When I was a college senior, I used to sit in my favorite coffee shop, hook my laptop up to the free wifi, and pretend I was an editor at Electric Literature. This is a true story.
Now, as EL’s incoming Deputy Editor, remembering my slightly delusional daydreams makes me feel mildly embarrassed, but more importantly, extremely proud that all these years later I get to be a part of an organization I’ve admired for so long. (Not to mention impressed by my younger self’s impeccable literary taste!)
It’s not by chance that EL was the literary magazine I set my sights on. With my limited cash going straight to books for class (and, way, way too much coffee), I was starved for contemporary literature I could access for free. Electric Literature offered me exactly that: strange, wonderful stories that, true to EL’s mission, were exciting, relevant, and inclusive—an education in literature that went beyond what I was getting in my classes. And I was able to read those stories because of supporters like you, who ensured that people like me could access Electric Literature’s digital pages without fees or paywalls.
Back then, I needed free literature. Now, I get to provide it. Back then, I wondered if I would ever be paid for my writing. Now, I get to ensure that each of our writers is compensated for their work.
By donating to our spring fundraiser, you help ensure that readers like you, my college self, and millions of others maintain free access to our extraordinary and growing archive of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, graphic narratives, cultural criticism, and insightful coverage of forthcoming books—all written by contributors who are paid for the work they do.
Donate today to help us keep literature accessible for everyone. You never know—your donation might just allow an over-caffeinated college student with big aspirations to read her way into her dream job.
Gratefully yours,
Katie Henken Robinson Senior Editor and incoming Deputy Editor
To viewers grieving the death of Stranger Things—by death I mean not the finale of the Netflix series this past January, but the show’s unfortunate decline, after the third season, into a plodding, convoluted ghost of its former self—let me offer something of an analgesic. Travel with me, if you will, back to the superb first season, where Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers, a broke, chain smoking, seemingly delusional mother, opens a can of paint and scrawls the alphabet onto a wall of her home. Joyce hopes her missing son will use the letters to communicate with her from the Beyond. Ryder’s performance would count as one of the most convincing portrayals of insanity in recent screen history, if it weren’t for one thing: Joyce is not mentally ill. Her son is trapped in the Upside Down, and her love is so powerful, she’s able to ignore the rules of logic and perceive what no one else can.
I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.
By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.”
When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”
Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”
Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans,The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi
Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”
Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength.
Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”
Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.
Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.
By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right.
In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to TheNew York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.”
Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:
Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.
I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing.
Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.
The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis.
When a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof?
“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.”
The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically.
It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.
Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)
Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program.
Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.
Every March, we gather for the time-honored literary tradition of trying to make a pun out of March Madness. Last year, you helped us decide the best campus novel ever written in our March Gradness bracket. The year before, March Sadness. Now we’re back again with March Cadness, a quest to find literature’s best (or worst?) cad!
Okay, we’ll admit it: We’re running out of puns. For this one, we had to reach back—way back—to the 19th century, when cad was a popular term to describe a dishonorable man who uses charm and seduction in pursuit of selfish ends, often leaving wrecked relationships in his wake. While cad may feel dated or unfamiliar, the archetype is not. The cad has never really gone away; he’s just changed names. From Don Juan to player to fuckboy, literature has always been populated by these disreputable men.
What remains true about the cad is that he is narratively irresistible. He generates plot, accelerating conflict, stoking desire, and inviting humiliation. He is, for better or worse, the engine of many books. And yet, what often makes this archetype so compelling is not his bad behavior, but his slow unraveling—the moment the mask slips and he is exposed for what he is: a cad!
For this competition, we’ve gathered the worst cads across literary history: the smooth talkers, the liars, the self-mythologizers. You can start making your picks on Monday, 3/30 at 12 PM Eastern on our Instagram stories. Check out the bracket below and download it here to fill out your picks, then follow along to see if your (least?) favorite cad wins!
Below is a sneak peek of the Round One match-ups, featuring 32 of the best cad novels out there, ranging from classics to contemporary takes on the cad.
blush / river / fox is the English language debut of Swedish writer, artist, and translator Anna Nygren. Part of Milkweed Editions’ Multiverse series, which “gestures toward a correspondence—human and more-than-human—that lovingly exceeds what is normal and normative in our society, questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be,” Nygren’s book of poems and drawings plays with multiple styles and registers. The series, which includes the work of Hannah Emerson, whom Nygren has translated, pushes against the flattening that occurs when talking about neurodivergent and disabled people. Nygren’s work has its own rhythms and approaches, but demonstrates what the best poetry does: shares a different perspective and approach to language, and invites the reader into that world.
I spoke over Google docs with Nygren and their Milkweed editor, Morissa Young, who is also the founding co-editor of Strange Hymnal. The shared inquiry into language was evidenced by the working relationship between Nygren and Young. The ways that Nygren responded to both of us in conversation demonstrate a similar linguistic dynamism that can be found in their poetry. The inventive ways that they think about language, describing a word “like a tentacle stretching for another version of the word that could help the word’s world to expand in the reader’s mind.” This playful curiosity is part of how they think and work in both English and Swedish, something that Young said “collapses the limits of language.” Instead of worrying about not being fluent in English, they leaned into that in ways the language gap could open up exciting possibilities. It was a pleasure to talk with Nygren and Young about how they worked together, the double meaning of the book’s title, and the color pink.
Alex Dueben: I wonder if you could start by introducing yourselves.
Anna Nygren: Oh, I think this is the hardest question. I want to answer that I am a fish and not. Also, I live in Sweden with [my] cat Zlatan.
Morissa Young: My name is Morissa, and I’m an editor at Milkweed Editions. I manage production for many of our books, including all of our Multiverse titles. Milkweed’s Multiverse series publishes work by neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled creators to surface and explore the different ways we use and interact with language. The series is curated by poet Chris Martin, who acquires manuscripts and works developmentally on them with authors before handing them over to me for production and final edits. As a neurodivergent editor myself, I find Multiverse to be one of the great joys of my work. I love thinking about language—how to both follow and break its rules, how to experience it with all five senses, how to live within, alongside, between it.
I live in Minneapolis, and like Anna, I keep company with cats and consider fish my kin.
AD: Anna, this isn’t your first book, but it is your first one published in English. What language do you prefer to write in? What does writing in English offer you that Swedish or other languages don’t?
AN: I think for me, using a language other than Swedish means a kind of expansion of the world, like, words are like things I feel a strong relation to. In a way, I find it a bit difficult to think that languages exist. I prefer to think about words, and words are like friends (that does not mean that they are not difficult, mean, evil, strange things, but they are friends, creatures) and English gives me more words. But the English words also have Swedish siblings, so they come with translation. And translation for me is always something sort of in-between, so a word might have a sound that reminds me of another word that comes from another context, and then the words have this as a kind of parallel sibling-meaning. Also it makes things a bit slower, andI find new things and words when translating.
MY: The way Anna thinks about words and translation and the way they explore this understanding in blush / river / fox are some of the many reasons I was so excited to begin working on this project with them. blush / river / fox gives body to complex ideas and emotions, like family memory, a fraught sense of gender and identity, and what it means to become, but it’s also deeply connected to play, which collapses the limits of language. The Swedish language, its sounds and the way it interacts with English, its cognates and false cognates expand and complicate this world of words. This book is written in English for an English-speaking audience, but at the same time it exists in this liminal space between languages.
I find new things and words when translating.
AN: Also, I am not flawlessly fluent in English, I make mistakes, andI like mistakes in spelling because I think of them as secret spells inside the words.But then sometimes I want to write correct, and I feel frustrated that I have not learnt, but then other times I think of not learning as a kind of refusal to make the right thing. But it is difficult to know what is a friendly reminder of the words’ worldly agency and what is just me being lazy. I think everything is difficult, but then I think that is the reason to do it.
MY: There are also many places in the book where, instead of defaulting to a correct English or Swedish spelling, we landed on something in between, an invented word. In the line “miss the forehead / slints / the wounds,” I asked what “slints” meant, and Anna replied that it’s a sort of mistranslation. They explained, “‘slinta’ in Swedish means ‘miss,’ sort of, like when using a knife and making a mistake and maybe accidentally hurting yourself.” My understanding of this mistranslation is made richer by Anna’s explanation, but I also still felt an understanding without it—in my brain, “slint” echoes off of words like “splint” or “sling” or “sprint,” which creates a new definition that can only be explained by the way the word feels to the reader.
The editing of this book was not so much searching for outright errors but instead finding spots where language sticks and reaching until we grasped the thing that felt right. What resulted was a kind of internal grammar built on wordplay, linguistic overlap, breaking rules to expand language, and following rules when structure became too slippery.
AD: Has your process changed from your earlier work? How much of that was related to the language? How much of that is this book, or working with Morissa?
AN: I think all works have their own process, but also, I think of everything I am doing as part of the same thing. I have worked with different editors on Swedish texts. The editors make the texts and processes different. I think it is like playing maybe, or just like, being together, I think it is like, one of my favorite ways of being together, being in a text. So BRF had multiple editors and we have never met in other ways than in text (or, I have met Chris on Zoom but that was after). I think there is something about having different relations to the words, or the language, that makes us meet in the text as a kind of careful strangers. I am so happy for that because it makes the word-world grow.
MY: I love the idea of meeting one another on the page and being together in a text—it’s absolutely true. The editorial process for blush / river / fox was very much a collaboration, and the book itself became this really beautiful medium for conversation and expansion.
Anna, I remember you mentioning a while ago that you’d composed some parts of this book in Swedish first, then translated into English, and other parts—“fox,” I think—you wrote directly in English without the Swedish intermediary. We haven’t talked much about that before, but I’m curious about those two different writing processes and how they impact the resulting work.
AN: Yes! I think in my head it is like, I don’t know, the three parts are like very different times or modes, and that has to do with translation, I think. Blush came first, and first it was in Swedish, and I translated it, and then when translating I sometimes use a dictionary and learn new words, and then sometimes I forget them again. The feeling of blush is also very much memory of childhood, and there is an aspect of blush that is difficult and angry and sad mixed with desire and longing and trying. So the translation is also a trying and tiring process . . . Fox yes, I wrote most of it in one evening, it just came like magic. Also, while we started working on the editing, I started to have more of these magic moments of words coming to me in English, so this summer I wrote so much poetry in English, except it was not me writing it but the words writing me, or something like that. And sometimes I think when writing directly in English, I use only the words I already know, but when translating I sometimes learn new words. [Writing] directly in English is more like a flow, while translating is more a slow kind of playfulness. But in both cases, there are ghosts of translation or Swedish (and sometimes more) languages.
AD: This book is primarily a book of poetry, but there’s artwork, there’s color. Was there a model for how you were thinking about combining these elements, either your previous work, or others work? And how does one edit work built around the interplay of such elements?
AN: Okay my answer is yes and no and I don’t remember. I am very much inspired by the other books in the Multiverse series. But I had not read all of them before writing BRF. Sometimes inspiration comes afterwards, or maybe it was a ghost from the future (I like ghosts and I like futures) and I always think it is so difficult to name single works or authors or artists, because I am afraid of forgetting some and remembering some and it feels unfair to do so . . .
I like mistakes in spelling because I think of them as secret spells inside the words.
MY: When it comes to the color and images in this book, my editorial approach wasn’t actually different from the way I edit poetry in general, which is very much informed by the way the words sit on the page, interact with negative space, and fit within the physical book. White space, color, and Anna’s drawings work together with the words themselves to express a mind’s topography, so I didn’t really think about them as separate elements to work around, but rather as inherent parts of the poems. For any book with a non-standard interior, I work closely with the designer to be a kind of intermediary between them and the author. Alex Guerra, our design fellow, did an incredible job typesetting blush / river / fox and doing a kind of translation of his own to move the book from the screen to the physical page.
AD: The book is titled blush / river / fox, which are the three sections of the book. To what degree do you think of the three sections of the book as distinct pieces? And how much are they three parts of one book?
AN: I try to remember (but I also think maybe I should try to forget and find new connections, but I don’t know). About a year ago I wrote this about the different sections:
“First part is blush. It is maybe: body, girl-fail, family, memory. Last part is fox. It is running, fur, forest, but also language. I think a lot about more-than-human animals, I think about writing about them. It is metaphor and it is not. It is violence when trying to love, I think, and that scares me. When writing this I wanted just to be. Therefore it is difficult to describe. I think the book is trying. River maybe like RIVER. Is more like prose, maybe, between forest and family is a translation. I never felt like human, never felt like girl. I think river is a play, with translation, words inside words, I think it is fun and sad. I think love is fun and sad. I try to describe but it is hard and I feel I don’t want to. I think of a river that is, between the lands of not-water, it is separating and glueing together, stitching together, scarring together, tearing apart. It is like becoming something, I don’t know if I want to write free, I don’t know if I want, free, I want try, to try and to follow and to try to continue and to listen.”
Is that an answer?
MY: Definitely! I leaned on that paragraph you wrote quite a bit when I was working on the book’s description.
Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book’s three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker’s orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.
AD: I love that idea of being rooted to the corporeal before moving outside of it. Related to that, what is the relationship for you between the lines of a drawing on the page and the shape of the words on a page, because they are both physical actions?
AN: I write a lot by hand. And then the word is a drawing. One of my favorite things is to just draw one word that is on my mind and then fill the rest of the page with color or like, movement of coloring . . . I don’t know really if I have thought about it in other ways. There is something thinking inside the words or inside me or in the drawing in the hand in the air . . . like the thought is always a bit strange, like something I don’t understand.
AD: Could you talk a little about the color pink and what that means to you?
AN: Oh! I like this question, I have already answered it. The answer is in the book as a note, and the note is super true, but also, the pink words were not my idea from the beginning! It is a stolen idea or borrowed or a gift. I mean, it is like all this is made together.
The book itself became this really beautiful medium for conversation and expansion.
MY: In one of our correspondences, Anna asked me if I wanted to know something about the color pink in translation, and of course I replied yes. I loved their response so much, and, like they mentioned, we wound up adding it to the book’s notes. I’ll include that passage below:
“The word PINK, and also the word KISS, means PEE in Swedish. The Swedish word for the color pink is ROSA, like a rose is a rose, but it is also one of the most common names for cows, like individual cows named Rosa. There is another, maybe older, word for ROSA that is SKÄR. SKÄR also means CUT. It is like a soft cut and a blushing cut a rose a romantic thingcolorword cutting across. SKÄRKIND is the name of the village where I was born. KIND has a meaning in English yes! In Swedish KIND means CHEEK, so SKÄRKIND is like a pink cheek like blushing but also a cut, in the cheek. It is like hurting. SKÄR also means a rock in the sea, I don’t know the English word, it is like a stone a thing in water it is cutting it is a rose and it is. And the sea. When I was a child I peed in bed every night for many many years and I was woken up by my parents changing sheets and I sometimes think of this when I think of bodies of water and so. On the other side of the sea closest to where I was born there is Finland and the Swedish word in Finland for PINK is simply LJUSRÖD, light red also like a red light. I love fish and all the creatures living in lakes and rivers and oceans. The flesh of salmon is PINK. I often think of this. There is also crayfish. The Swedish crayfish are of two kinds. Those living on the west coast (where I live now) become PINK when they are cooked. Those living in lakes on the east coast (where I was born) become red when cooked. The Swedish word for CRAYFISH is KRÄFTA. KRÄFTA is also the name of the star sign CANCER in Swedish (I think it is more of a crab in English but stars refuse to know anything about species, it is also my star sign) and also an old name for the illness CANCER I often think of this eating ocean stars and tumors the thing inside like pink and so.
This is not the reason why the words are pink in the book because of blushing, but also it is.”
AN: The reason for pink is always changing and tilting and growing and . . . So I had a CD with the artist P!NK when I was 13 (and blush is so much a 13 thing and that time was so important and difficult and much more) and I listened to the song “Family Portrait.” I only remember the line ”we look pretty happy” and then there is something about pretending. And I think there is a sad meaning in this. Because family and photos are difficult, but also much more. I wrote BRF for my family. And I also think pretending is not always a bad thing, I think it is also making other worlds, and I think that is very much needed [at the moment]. Like there is a thing in pretending that reminds about the possibility of other worlds, or that this world can be different. Then pink is also such a difficult color! But I like it.
AD: Some of the artwork is pink, and throughout “blush” there are words and phrases in pink. I kept thinking about that in relation to how you think about language, and the ways that sounds and spellings and meanings are tucked within words.
AN: That is just, I don’t know, how I imagine the words or phrases want to be. They feel pink.
Recently, I’ve been distracted by the fact that all the Black men in my family are gone. I’m the last one. And these dead guys won’t leave me alone. Every essay, poem, and cryptic Facebook update for the past five months has veered into my obsession with them.
What a joke it is to be haunted.
I tell this to Josie, and she stares at me. I suspect half of her therapy schooling was spent honing this stare. It’s dreadfully effective at getting me to run my mouth.
I cave and eventually say, “It was either commitment issues, suicide, or white women.”
“You need to unmute, Mar.”
New-fashioned therapy. I was so excited for a virtual platform because—and Josie would love that I’m admitting this—it’s much easier to be vulnerable with the shield of an unstable connection, non-working camera, and therapist who isn’t technically licensed in your state.
Unmuting, I say, “Oh, my bad. I was saying that these family members either died by killing themselves, or abandoning their family, and—well, my great-grandfather was actually shot because he was having an affair with this white woman.”
I leave a dollop of quiet after I say that, trying my hand at the therapy stare.
. . .
I cave again. “It must run in the family. Claire is white.”
. . .
. . .
Damn, she’s good.
. . .
“And maybe there’s something real to that. Maybe I’m afraid—”
“Mhm?”
“Well, yeah, you can probably guess what I’m thinking.”
“I can guess, sure. But mind-reading isn’t my gig.”
I tell her how these Black family men keep coming up for me. First, I call them distractions, then generational curses, then, “I wonder what they were like.”
Josie gives me a Buddhist anecdote before telling me, “Being the lone anything in your family can be a lot. When do these distractions happen?”
. . .
On a Facebook video call, Mar tells Momma he’s been officially diagnosed with depression.
My computer desk sits in front of an open window. I’m cold. No, frigid—that’s a better word. I often gaze at this same tree. Well, he’s not much of a tree now. He looks like a map of a city’s roads, his branches crisscrossing each other, with shrivels of pink flowers dotted about his wooden hands like sleeping butterflies—oh, I see it now. My special tree looks like one of the online interactive maps I used while researching for essays. There are spatterings of pink dots along backroads, and if your cursor hovers over those spots, a picture of a hanged Black body, or a burned Black body, or beaten Black—
“Mar?” Josie is still with me.
“Sorry. I get flashes of my great-grandfather’s face. I don’t see him literally,” I say. “I’m not seeing things—no need to worry.”
“I’m not worried at this particular point,” Josie says.
I tell her my Granny kept a portrait of her father, “Lefty,” atop her shelf collection of porcelain cows. It’s been thirteen years since I’ve been in the same room with that photo of Lefty, but I can envision him perfectly. In the picture, Lefty has a leather army jacket and motorcycle cap. He has pretty eyes, and I hate that I remember them. In 1954, he snuck around on my great grandma with a white woman. The white woman’s brother gathered a few buddies to shoot Lefty at the end of his workday. I still can’t find his pink dot on the map.
“Maybe I’m so obsessed with this dude because I’m dating a white woman,” I say. “Think I’m onto something?”
“There’s probably a reason this idea is coming up.”
More staring. Only this time, I don’t cave.
“I’d like to try something I hardly ever do,” she finally says. “There’s something called writing therapy.”
I perk up.
“We can try this out if you’re willing. Here’s a prompt: Keep a diary—or it could be one of your stories—where you write your life in third person.”
“Mar is afraid that’ll make his head bigger than it already is,” I say.
“Mar shouldn’t feel forced to try this. But if he did feel comfortable, Josie thinks he’ll enjoy it. And this might stir up some different writing, so you won’t have to keep—”
“Beating dead horses,” I interrupt.
“That wouldn’t have been my choice of phrasing.”
[2. HAVE MOMMA SLAP-TEST THE BATTERIES]
Dear diary that only Josie reads, I tried telling my mom
On a Facebook video call, Mar tells Momma he’s been officially diagnosed with depression. Mar has battle plans depending on her reaction. He could tell her this was only cooked up by his therapist to screw over the insurance company.
First, Momma says, “But what about all your accomplishments?”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Mar responds. “It’s more like I don’t like myself.”
“Oh, baby. But you’re an amazing man. And I’m so proud of you—your Momma is so, so proud.”
“Thank you, Momma.”
. . .
“Can you do something that makes you happy? Are they going to get you meds for it?” Momma’s voice starts buffering.
“It’s really not that big a deal. I just feel cold sometimes.”
“Cold?”
“Yes—maybe not cold, but numb, you know? Like a robot. I need to think about feeling before acting it out. Does that make sense?” Mar says (Josie, the third-person thing feels off. It’s not my kind of dorky. Can I go by Robotman after the Doom Patrol comics?).
“Yes, Momma gets that way from time to time, too.” She stills. “What about your writing? Isn’t that going well?”
“My writing is—to be honest, I’m not sure anymore. Weirder,” Robotman says (No, that doesn’t feel right either).
“Ain’t nothing wrong with weird, baby,” Momma says.
Gizmo sees Momma contemplating. She sighs, puffs, jitters, and grits her teeth. It’s like watching an electron avalanche. Gizmo doesn’t wish to say it, but her anxiousness peer pressures him. “This is probably all coming out of my situation with Claire,” he beeps.
“Are y’all going through a rough patch?” Momma calms. Now she has her answer.
“Yeah, kind of. I told her I wanted to break up.”
“Ah. That’s a rough patch, alright.”
. . .
Momma says, “Do you think you’re dating the right sex—are you gay, honey?”
When Gizmo searches ‘How to cry as a Black man’ on TikTok, he finds a video with 1.3 million views.
“No, I don’t think that’s it.” Gizmo proceeds to giggle. He wonders how long she has suspected her little machine was gay. He wonders why she didn’t ask a more helpful question—or maybe that question was helpful. What had he done to be so unknown to his own mother? Gizmo’s last book was about Momma: learning grace from her and all other Black mothers across the country. It wasn’t the best researched, it seems.
As he stops his giggle fit, he realizes this conversation will make its way into a future essay: She’s the motherboard that keeps giving.
. . .
“Did you hear me, Mar?” Momma’s question cuts through.
“Maybe you need to get some more Black friends. Remember you’re still Black.”
Something crumples within Gizmo’s chest. Gizmo squeezes his eyes in—pain? Maybe Gizmo can feel.
“Mar, I’m for real; you’re all the way up there. And white people make everyone feel lonely.”
“Sorry,” Gizmo says. “You know, there’s only two other Black students in my grad program, and we’re each separated by genre, so I never see them.”
“That’s alright, baby. There’s got to be someplace close to D.C. with some Black folk. Because you got to remember you’re a Black man. And—I know you love white girls—but maybe look for a Black girl next time.” Momma snickers, and Gizmo files the sound of it away.
Local Disk (D:) Internal Storage>>Essays>>>forFam|
Her_laugh_like_sweet_neighing.mp3|
[3. RENEW ANTIVIRUS SUBSCRIPTION]
Claire does not want to break up with Gizmo. She asks him to give their relationship a chance, to fight for it. “After we moved here, we stopped going on dates—that’s the problem.” Claire is sure about this. “This happens all the time to couples. Let’s try dating again. Please. Please. Mar, I love you. Say something, please.”
. . .
Gizmo accepts the terms of the agreement.
Six days later, Gizmo is on a Smithsonian date with Claire. After a selfie with C-3PO and R2, Gizmo and Claire’s silhouettes hold hands under a Barnum and Bailey banner with elephants balanced on beachballs. Each elephant’s eye is too honest. Gizmo can’t bear looking into those dots of ink that form their irises. He imagines the elephants whispering, “Yes, we really were whipped until our trunks flourished convincingly for the crowd. Yes, humans, we really were true.”
Claire disrupts Gizmo’s trance to say, “I can’t believe we did this to those animals. Let them get away with doing this.”
Gizmo’s teeth grind with desperation. He wants to tell her so many things at once, like: This section of the museum really is hilarious; only nine paces away from here—from Prince’s guitar and a circus poster—there is a room no one stays in for long where recordings of famous minstrel performances loop. And also: Isn’t it funnyyou just said “we.” And also: What’s the hard part to believe—that the We had the idea or that the We were able to realize their fantasy? All so that the We could cackle and awe at what can be made possible with a master, slave, and bullwhip.
But those words would come across far more combative than Gizmo would hope, and it’s so damn difficult to be articulate when he looks into her eyes. So, instead, Gizmo says, “I know. Shit was wild.”
They skip the Jim Crow show to marvel at Captain America’s shield. In person, its white stripe is gunmetal grey. The Handmaid’s Tale dress stares down at Claire like a weeping angel.
“Realer every day with Roe v. Wade,” she says.
Gizmo likes Claire’s speech. She is accidentally musical when she’s bleak. They make their way to a shrine of PBS heroes. Claire maraca-bounces her head and sings along to the “won’t you be my neighbor” coming from the speakers. In a photograph above a red, hand-knit cardigan, they see Mr. Rogers dipping his toes in a kiddie pool with Officer Clemmons. Claire catches Gizmo lingering on this photo longer than he should. “There are so many Black cops on TV,” he says. Gizmo is not sure why he says this out loud, but kudos to Claire for the respectful nod in response.
As they *click click* past Dorothy’s slippers, Gizmo is startled that he can’t wipe Officer Clemmons’s face from his vision. There was something about his face—
(There I go again, Josie. My distractions.)
Officer Clemmons bears a resemblance to Gizmo’s great-grandfather: the bountiful glean on his cheeks, the sepia pupils. Though Lefty was lynched before he could grow grey hairs.
“You hungry?” Claire speaks. “Not sure if we should eat here. It’s probably the most expensive cafeteria food you’ll ever see in your life.”
And Gizmo is glad Claire said something, because, “You’re so right, and there’s this awesome place called Busboys and Poets on 5th.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Didn’t Uncle Pete write poetry? The one who shot himself in his bedroom. His momma’s shotgun. Never realized the Hemingway connection.]
“Busboys and Poets?” Claire asks.
“Yeah—they have books. And food.”
Leaving the museum, Gizmo and Claire pass a street performer bludgeoning a steaming-hot tempo against the winter air. He’s a paint pail riot thudding from the sidewalk.
“Fuck me—he’s amazing.” Oddly erotic phrasing, but Gizmo couldn’t have gathered more truthful words. “I have a ten. I feel bad he’s beating his hands that hard in the cold.”
Gizmo gives Claire the bill, and she bows after placing it in the performer’s hat. She bows like this is her performance. The drummer starts howling a thank you song—fiddling the spellbound chords within his throat. He’s so young and yet he sounds like a medieval war siren. His voice is so graveled and textured that you could touch the rivulets it leaves in the air—run your fingers over the sound as one flips through albums in a record store.
Gizmo says, “Otis Redding. That’s who he sounds like.”
Claire says, “Ah, I love Otis Redding—grew up listening to him with Dad.”
The drummer’s song bellows behind the two as they walk up the sidewalk.
“Really?” Gizmo can’t hide his shock.
“Yes!” Claire’s voice heightens over the drummer. “Didn’t expect a white girl to have grown up on Otis, did you?”
“I’m starting to expect the unexpected with you.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. When I was a boy, I imagined all the disappeared Black men in my family would have voices like Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye.]
“Ha. What a writer thing to say. You’re also unexpected.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Grandma told me her brother, my Uncle Rat, was killed by a log truck. He was driving too fast behind the truck when the trucker hit the brakes. The log sawed through his Impala, and parts of him. Granny said Rat was funny, so I gave him the voice of James Brown in the stories she’d share.]
“Being a writer is definitely unexpected,” Claire says.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Such a dramatic way to die. Why couldn’t he have been like Mr. Perkins and simply left his family in the middle of the afternoon? Our family loves its flair for dramatics. Then, there’s what happened with Uncle Rat’s son: my cousin Derek. He overdosed on—what was it again?]
The paint pails are still thrumming.
“Did you find something in there to write about?” Claire’s eyes hook into Gizmo.
“Mm. Yes, yes, I think so. I might try my hand at non-fiction,” Gizmo says.
Paint pails thrumming.
“Oh, really? How will you manage not to lie?” Claire pokes his arm in a delightful way. [disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. I remember thumbing through the box of Lefty’s vinyl stored in Granny’s closet to recover a trove of the unsung and unscratched.]
“I’ve been writing about my family, but I know so little that it might as well be fiction, you know? I basically only know how they died.”
Paint pails thrumming.
“Could I read some?”
Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. My great-grandfather was shot nine times for dating a white woman. He’s still thrumming. My uncles wanted to die and did something about it. Thrumming. Thrumming. Lonely little Black boy, Truth is the executioner’s blade kissing your nape.]
“Only if you want to share, of course,” she says.
Gizmo never shared his essays with Claire, because he thought they’d be a healthier couple without those hard conversations about race dominating their time together (which is why I’m not sure this essay will help me, Josie. Writing has always been my hiding place).
This would be a fair time for Gizmo to dig into why he broke up with Claire, why he—out of the blue—saw her more as a friend than a future wife. But if Gizmo wants this to be non-fiction, the truer question—the non-rhetorical question—would be about the drumming. Gizmo has honest questions about the drumming. So let’s go back to that afternoon, with the paint pail man and that sound. What if it wasn’t really paint buckets? What if it were hooves? What if Gizmo turned around to see the street drummer on a horse? What if he would see a lynching rope in one hand of the drummer? Then, Gizmo might have seen the eyes he hadn’t noticed before. His eyes were sepia and glossy-burned. What if it was a daymare, and the drummer started galloping toward Gizmo, howling a strange laughter. Would this have been too obvious?
[4. SCAN FOR MALWARE]
Auntie called young Gizmo “little nigga” and “white boy” depending on the situation. Mixed inputs scrabbled his mind. Before his mother came back into Gizmo’s life, Auntie raised him. Momma, then Granny, then Auntie, then Momma’s second go—three Black women he’d trot between. All the hurt these women endured, and they’d never tried therapy. Gizmo wants to recommend it to them, but he’s fearful about Auntie’s reaction.
Gizmo admits he was hesitant, too. He never considered therapy an option until Claire proposed it. Claire convinced Gizmo therapy could overwrite his decision to leave 28 days after they moved in together, 28 days after they U-Hauled from Texas to start grad school together. Normal people don’t change their minds that quickly. Gizmo was malfunctioning. After all, he only applied to George Mason—was only here—because it was near Claire’s dream university. They had been together for nearly two years. What switched inside Gizmo?
Claire pulled up “Zocdoc: Find a Doctor” on Gizmo’s desktop one evening after his writing center training. On the intake form, it asked something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea what’s wrong with you?”
“Why yes, I think I do, Doctor Zoc,” Gizmo typed.
Gizmo remembers (and you already know this, Josie) putting that he felt like a robot. For his whole life, people have seemed too . . . fleshy. Gizmo doesn’t understand how people can feel so deeply. After he told Claire about “his feelings” that they’d be better as friends, she cried in such a red-faced way. She was crying for them both. He couldn’t even well up one dry eye.
Claire asked Gizmo when he last cried. He said, “Elementary school. I fell playing kickball.”
“That’s not normal, Mar. That’s not normal.”
A list of Black men Gizmo has seen cry: Barack Obama, Idris Elba on Hot Ones, Michael Jordan in that meme, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther after his father was bombed, Will Smith in situations involving Jada Pinkett Smith.
When Gizmo searches “How to cry as a Black man” on TikTok, he finds a video with 1.3 million views of a groom seeing his bride for the first time. The title: “Black Man Trying Not to Cry.” The groom’s tuxedo is made of pearls, and his lineup is devastatingly gorgeous—it’s one of those hall-of-fame cuts the barber would put on their wall. There is a warning that this video is “very emotional.” The groom cries so profusely at the sight of his wife that his neck glistens. Gizmo recalls that he and Claire would watch Burn Notice back when the love was mutual, and she’d mimic a tactic from the dangerous woman dating the stoic man on screen: She’d threaten with a smile. “You better cry at our wedding,” she’d say.
He’d play his part. “Of course I will. Even if it’s only one tear. It’ll be one big tear.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes. Or do you think they swigged their lives down like Irish car bombs with stoney faces? According to my family’s women, they’d often leave in autumn when even the trees were indecisive about what direction to die in. I have this fantasy where our family’s men are free-range horses: one of two expressions, engineered for running, heartbeats so strong they’d strip skin off the palm of anyone who put a hand to their chest. In the fantasy, there’s only the simplicity of what we are, not what we’ve been trained for.]
[SYSTEM ERROR]
Josie, Gizmo is getting uncomfortable. Gizmo is getting uncomfortable with sleeping. He takes caffeine pills to stay up all night to write this essay or doom scroll for instructions. [SYSTEM COLLAPSE] He can feel his heart now. He wants to [Esc] with humor; how will he [Fn] with a disease his body has no willingness to fight?
Nina Simone’s voice stands like a gargoyle in each corner of this dark living room. Gizmo has lied to Claire that he needs to sleep on the couch. It’s 2am. He is writing this with music in his earbuds at his desk. Claire opens their bedroom door. He is whispering binary and dictating pop-ups when Claire catches him. She will soon give up the repair effort. She lingers through the chill melody of the room to reach him, asks for his promise to stay in therapy—to stay even after he leaves.
[6. REBOOT]
Two years after the breakup, they will both be much happier. Gizmo will still feel guilty. Though it will be nice to know he’s feeling. Gizmo will move in with fellow grad students: poets, who—he will come to understand—are big fans of crying. And he’ll love that. On a fall day, they will invite Gizmo to a nearby park to write. Katey will point to a tree splotched with color, and say something blissfully macabre: “In autumn, things are either dead or dying beautifully.”
And that will lead Gizmo back to his desk, to his window, to his tree, still dotted with pink. He’ll scribble verses where kids climb it, play pirate ship.
Youth is such a scarcity for a Black child.
Under this circus tent, performing Blackness is worth more on the market than the lives of its performers.
The pirate children will find stick swords, launch into their “en gardes,” and he will watch them from a distance. He will build an imaginary castle wall around joy to sit outside and stare through its cracks, pushing his eyeballs in like quarters slotted through a gumball machine.
Eyes again. Always the eyes. That obsession came after Gizmo’s mother swore you’d always be able to spot a lying man by their eyes.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Except Claire. She couldn’t spot it in my eyes. And when I nightdream my younger self playing in a tree with other kids, they can’t either.]
[7. CALL SUPPORT]
Gizmo never
Josie, I never finished the essay.
I stopped coming to therapy because I was afraid you would tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty. I was afraid of confronting defense mechanisms, and masking, and core beliefs, and pre-screenings for ASD, and moralizing, and hearing you say that there’s no instruction manual on repairing a robot Black boy. I was afraid you’d be warm when you asked me to do an imaginative exercise in which I speak to my younger self and realize it’s much easier to be kind to him because I don’t feel guilty about him—I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for him because he’s just a lonely kid trying to survive. Because he didn’t choose any of that for himself. Then you would ask me how I’m feeling, and I would say, “I don’t know. I can’t decide if I’m better because I feel better or because I can rationally prove why I should feel better. And maybe I would finally let you read this, and let you ask, “Would a robot feel all this—” feel all this feel feel
I thought I needed to be something steel and indelicate. I’m only 22, and I’m running out of family examples of living through this. Cousin Derek and Uncle Rat didn’t make it to 24 because, under this circus tent, performing Blackness is worth more on the market than the lives of its performers.To ringmasters, even dead elephants are worth their weight in ivory. That’s why I made the decision to come back to therapy; maybe I can be an example for those not yet here.
Working on myself, I won’t want to repeat the same mistakes and lies with Rachel (my deus ex machina). Tomorrow evening, she and I will attend a “Dining with Baldwin: Culinary Homage with Jessica Harris” event at the National Museum of African American History. It will be hard chowing down in front of folk I don’t know, but Dr. Harris will remind me of Granny. Rachel has turned me on to Ethiopian jazz, which we will listen to on our drive. She will tell me these songs remind her of Sundays in her home country. I’ll let her look into my eyes, and hope she trusts me when I say the songs remind me of a family I have not met.
Josie, you told me that writing what I’d like to witness in my dreams before going to bed may help avoid nightmares. So here goes:
Outside cookout. Not too hot. The grill whistles like a steamboat, and the kids blow bubbles in each other’s faces. Granny is showing Uncle Rat (ever the impatient one) how to sop his injera in doro wat without it falling apart. Momma is raising hell with Lefty because he’s a horrible domino partner. Derek is trying to convince Auntie and Uncle Pete that the tere siga is fine to eat raw. I’m—as always—overdoing it on the berbere, so Rachel offers to feed it to me. There is the sway of old pine. She and I go back-and-forth: She feeds me, I feed her. I look into her eyes, and she looks into mine.
On a fishing trip to Yellowstone National Park some years back, I was thinking more about lures than the wilderness beyond the banks of the crowded streams. Nothing felt tamer than casting into the Yellowstone River while kids swam nearby and parents shouted out cautions and calls for lunch. But one morning, as I was reeling my line in, an enormous splash almost overtopped my waders. Annoyed, I turned to see which kid had cannonballed so close to me. Staring back at me was not a rambunctious child, but the cold, threatening eye of a massive bison, just the type that park rangers had warned us to stay well away from. This bison had dunked so close I could have patted the wooly fur around its muscular neck. All at once, I was plunged into a danger I should have expected but took me completely by surprise.
My close call with the bison—yes, he swam on past with that bottomless eye on me the whole time—helped inspire my main character Lea Johnson’s tumble into the wilds just outside her own front door. In my novel The Meaning of Fear, Lea, a behavioral researcher, relocates to rural Michigan in the wake of a violent attack on her husband. Despite being an expert in the fear response, Lea finds herself fearing the “wilds.” Sharpshooters take to the trees at night in her yard for an annual deer cull, while new friends and neighbors, and even her own husband, volunteer to help trim the herd. When a teenage trespasser on her property goes missing one night, even the local sheriff doesn’t seem concerned that the young man could be lost or mistaken for a deer. Are these folks’ values wildly different from hers, or is Lea out of step with a natural order she didn’t realize existed on the outskirts of her beloved town?
These nine novels tell the stories of women who find themselves battling their own wilds. Some women are thrust unexpectedly into a wilderness that calls for new survival skills and instincts. Some women are escaping from brutal captivity, preferring the possibility of death to servitude. Still others find the wilds in places that seem tame. These novels bring an unsparing eye to suffering, deprivation, and grief. But these stories also celebrate the land’s beauty, the joy of freedom even in the harshest places, and the revelatory sense of self that comes when a woman only has herself to depend on.
When the women of The Natural Way of Things awaken, drugged and locked in a remote compound, the squeals of kookaburras are the first tell that they have been snatched to the wilds of the Australian Outback. The ten women soon recognize each other as having made public accusations of sexual violence against prominent men. Despite deprivation and violence—their male jailers force them to labor in tunics and bonnets made from the bones of birds—Yolanda’s comrades cling to stubborn hopes of rescue, while she protects the women from hunger by learning to trap game. The bloody work takes its toll: “By the end she wore a ragged skirt of rabbit bodies and clinking steel traps . . . the flesh soon glued to the belt with blood . . . ” To survive the wilderness of men’s violence, Yolanda transforms from woman to feral animal guided by pure instinct to embrace nature’s refuge.
The Vaster Wilds pits woman against the wilds from its first lines. Set in 1609, young Lamentations flees from Virginia’s Jamestown colony into the “great and terrible wilderness” to escape starvation and a crime that deprivation drove her to commit. More Lot’s wife than Robinson Crusoe, the girl flees north through the dense forest without looking back. As she fights the cold, malnutrition, and the toll of past trauma, Lamentations chops fish from the ice and shelters in fallen logs. At first, survival means outrunning the men who pursue her. Later, as her health and stamina slip, true survival means learning when to flee and when to shelter in “one of the quiet good places of this new land.” Throughout the novel, Groff cuts to the nearby Powhatan gathering food and building communities as a reminder that this world is only wild to the woman not born to it.
In The Pesthouse, a woman’s refuge in the wilderness might turn out to be her only hope for a civilized life. After a contagion transforms America into an industrial wasteland populated by lawless bands of enslaving men, Margaret’s quarantine in a remote pesthouse in the hills is her first proof that survival can only be achieved in untouched places. She is a true woman of the wild, trapping birds, flinting fires, and fashioning peace from fear and loneliness. Her ease is reflected in nature’s easy reclaiming of the ruined land. Forests are overtaking farmlands and rivers tear at the roads “with the undramatic patience of water.” The closer Margaret draws to the seaside and passage to Europe that’s anything but safe, the more she questions whether her salvation lies in turning back to the wilderness, away from the wilds men have made of their tattered civilization.
Sometimes the wilds take over the office with the same inexorable creep as the latest policy directive flowing from the executive suite. Until she steps off the elevator onto a decidedly squishy carpet, Rose, a young sales associate in Edinburgh, never dreamed that when her boss said the firm was “going under” due to poor sales, she was being literal. As the water level rises by the day, productivity increases and pleas to leadership to stem the flood are met with policies preventing swimming. The staff jerry rig computer mice to function underwater while Rose wonders whether management, perfectly dry in their suites on the upper floors, will expect their employees to work fully submerged. At home, her clothes never quite shed the damp before she must plunge again into the aquarium of work. Amphibian forces Rose and her co-workers to absorb an absurd corporate culture and ever-changing sales quotas with their every breath without drowning.
Absolution takes place partly in 1963 Saigon, a city that has long tamed the wilds. At least that’s what Tricia and Charlene, who live in the grand villas reserved for their military advisor husbands, believe. Living a cloistered life with artillery fire just beyond the stucco walls, the ladies hold cocktail parties and perform charity work for Vietnamese children. When Charlene arranges a charity mission on the South Sea coast, Tricia is excited to swap her pedal pushers for fatigues. But when their army transport vehicle breaks down in a wilderness of jungle, rice paddies, and Vietcong raids, the women are thrust into the wilds for the first time. Being stranded reveals the foolishness of charity that bestows Barbies and licorice in a Vietnamese wilderness populated by the wounded in an already raging war.
The Underneath turns the woman in the wild narrative on its head. Here the wilderness is a place in need of rescue. When Kay Ward takes a break from her journalism career to mother her two young children, the hilly Northern Vermont forests that surround their rented farmhouse feel as safe as they are scenic. Kate soon finds herself lost in the wilderness of her children’s needs, oblivious to the ravaged wilderness just beyond the beauty she can see. The disturbing secrets the farmhouse reveals draw her to Ben Comeau, a heroin dealer whose logging scam is destroying the wilds just as the drug epidemic he feeds is threatening his town. The Underneath is a portrait of the American wilderness that, much like the human communities on its margins, is being razed to its roots.
In The Lowland, grief and loss bind three generations of women to one wild place and the family home that overlooks it. By the time Bijoli gives birth to two sons amidst the turbulent revolutionary movements of 1960s Calcutta, modern houses, including her own, ring the fetid lowland that was once an ancient seabed. Tragedy strikes one of her sons in the lowland’s flooded waters, causing the family to splinter and setting Bijoli loose into the grief-stricken wilds of her mind. Meanwhile Bijoli’s now adult granddaughter, Bela, roams freely across the American Midwest, working itinerant farming jobs while unknowingly re-enacting her grandmother’s fruitless care for the lowland. Late in life, Bijoli’s daughter-in-law, Gauri, will herself return to the lowland to confront her own secrets surrounding her husband’s death. This portrait of shared loss connected to a place that was never meant to be tamed reminds us that women can be cast into the wilderness just by stepping out their front doors.
First published in French in 1995, under the title The Mistress of Silence, I Who Have Never Known Men has of late attracted the literary spotlight. The story of a girl born in a cage holding thirty-nine other women, guarded by men who feed but never speak to them, resonates with its stark, eerily calm portrayal of systemic dehumanization. The women lack privacy for basic bodily functions and have no memory of how they came to be captured. When a catastrophe befalls the men, the women are freed into the jarring reality of a barren place. Here the wilds are vast, empty plains, with the occasional river. The girl herself, born ignorant, could be expected to be the novel’s wildest thing. But her restlessness, curiosity, and practicality ground her in this mysterious land as she wanders, forages, and eventually faces being alone in the unknown and the unknowable.
The God of the Woods opens with the epigraph, “How quickly . . . peril could be followed by beauty in the wilderness . . . ” It’s 1975 and teen Barbara Van Laar has disappeared from a summer camp her family owns in the Adirondack woods, exactly 14 years after the mysterious disappearance of her brother, Bear. From there, the narrative dips back in time to show Barbara’s mother, Alice, trapped in an oppressive marriage, drugged during childbirth, forbidden to nurse, and isolated from everything natural about raising her kids. In the present, the search for Barbara in wild places slowly reveals Van Laar family’s secrets that never quite disappeared. Upon arriving to Camp Emerson, girls are taught to “sit down and yell” should they find themselves lost in the forest. The mystery of what happened to Barbara may prove that staying in one place and crying for help is exactly what women determined to survive should never do.
I once had the pleasure and good fortune of interviewing self-proclaimed Afro-gothicist Leila Taylor about her book, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, a poignant text that is part memoir and part cultural critique. Our discussion was eye-opening for me because Taylor and I both grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and our talk centered on the ways that the gothic in America is viewed as a predominantly white space, when Blackness in America and all its forced socio-economic trappings are inherently gothic—blighted homes in the middle of a residential street, boarded up housing projects, rusted vehicles, overgrown grass, potholes, abandoned storefronts, dilapidated schools, unclean drinking water. Adding violence and horror to the mix, I’d say urban ghettos have cornered the market on the gothic, and yet.
In recent years, I’ve been returning to my conversation with Taylor because my debut novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, is a gothic horror set in a public housing project built in a fictional midwestern city with similarities to Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Like the abandoned homes in Detroit and the poisonous water in Flint, in Hester Gardens the trash is rarely collected, and residents must contend with mountains of garbage and a stench that permeates their lives and weaves itself into the fabric of their clothes.
So, Taylor was definitely onto something. With an eye towards the gothic as a literary genre, I’ve noticed recent growth in popularity and readership for gothic works written by Black authors, particularly of the Black Southern gothic in the vein of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which smashed 2025 box office records. I sense that this trend is here to stay.
I’ll always recommend classic Black gothic works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, but here are seven contemporary gothic novels written by African American authors that will shatter your heart and make you think.
Award-winning author Tananarive Due’s entire body of work is stellar, and you can’t go wrong picking up any one of her books, from her debut The Between, to The Good House, to her African Immortals series beginning with My Soul to Keep. Due has the distinction of being an author who can pen both acclaimed novels and short fiction, and I highly recommend her collections Ghost Summerand The Wishing Pool as well.
But I came here to talk about her celebrated gothic work.
The Reformatory is a master class in American literature that rightly won several awards and was lavished with critical praise. Set in 1950s Florida at the Gracetown School for Boys, which is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, where Due’s great uncle lost his life, the text follows 12-year-old Robert “Robbie” Stephens Jr., a Black boy who is sentenced to six months at the de facto children’s prison for protecting his sister Gloria from a white boy’s advances.
With the building’s ivy-adorned redbrick, sweltering heat, iron entry gates featuring barbed wire, and a landscape filled with revenants of murdered boys, Due builds a visceral gothic setting as she stares down the reformatory’s racist and brutal history.
This critically acclaimed book deftly tackles multiple taboo topics in a story both compelling and haunting. It tells the story of Jemma Barker, who leaves Chicago for a job at the Duchon residence in New Orleans, a white Antebellum home with pillars, black shutters, a wide porch, and oak trees. A house in need of repair that the locals warn her off of. An abode of neglect, with loose tiles on the roof, weeds, and, apparently, spirits.
Both the family and the home are hiding secrets, and soon Jemma learns the Duchons are locked in a curse that only she can break. With this powerful book full of unforgettable characters—I will never shake Honorine Duchon and her icy gaze—Sandeen takes on colorism, incest, passing, classism, sexism, slut-shaming, and passed-down generational curses.
adrienne maree brown channels Octavia E. Butler in this debut novella, the first in brown’s Detroit-set Black Dawn series. In Grievers, we have a city plagued by an illness with no cure that stops the sick in the middle of living, rendering them catatonic. Lyrically told, the story follows Dune, whose mother has the affliction, and, in fact, is patient zero. As Dune investigates the cause of the illness, she must navigate a hollowed out city of the dead and near-dead, filled with graveyards and dilapidated homes, in a text both gothic and suspenseful in its telling.
In Grievers, the gothic manor isn’t a home, rather an entire city (really country), where, even before the illness, the city rationed water due to greed, and the country was filled with fear, racism, poor education, corruption, and war. A “crumbling age” that readers might find eerily familiar.
Compton’s critically acclaimed debut takes the reader to Texas, with the titular house providing gothic angst and a look at trauma, grief, and the past that haunts. The text follows Eric Ross, a down-on-his-luck father of two who arrives in Degener after leaving his wife and life in Maryland. He becomes caretaker of Masson House, a spite house that once overlooked an orphanage, and is tasked with recording the four-story home’s suspected paranormal activity, events so sinister it drove the previous caretakers mad.
The story brings to mind Tananarive Due’s The Good House and Stephen King’s The Shining, and it speaks to Compton’s brilliance that even with those associations, this book feels fresh and singular.
In keeping with the gothic tradition, Masson House is a character itself, described in the opening sentence as akin to the “corpse of an old monster.” Throughout this powerful thriller, the sinister structure feels alive, with its rectangular windows, gaunt and gray facade, and the local lore that engenders fear in the town.
Like in Sandeen’s work, House of Hunger opens with a character embarking on a new job in a mysterious manor. In this case, Marion, who lives in a slum, pursues a job as a bloodmaid in a fictional north run by a waning nobility. And although the setting and location might not be an American city, Henderson’s text makes salient points about a failing empire in the north, where power has shifted away to the industrial south with its democratically elected parliament of factory owners, oil barons, and politicians. The House of Hunger is the first and grandest of 27 houses in the north, and it is only one of four still with any power.
Marion arrives at the six-foot structure, “a fearsome thing,” to find windows glowing with candlelight, a dying garden, and gargoyles covered in moss. The nobles want Marion’s blood to survive, and Marion is desperate for the pay and the lifestyle, but quickly learns there are dangerous secrets in being a bloodmaid, and the truth of the hunger comes at a price.
LaValle’s award-winning novella always comes to mind when I think of contemporary gothic works for its use of setting to evoke dread in the reader. A must-read reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Horror at Red Hook,” LaValle’s The Ballad of BlackTom tells the story of Charles Thomas Tester, who lives in Harlem and one day delivers an occult tome to a sorceress in Queens, an event that opens a door to magic and mayhem Tester wishes he could close.
Set in 1924, the book offers social commentary on white supremacy, institutional anti-Black racism, and manages to also be a work of cosmic horror that both honors and critiques Lovecraft. The landscape Tester navigates drips with gothic horror. The New York streets, the subway, the perilous path from Black Harlem to the Flushing Queens of German and Irish immigrants, and the reclusive sorceress’s manor all work together to give the impression that something sinister is lurking within every person, building, and object.
In her Southern gothic, LaTanya McQueen takes down a controversial practice in the American South of turning former slave plantations into tourist spots. The book follows Mira, a Black woman who returns to her North Carolina hometown for a friend’s wedding on a renovated tobacco plantation that is rumored to be haunted by former enslaved people.
The gothic horror comes alive in the plantation setting, where Woodsman House sits three stories tall, with several Greek columns, and hundred-year-old maples. A glimpse at the disrepair the property falls into in Mira’s youth, with peeling paint, weeds, and columns that look like they’ll collapse, coupled with her arrival for the wedding, when the grounds have been turned into a luxury resort and wedding venue, featuring reenactments of the enslaved people picking tobacco, McQueen’s work offers strong social commentary and a reckoning with this country’s barbaric past.
This book, the first essay collection centering trans writers of color to be published by a major press, is a groundbreaking response to continuous attacks on the trans community. It’s been hailed as a “beacon of hope” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review), and widely praised for its authenticity, quality of writing, and broad range of stories. And now it’s receiving awards recognition.
We couldn’t be more proud that Both/And is Electric Lit’s first book. On Tuesday, we launched our spring fundraising campaign, nearly a year after walking away from our NEA funding, largely because of the Trump administration’s repugnant policies on gender identity and diversity. And yet, our work, and our community, continues to thrive. As EL looks to the future, we remain committed to elevating the stories of those most marginalized among us. Your support goes a long way towards protecting that vision.
A trans magazine can create a magnetic field, drawing people together into community. From Transvestia to TG/TS/TV Tapestry, Gendertrash from Hell to Original Plumbing, indie community publications have long allowed trans people to find each other, share resources, and build culture. Needless to say, much of that activity has since moved online, taking place in Reddit forums, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, blogs, OnlyFans pages, Discord servers, and countless other digital spaces. But trans print has experienced something of a renaissance recently: No fewer than five print-first trans literary magazines have launched their first issue (or two) since January 2025.
This roundtable is a conversation between some of the people behind those magazines. As the founder and managing editor of Chrysalis Magazine, which publishes art and writing by trans youth ages 0-18, I wanted to speak to other editors of trans periodicals about the joyful labor of starting and running a magazine, and the role of print publishing in trans culture and community. I spoke with Andrea Morgan and Luke Sutherland of the DC-based trans publishing collective Lilac Peril Press; Alma Avalle and Joyce Laurie of Picnic, New York’s finest trans literary magazine and culture rag; Ira Beare and Helena Lamb of EASEL, a trans photography magazine based in Chicago; and Aris Cumara of the ambitious and eclectic Trans Mag. Together, we reflected on the relationship between print culture and trans activism, the power of t4t publications, and the future of trans publishing.
Jacob Romm (Chrysalis): Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, each of us published the first issue of a trans magazine in roughly the last year. How did you come to start your respective magazines? What was the vision?
Andrea Morgan (Lilac Peril): Luke and I were having a lot of discussions around the time of some of the early Little Puss salons, because we had traveled up to New York to see what was going on, and really, really loved what we were seeing. We essentially came back to DC and were sitting around going, why doesn’t that exist in other places? And really could only respond to ourselves with: It doesn’t happen unless someone does it. And if no one’s doing it, then we have to.
Alma Avalle (Picnic): I think one of the things that got us excited about publishing Picnic, starting at the time we did, is that if you look at the media ecosystem from five, ten years ago, there wasn’t a massive appetite for trans writing in the cis mainstream press, but there was at least more of one. There are increasingly fewer places that are seeking our voices out or actively promoting trans writing. If we want places for our writing to exist, particularly writing that deals with trans people as people and trans characters as characters worth diving into and dissecting, we’re going to have to be the ones to make it, edit it, commission those stories, work with the writers.
Aris Cumara (Trans Mag): Just after the 2024 election cycle, I had read something about how a collection of trans journal entries or research articles was deleted. The research was just gone! I felt like something should be done for my community, and that’s where the magazine idea came from. There’re not a lot of spaces that are explicitly trans and looking for trans work. It needs to be printed and saved and put into archives, where it can’t just be deleted when ideologies change.
Helena Lamb (EASEL): It’s been a big couple years for trans photography. I feel like people have really been getting into it in a way that I’m happy to see. But there are just so few outlets for that kind of thing. This summer I was getting frustrated by the idea that the highest level a trans photographer can aspire to is getting a lot of likes on Instagram. I can also directly cite Picnic as inspiring me to start EASEL. When Picnic came out last spring, I was like, oh, you can just start a magazine! So we did.
JR:The idea for Chrysalis had been in the back of my mind for a couple years, but after the inauguration in January 2025 and the wave of executive orders attacking trans youth health care, I needed an outlet for my outrage and anxiety, some project that felt productive and connected to community. I started seeing all these videos of trans kids testifying in court, telling very carefully rehearsed and strategically crafted stories of what it means to be trans. But talking to real life trans kids, the way they describe their identities is actually so much more imaginative and interesting. I wanted Chrysalis to provide a space of imagination for less domesticated and respectable versions of trans childhood to be expressed.
Let’s talk a little bit about the editorial vision for these different magazines. What type of work does your magazine publish, and how did you decide that was what you wanted to prioritize? How do you curate the space of your magazine?
When something’s deeply immersed in community, it doesn’t need to explain itself.
Joyce Laurie (Picnic): For me and Alma, part of our editorial ethos is that we’re not doing this in a vacuum, and we’re not the first people to do this. We come after Nevada, after Detransition, Baby, there’s no shortage of trans people in popular culture, right? But it tends to be pretty one-sided. What we were interested in was not just talking about transness as an object, but trying to capture the kind of art that emerges from communities of transgender people. We talk to each other enough that there are some questions that are no longer profound or interesting to talk about, right? When something’s deeply immersed in community, it doesn’t need to explain itself.Our editorial priorities were to create work that’s meant to be read in the context of t4t community. Picnic is a t4t publication.
AM: The issues of Lilac Peril so far have been quite open, giving as little guidance as possible. Our last one was called “Taboo”—if trans people are taboo to society, what are the things that are still taboo to us? But that’s all the writers had to go off. We tried to prioritize people that were new to writing, because getting into it is so intimidating, and it’s hard to understand where to even start—especially for people who are writing about trans topics. We’ve seen some amazing writing, and we’ve also had the chance to work with people whose writing is flourishing in ways that are only possible if there’s an outlet for it. We’re really happy to play a part in that.
HL: The primary goal of EASEL from an editorial standpoint was to get artists to take themselves seriously—to cultivate a space where artists have an opportunity to see themselves as people who are producing real cultural artifacts, both photography and critical writing about photography.
Ira Beare (EASEL): If I can just add to that—I think because we all get this intense proliferation of images all the time, it’s easy for photographers to devalue the medium that they work in. We’re seeing an increased output without a reciprocal increase in the seriousness of people’s relationship to it. It’s nice to have a place to put it where it can land in a way that is slower than just scrolling past.
AC: I relate a lot to what y’all are saying, and it connects to the vision I had for Trans Mag, which is a little bit of everything. We wanted research, poetry, photography, visual art, craft, comics, and it became this combination of all my favorite magazines growing up. We do an open submission call for a lot of the work that we put in, and we want to feature people who live in much more conservative areas than Bushwick. And we do very specific themes per issue: Our last issue was about punk, mad-at-the-world transness. The next issue we’re doing is all clown-themed, and I want to do a theme on religion this coming year.
JR: I really appreciated what folks said about trying to edit in a way that encourages people to take their work seriously. Working with young folks, it was a priority that we had an editorial board of published trans writers, so that someone like Kyle Lukoff or Soleil Ho or Noa Fields is engaging with the work of these young writers, and offering forms of mentorship and possibility modeling.
So Joyce used this phrase “a t4t publication,” which feels connected to the next question I want to ask. How do you envision the audience for your magazine? Do you see it as being primarily for other trans people, or also focused outward?
Luke Sutherland (Lilac Peril): I don’t think we even considered the possibility of a cis audience. When we first started, our audience was hyper-local to trans writers in the DC area. And even though we’ve branched out over time, we still hold that really close to our chest. As a side note, we’ve noticed a funny trend when we table at events with a more general audience, like the Baltimore Book Festival last year. The number of completely random cis people who buy the magazine after we give them a 30-second pitch has been really funny and unexpected. I try not to psychoanalyze it too much, but I’m like, is this a guilt purchase? I don’t know.
AC: I love to hear this, because I had a similar experience when we did the first issue of Trans Mag. I saved up some money, bought a used car, put boxes of the magazine in my trunk, and went all over the US with it. I got in touch with little bars and bookstores and asked if I could pop in, tell them what I’m doing, and see who shows up. There were some places where it was all trans people, but then I went to Salt Lake City, Utah, and it was all cis, straight people, very stereotypical nuclear families. And when I gave them a little pitch, they were like, “Wow, let me get a copy. I’ll get a copy for my friend and we’ll look it over together.”
I don’t want our writers to ever think they have to explain what HRT is, or what t4t stands for.
AA: I think Picnic is very lucky to rely on an in-person fan base. The magazine grew out of what we observed with our friends at Little Puss and the Topside Press era, but also out of the scenes that Joyce and I exist in. So, when I’m thinking about who is going to read the work inside of Picnic, first and foremost it’s who is coming to the launch party, who is going to be at the bookstore in Ridgewood where we keep copies in stock. When I think about the idea of cis readership: The more exposure we can give our writers, the better. But when it comes to the type of submissions we’re looking for, I don’t want our writers to ever think they have to explain what HRT is, or what t4t stands for.That saves you a lot of space on the page, and lets you get to the interesting stuff a lot quicker.
IB: Based on the names of people who order from us online, we are selling primarily, if not exclusively, to transgender people. We spend a lot of time thinking about distribution, because it feels important to me that the magazine be encounterable if you don’t know who we are on the internet. And we found that sometimes a lefty used bookstore likes us way more than a gay bookstore. That was interesting in terms of thinking about where trans people actually are and what spaces they actually want to be in.
JR: For Chrysalis, there are some considerations specific to publishing youth writers and protecting their identities: We don’t publish the last names or any identifying information about our contributors. Sometimes they want us to list their social media handles, and we don’t do that because we don’t want to be responsible for whatever vitriol they might receive. So I’m often thinking about the possibility of hostile cis readers. And I’m aware that because Chrysalis publishes writing by trans kids, there’s a lot of feel-good value. I’ve tried to hold lightly the sense that it might be politically expedient in some way for people to encounter the writing of trans kids, and have a sense of their wholeness as people aside from what they’re seeing in the news. If that happens, great, but the readers I’m most wanting to care for are other trans young people, and in a way, the inner child of trans adults.
As I’m sure none of us need to be reminded, it’s a complicated time to be trans. What kind of relationship do you see between trans activism and community organizing work, and the cultural work of magazine publishing?
LS: I think hope can be kind of a cheesy word, but I’m thinking of the Mariam Kaba quote that “hope is a discipline.” When I think about that in terms of my personal writing and in terms of Lilac Peril, I think putting your energy into a long-term publication project like this is a practice of hope, because you have to believe there will be a future where this book exists, or this magazine exists. It’s investing in the belief that there is a tomorrow, there is a world after this.
AC: I agree entirely that it’s a discipline, it’s work. It’s showing up again and again to make something you believe in, and hope other people will believe in. And I think it’s a good way to tie into community. The other day I got an order from Boise, Idaho: I’ve never been to Boise, I don’t know what the trans community is like there, but something that I have put work into is going to exist in that community. The work is important, the communities are important, and they will always somehow find each other.
AA: One of the most exciting things about Picnic is the fact that it has a really strong ability to bring people together and have them as a captive audience for an hour or two. When I think about what Picnic’s utility can be going forward, if I’m organizing a reading where 100 people show up, maybe in the middle of the set of readings you have somebody come up and give the basics of ICE watching. Maybe at the end of the event you hand out whistles and know-your-rights cards as you’re selling the magazine, so people are leaving more attuned towards the issues that our neighborhoods are facing, and more equipped to help.
Hope is investing in the belief that there is a tomorrow, there is a world after this.
HL: And that’s the virtue of being print-first. If you want the object to get into people’s hands, you have to collect people. I’ll also say that something that’s always on our minds as queer publishers is obscenity law. When we sent our inaugural issue to our first-choice printer, they refused to print it because they objected to the content. There was some sexually explicit content in EASEL 01—really good stuff. But that meant we had to find a second press last minute, and that was a shock.
JR: We made this sticker for Chrysalis that says “trans imagination is trans power,” and I really believe in that. For me, the very possibility of transition relies on a radical act of imagination. Personally, I really depend on trans literature to offer me spaces of imagination to encounter forms of transness that are not constrained by the doctor, the insurance company, the law. I think that work of imagination is crucial to trans political vision.
Jumping on what Hellie said about printing physical magazines, maybe we can talk a bit about the fact that we all publish in print either before or instead of sharing content digitally. Why was print so important for each of you?
JL: I’m inspired by the novel Nevada. In my experience, someone lends it to you and tells you to read it. It becomes this sort of ritual that I think is very transgender and has to do with the way that we share lives. I mean, we want to go to your house and see Picnic on your coffee table. I went to Chicago in December, and I did not see a single trans coffee table that did not have a copy of EASEL on it. That kind of presence feels more powerful than Instagram followers.
AA: I’ll add that print just made sense financially for us. We’re very proud of being able to pay all our writers, and there would be no way to monetize in the way we need to if we were doing this digitally. We wouldn’t have access to ad revenue in a way that would be able to move the needle. But it turns out that printing 200, 300 magazines and selling them at $12 a pop means that we can make back our initial investment and pay the contributors for the next issue.
LS: Print was also a no-brainer for us. Andrea and I have had explicit conversations about not feeding into the AI slop machine by having this work exist digitally. But even before all that, we’re paper perverts. The tactile reality of a book is very important to us. Joyce mentioned Nevada—for us, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutionshas been a northern star in a lot of ways. [Author Larry Mitchell] couldn’t find a publisher who would take it, so [he] ended up starting [his] own press, Calamus Books. There’s a reason that radical political movements and marginalized people have historically created small presses. We have to be the means of our own publication.
AM: Luke, you should mention Lilac Peril’s version of “On Every Coffee Table.”
LS: I heard an anecdote from a good friend of mine who has a human-sized puppy cage in her home, as one does. And she let me know that for several months, our last collection, Taboo, was the only reading material in reach of that cage. We’re proud to say that our book is the number-one most-read book in human-size puppy crates, as far as we know.
AA: Picnic 2 is coming for that record.
HL: A print magazine is a good way to make sure the images you’re publishing are good. It’s easier to demand excellence when you’re going to spend time and money putting a physical thing into the world. An image is so much more effective, useful, interesting, and powerful when you are holding it in your hands, and a group of people are crowded around the magazine experiencing that image together. As we all know, looking at a picture on your phone, whether it’s really good or really bad, is useless. I had no intention of putting more images onto screens if I could help it. There is a digital version of EASEL, but I couldn’t care less about it.
AC: Something that we’re trying to do this upcoming year is to double and triple our print capacity in order to get them into local bookstores around the country. We do as cheap wholesale as we can to bookstores in the middle of nowhere, where somebody can walk in and see a magazine that’s bright and colorful and cool-looking, and has the word “trans” in big letters right across the front.
JR: Yeah, strong second to all of that. And also for me, print came from being such an archives nerd myself. Print lasts, and in many cases lasts longer than the file formats of digital media. The editor’s note of Picnic mentions this too: Save your magazines in a box in your basement. I’ve started my own cardboard box of trans zines, saving print ephemera from this time as an act of faith in the future of trans life. Other nerdy trans researchers in 50, 100, 200 years, will want to be pouring over the things that we’ve made.
I want to close by asking: Putting aside questions of feasibility, finances, time, and capacity, what do you hope the future of your magazine looks like? What’s the big dream?
HL: Ira and I have had a couple of conversations about what it would look like for EASEL to be a success. And honestly, I feel like we made it. So many publications like ours put out three, four, five issues, and then just drop off the map forever. So the fact that we turned out two in a year feels amazing, and I’m going to keep doing it for as long as it feels good. That being said, in a perfect world, the dream I have for this magazine is to be able to pay contributors more. My dream for EASEL is just more money for everyone.
AC: Something that I would love to do is to build a full industry-level trans media production company that works on artistic endeavors across the board: magazine publication, book publication, comics, CDs, animation, and film. Something that’s built sustainably and pays artists, does things ethically, and at the quality that we want. Instead of waiting for money from these other big companies that have been doing it for years, what if we built something that could be just as big and produce just as much work, but we get to run it? That’s the big, big goal.
LS: A concrete goal of Lilac Peril is that we’re very interested in publishing novels, and we already have one in the pipeline, which will ideally come out in 2027. When I think about my dream for this project, it’s basically what it sounds like Picnic has already achieved with EASEL, which is to say, I would be over the moon to hear from someone else who started a publication because of what we do.
JL: I was going to say exactly what Luke said, which was in the editor’s note of Picnic 1, and in the end note. When you start, when you end, before you go, please start a magazine. You can do it. All you have to do is believe in yourself. Obviously you’re transgender, so you might not, but you should—because what you have is worth hearing.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
