincing Ann to withdraw her plea, they set out to clear her name, even as she keeps secrets from them. Eventually, the case takes them into the dark territory of sex trafficking. Erin McCabe allows Gigl, also a trans attorney, to discuss issues, both major and minor, that impact transgender people; through her inventive storytelling, we understand how poorly the legal system functions to protect them. 

Warn Me When It’s Time by Cheryl Head

While Head’s stand-alone Time’s Undoing has received much-deserved positive press, her Charlie Mack Motown series offers us her most memorable queer character: P.I. Charlie Mack, a cis Black lesbian, is one of the few intersectional queer characters in crime fiction. She’s tough-minded, intelligent, flawed, and sensitive; she must navigate everything from complex criminal schemes to her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. In Warn Me When It’s Time, her sixth in the series, she takes on a hate group claiming responsibility for arsons and robberies at mosques, temples, and Black churches in Detroit. Head brilliantly traces the origins of systemic bigotry from the ground-level violence and into the shining halls of the government.

Bury Me In Shadows by Greg Herren

One of queer crime fiction’s most prolific and decorated writers, Herren takes a turn to the Southern Gothic in this YA novel. After a drug and alcohol binge, gay college student Jake Chapman is sent to his grandmother’s decaying home in rural Alabama adjacent to the ruins of an old plantation. During an archaeological team’s excavation on the plantation grounds to uncover the truth of a family legend, they find a skeleton. Soon, his family’s dark past begins to surface, bringing very present danger to his doorstep. Herren imbues the novel with rich details about the town and its multilayered history. Like any good gothic novel, the setting here, with its lush details and shadow-drenched landscape, conveys a palpable mood. 

Once You Go This Far by Kristen Lepionka

In Lepionka’s fourth P.I. Roxane Weary novel, school nurse Rebecca Newsome dies in a fall while hiking, but her daughter Maggie doesn’t believe it’s an accident; she suspects Rebecca’s ex-husband, a well-connected cop. She hires Weary, and the case takes the investigator down many paths, including to a fundamentalist church, a Canadian casino, and a women’s health organization run by a charismatic politician. Throughout the series, Lepionka juggles complex plotting with layered character development, anchored by Weary, who is bi, navigates a complex romantic life, and wears a tough exterior over a flawed and vulnerable interior. Her desire to solve crimes and find lasting love are threaded together believably, making for a genuinely memorable queer crime fighter.

Red Market by Dharma Kelleher

In this fifth novel in the Jinx Ballou series, Kelleher takes her Phoenix-based trans bounty hunter, Jinx, into grim terrain: the illegal selling of cadavers. When she’s hired to track down the body broker, and he ends up dead, she’s the prime suspect. As with the other books in this vivid and gritty series, Jinx is an unforgettable queer crime fiction protagonist. She’s a tough, powerful trans woman who takes action and propels the story forward at a breathless pace. Woven between carnage and plot twists, Kelleher, a trans woman, exposes the injustices visited on trans people with great sensitivity and without being didactic. There’s tenderness and authenticity under the leather-studded surface of all her novels.

Lies With Man by Michael Nava

Set in Los Angeles during the mid ’80s, the ninth Henry Rios novel concerns an initiative that right-wing Christians have placed on the November 1986 ballot, which would grant the health department the right to force people with HIV into quarantine camps. Latino defense attorney Rios agrees to serve as counsel for a group of peaceful young queer activists opposing the initiative. When a bomb at an evangelical church kills its pastor, one of Rios’s activist clients faces the death penalty. Like many of the novels in Nava’s award-winning series, Lies With Man explores complex morality and social justice through a legal thriller. It accomplishes what the best historical fiction should achieve: telling a compelling story that shows how the present reflects the past. As always, Rios is our compassionate and flawed guide through these troubled times, which still haunt us today.

Devil’s Chew Toy by Rob Osler

Of course, not all crime fiction needs to be dark and brooding. After all, humor and wit describe queer life as much, if not more, than adversity.  In Osler’s debut, we meet Seattle teacher and part-time blogger Hayden McCall, whose crush, go-go boy Camilo Rodriguez, has mysteriously vanished. Camilo is a “Dreamer” whose family was deported and whose sister has returned to Venezuela with them. Concerned that the police won’t take his disappearance seriously, McCall teams up with his friends—Hollister and Burley—to track down Camilo. With brisk pacing and hilarious situations—they discover the first clue at a pet store called Barkingham Palace—Osler designs a caper that’s both diverting and equally substantive, proving that a story can embrace levity without being fluff. 

Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen

In the first of Rosen’s historical series set in 1954 and inspired by the hard-boiled crime fiction of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Irene Lamontaine’s widow hires Evander “Andy” Mills to investigate her wife’s death. Mills has been recently fired from the San Francisco police department for being caught at a gay bar during a raid. The titular Lavender House refers to the Lamontaine estate, built with money from the Lamontaine soap empire, that serves as a queer paradise where all its inhabitants are free to be themselves. Of course, even within the walls of Lavender House, greed, jealousy, and murder exist, and Andy must discover the truth. Rosen blends hard-boiled aesthetics with a queer viewpoint, celebrating the cornerstone of American detective fiction while challenging it.

Bath Haus by P. J. Vernon

One of the most commercially successful queer thrillers in recent years, Vernon’s Bath Haus, explores the dark side of contemporary gay relationships. Oliver Park has everything that should make him happy: his partner, Nathan, a handsome, attentive, and wealthy trauma surgeon; a sprawling townhouse in Washington, D.C.; and, after years of struggling with addiction, his sobriety. So, when he seeks out anonymous sex at a local bathhouse and nearly dies at the hands of his hook-up partner, his life begins to unravel in dangerous and unsettling ways. This novel struck a nerve in part because of its titillating subject matter, in part because of its clever twists, and in part because of its complicated and sympathetic central character, a flawed queer man fighting for agency in his life.

I Saw Myself in the Intense Longing and Love Portrayed in “Fried Green Tomatoes” 

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When my sixth-grade crush told me she didn’t want to partner up with me for a class project, I was quietly heartbroken. I didn’t yet know I was queer, but I knew I was devastated. Reeling from the loss of my closest friend (and imagined future wife), I did what I always do in times of crisis: I turned to a book. 

My mother had a copy of Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, so I picked it up and started to read. Evelyn Couch, a lonely empty-nester searching for purpose, meets Ninny Threadgoode at the retirement home where her mother-in-law lives. Ninny is a spunky chatterbox who soon draws Evelyn in by sharing her stories of life in Depression-era Alabama, including anecdotes about the lesbian couple who owned the Whistle Stop Café: the slyly charming Idgie Threadgoode (Ninny’s sister-in-law) and the angelic but strong Ruth Jamison.

Like Evelyn, I was quickly captivated by the stories of Idgie and Ruth’s bravery as two queer women, who ran a business together, raised a child together and stood up against racism in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. Idgie and Ruth’s devotion to one other, along with the pure joy they found in each other’s company, reflected how I felt when I experienced these strange pre-adolescent sparks with other girls my age. The intense longing and love described in the books felt like a recognition I had long been seeking.

Before I even knew I was the B in LGBTQIA+, I was writing short stories about running away with the other little girls in my class, who were mostly outgoing tomboys, while I was quieter and girlier. I wanted to spend all my time with them: protecting them, working side by side in school (like Idgie and Ruth did in their café), hearing their secrets and telling them mine. I wasn’t always sure what to do with these feelings, and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café provided me with some context. 

Fried Green Tomatoes, the book’s 1991 film adaptation, is currently enjoying a renaissance as new fans discover it on Netflix and fans from its heyday do nostalgic rewatches. Before my own rewatch, I turned back to Flagg’s source material, and I was immediately transported back to my thorny pre-teen years, which were filled with confused queer longing.

The book is even more explicit about Idgie and Ruth’s relationship than I remembered. When Ruth comes to stay with Idgie’s family one summer (at the time, Idgie is around 15 or 16; Ruth is around 21 or 22), Idgie’s open-hearted mother cautions her other children against mocking Idgie’s nervousness around Ruth, telling them, “Now, children, your sister has a crush, and I don’t want one person to laugh at her.” The fact that her crush is on a young woman like herself isn’t acknowledged; it’s treated like a normal crush that any angsty adolescent would have. Her siblings giggle at Idgie’s awkward behavior just as if her crush were a heteronormative one.

To my surprise, some of my friends who were happy to revisit the film did not know it was a queer love story. Or should it really be a surprise? While Flagg (an out and proud lesbian) makes it clear in her novel that the women are in a romantic relationship, the movie was subtle enough for the romance not to be read at all. In fact, the sweet, goofy food fight scene between Idgie and Ruth in the film was described by Jon Avnet, the director of the film adaptation, as a “love scene” during his director’s commentary on the DVD. If that’s the love scene, it’s no wonder people didn’t read their relationships as a romantic one.

I was writing short stories about running away with the other little girls in my class.

Something else surprised me, too. While I was more or less prepared to be hit with the bittersweet nostalgia of being a confused bisexual kid, I didn’t realize that my 40-year-old self would reread the novel (which I had read at least a dozen times in my childhood) and appreciate it for a completely different reason. 

While I did read the sections about Evelyn’s descent into menopause as a kid, I did not completely get it. Evelyn confides in Ninny, “I’m too young to be old and too old to be young.” As an 11-year-old, my understanding of that sentence was very surface level. Sure: Middle age is in the middle. 

Now, as a premenopausal woman myself, I read that sentence and get a chill. This was my older self mirrored back to me by Flagg’s iconic novel: I was no longer a lovelorn child, but a woman on the verge of… something. 

Evelyn is in a deep depression when the book begins. Her moods drop so low that she daydreams about death by suicide. As Flagg says, “Evelen was forty-eight years old and she had gotten lost somewhere along the way.” Evelyn is also obsessed with the ideas of pain and death. She also has what I think of as a healthy distrust of doctors.

“She wondered why she had to live in a body that would get old and break down and feel pain… While she had been in the throes of labor pains… her obstetrician had stood there and lied to her face. ‘Mrs. Couch, you’re going to forget these pains as soon as you see that baby of yours. So push a little harder. You won’t even remember this, trust me.’

WRONG! She remembered every pain, right down the line.”

I have experienced my share of doctors being obtuse or simply being ignorant of the realities of life as a person with a uterus. Evelyn’s dismissive doctor reminded me of some of mine, doctors who’d misdiagnosed or dismissed my painful symptoms of endometriosis, uterine fibroids and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) for years. 

Like Evelyn, I am weary of doctors – I’ve encountered so many who don’t listen, especially when it comes to women’s health. I didn’t realize it when I was a tween obsessively reading Flagg’s novel, but Evelyn Couch was the first woman I encountered in fiction who called out how callous (and ill-informed) the medical system can be when it comes to menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

I went to many, many different gynecologists who shrugged off my extensive list of symptoms, chalking everything up to “normal” period pain. I felt powerless, just as Evelyn did. Having pain doubted, brushed off or diminished by medical professionals is a sadly common and demeaning experience faced by women, and particularly Black women. 

At the nursing home where Evelyn and Ninny meet, the only employee mentioned by name is Geneene, a Black nurse who takes care of the residents. While she makes few appearances in the book (and movie), she represents the medical community at the nursing home. Earlier in the book’s timeline, Onzell, a Black woman who works at the café along with her husband Big George, takes on the role of medical caretaker when cancer overwhelms Ruth. When Ruth becomes bedridden, Ninny tells Evelyn, “Onzell moved into the room with her and never left her side.” In fact, Onzell is the only person with Ruth when she passes away; when Ruth is ready, Onzell is brave enough to give her the morphine that will release her from her pain. Whether by coincidence or design, Black women are the trusted medical professionals in this story, and they treat their patients with the respect and dignity that is so often lacking in the medical establishment. 

I was no longer a lovelorn child, but a woman on the verge of… something.

Ninny gives Evelyn these inspiring stories of the little town of Whistle Stop, but she also gives her something else. When the older woman discovers Evelyn in tears at the nursing home, she quizzes her about her symptoms and quickly gives her a diagnosis: “You’re just going through a bad case of menopause, that’s all that’s the matter with you. What you need is to take your hormones and to get out every day and walk in the fresh air and walk yourself right through it.”

And she’s right! Much of Evelyn’s dark moods and hopelessness has to do with her fluctuating hormone levels. When Ninny gave Evelyn this advice, I remembered the relief I felt when a wise doctor pointed out to me that the horrifying and self-destructive mood swings I’d have around my menstrual cycle were actually the result of PMDD. It is always helpful to have validation when you’re constantly questioning your own sanity. My doctor provided that for me, and Ninny provided this for Evelyn. Ninny’s words of wisdom and support help Evelyn cope with her own changing body and mind as she goes into the next stage of her life.

Only in the last 10 years has menopause (and uterus-having people’s health in general) really taken a turn in the spotlight. When Flagg’s book was published in the late eighties, things like menstruation, menopause, reproductive issues and women’s aging weren’t common in literature, television or film – the obvious exception being the forward-thinking The Golden Girls, which premiered in 1985.

Reading about menopause in Flagg’s novel and watching the characters discuss it in the film adaptation didn’t completely absorb into my brain as a child. Rereading and rewatching these scenes as an adult, I was stunned by how effective they were – and how little effect they had on me when I initially came across them. It felt as though Flagg had left coded messages – the ink wasn’t invisible, but it was essentially indecipherable to me at the time I first read it. 

There are pieces of art that can have vastly different impacts on us throughout life. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a good example of a book children and teens often find pivotal, but rereading it as an adult might leave you with a less charitable understanding of the infamous Holden Caulfield. Reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café as an adult, I realized I was now closer to Evelyn’s age than Idgie and Ruth’s during the lion’s share of the story. It felt magical to revisit this much-loved story after decades away and still find something new. Instead of eye-rolling as I had done when I reread The Catcher in the Rye (sorry, Holden; Phoebe, you’re still amazing), I felt I had access to a secret that had been hiding in plain sight for years. There are layers to Flagg’s work that I’m only now discovering.

It is always helpful to have validation when you’re constantly questioning your own sanity.

I was also able to look back at my pre-teen self a bit more tenderly. After my one-time crush rebuffed me (she ended up being queer, too, as it turns out), I found myself in yet another intense friendship with a girl my age who was similarly obsessed with Fried Green Tomatoes. What luck! We even called each other Idgie (her) and Ruth (me) – to date the most lesbian thing I’ve ever done. One of us often brought our copy of the book to school, and we’d quote our favorite parts, like Ruth quoting the Biblical Book of Ruth to Idgie in a letter in order to let her know she was ready to leave her abusive husband in Georgia and return home to Idgie:

“And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave three, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

(It’s worth noting that Idgie’s mother continued to be supportive of Ruth and Idgie’s relationship throughout; when Idgie brings Ruth back home to Alabama, Idgie’s mother tells her,  “Poppa and I just want you to know that we think of you as one of the family now, and we couldn’t be happier for our little girl to have such a sweet companion as you.” Her support also upends cultural assumptions – this acceptance took place in the South in 1928.)

Although it sometimes feels strange to have “outlived” the versions of Idgie and Ruth whom I idolized in my youth, it also feels like coming full circle. After Idgie famously charms bees in order to get a honeycomb, Ruth (who is meant to be impressed) instead breaks down in tears. She was more worried about Idgie’s life than impressed by her swaggering bravado. And at that moment, her feelings for Idgie became crystal clear.

“When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding though her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart…. She had no idea why she wanted to be with Idgie more than anybody else on this earth, but she did.”

Now, as my older self, I could look back kindly at my youthful yearning and feel some compassion for the young girl who was always searching for a fearless tomboy to run off with. I no longer feel embarrassed or sad for the confused pre-teen (and to be honest, teen and early twentysomething) who squinted until she was able to shape the person in front of her into their perfect partner. 

When Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was published, young queer people like me gained some comfort from reading about Idgie and Ruth’s relationship. Now women Evelyn’s age can also see their own experiences reflected back at them. As I’m preparing for the changes ahead of me in my forties, I’m thrilled to see that Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café had been there to guide me all along. 

In an era where regressive book banning has reared its ugly head, it’s all the more important to highlight stories like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Right-wing politicians and ordinary citizens claim they seek to protect children by banning books, but the only thing they’re “protecting” kids from is knowledge. And at worst, banning books makes it much more difficult for kids (and adults) to get ahold of the stories that might make a difference in their lives. 

I felt I had access to a secret that had been hiding in plain sight for years.

To see one’s self and community represented in art – whether it’s books, film, music or anything else – is validating; it lets readers know that they’re seen, and that they’re not alone. When I opened Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café as an angsty pre-teen, I had no idea that it would nudge open the door to my happily queer life. When I reread it this year, I felt a rush of validation when I saw my frustrations with doctors and the health care system (and my experiences with a misbehaving uterus) reflected back at me. 

Back when Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was originally published in 1987, I can imagine that discussions of LGBTQ+ lifestyles and reproductive health issues were much more muted. How many other women picked up this best-seller and recognized themselves in the characters Flagg created? How many other people were able to connect with the book (and film) and be themselves more fully?

As a kid, I was able to turn to the book and its film adaptation, and see a little of myself there. I wasn’t aligned fully with either the extra feminine Ruth or the rakish Idgie, but the feelings they had for one another rang true. Meeting them was the first time I knowingly encountered queer characters. What if I hadn’t had that experience? What if I didn’t find this window into a different kind of relationship? Being introduced to the possibility of an LGBTQ+ life was a turning point; I can’t imagine how much harder it would’ve been to grapple with my romantic yearnings without the help of Flagg’s groundbreaking novel. With Ruth and Idgie, I knew I was not alone. 

With Fried Green Tomatoes having been added to Netflix at a time when queer stories are being threatened every day, it represents much more than a fun nostalgic rewatch. It reminds people of the courage it takes to live openly and stand up for their beliefs. Just as Ruth and Idgie inspired Evelyn, the book and film will continue to open up possibilities for readers and viewers, no matter who they are or where they are in their life.