Hi.
Thank you both.
So both of you wrote about or read
about forms of escape, evasion, flight from binary gender,
from cops, from the demands of ballet and foreign
respectability and the expectations
of gay male culture.
And yet there is also in this form of writing and reading
and I think in the worlds you were writing and reading
about a demand to essentialize, exaggerate, and perform
your difference or evasion or the author's difference
and evasion.
And I was curious how you either escape or come
to terms with the commodification of your escape.
Easy question.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, let me think for a second.
I think-- I think you probably have a lot
of good thoughts about that.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
And I think you're--
I mean there's this phrase I'm familiar with it.
I'm trying to find a place who it comes from originally
and I'll say if it comes to me later someone can speak up.
Look at me, don't look at me.
You all know this--
it's like especially within I think
queer experiences this idea of wanting to get the attention.
But then the attention comes with violence, right?
So it's like I have--
I've been erased or I've been discarded
or whatever the thing is and you want
to be validated by being recognized or whatever
the case.
But then the second the attention
is given to you it comes with violence,
it's exposure to violence.
And it's like you're saying like a demand
to do the song and dance of it all.
And that attention to me is like you're
saying it's a problem but it's also really interesting
and it's something that I'm, I think
most interested in my own work in trying
to lean into instead of turning away from
and play with and play with those expectations
and find that space as a space where
I can move into complexity and move into uncomfortable moments
and kind of play a game with the reader.
And I think being aware of that and being
aware of what I think you're talking
about and that kind of bizarre tension
that's put on marginalized writers of all different kinds.
Being aware of that lets me hopefully
be a step ahead of the people who might
be demanding something of me.
But I don't know that there is a way to totally avoid or get
away from that kind of tension or contradiction
that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Beautifully said.
I don't I have much to add.
I think it's an interesting question
that I like to hear other people talk about when I--
for me I think it's not the kind of question
that's at the forefront in the writing for me.
So for me I'm really thinking-- if I'm
thinking about audience or reception at all
it's like I'm thinking about queer and trans readers
primarily and what is of interest, what is pleasurable.
What might be resonant, what might be a fun escape.
And so sure, I think it can be complicated
when people who are not your imagined audience
are reading your work.
And it can be complicated when people
who are your imagined audience are reading your work in ways
that you might not imagine.
But that's kind of a cool thing about writing something
and then putting it out in the world
and then it's not yours anymore.
And then other people say things about it
and then you think oh my God, I did that.
What?
OK, cool.
So as a non-binary and/or genderqueer authors
writing about non-binary and/or gender queer experiences,
is there a way that you find you're
commodifying your own experience in your writing.
Because that's something that I find
has happened where it's like I can
make my experience dramatic to satisfy a cisgender audience.
But that's not necessarily what I actually want to write.
So I guess how do you deal with the impulse
to sort of have this experience seen
but not feel like you're commodifying yourself.
Well, again I guess I would say like I'm not concerned
about straight or cis readers.
I'm delighted for people to--
I think the question for me oftentimes
when I was work-shopping sections of the novel
in the MFA program I was in.
And actually in the master's program
where I started it sort of.
People would want explanations for things
and I would be sort of like no, I can't do that.
I don't need to explain that.
And that was fine.
You know I had a lot of push-back on certain kinds
of things like there's a--
I've made the choice to use he/him pronouns
throughout the book for Paul and there was a lot of--
I got a lot of push-back for a long time
exclusively from straight and cis people.
And I was like I can't tell you why I can't do that thing.
I'm going to actually go home and cry a little bit and then
also not do it.
The crying, I actually did cry one time out of frustration.
I'm not really a crier but I cried out of frustration.
I was just like, why are you asking
this stupid fucking question.
And it's not a stupid question but it was to me.
I was just like-- what was frustrating was
I couldn't answer it.
And then later is able to answer it
after other people explained it to me and I was like thank you.
Cool.
I'm now sounding like a dopey fiction
writer which is not my plan.
But I think the last thing I'll say about this was--
yeah.
I think it's--
I'm not particularly worried about commodifying
my experience.
I'm just trying to get the next sentence out honestly.
Yeah.
And I think this is--
you might echo with some of this if this might be true for you
too.
The idea of commodifying like a non-binary trans
experience was like seems very, very new to me.
Like when I was transitioning like the idea
that I could comodify the experience that I
was having was very--
like that wasn't really an option.
So I think that some of those questions
are questions that might be coming
in this kind of cultural moment.
We have these kind of regularly scheduled moments
where the world seems to notice trans people existing
and then gets very excited and then that moment
passes for quite a while.
And then those kind of heightened attention moments
like in those look at me don't look at me
moments I think that there is maybe some more tension there.
But I mean like you're saying when I'm--
if I'm reading someone's narrative or story
or looking at someone's artwork or whatever
the case is who I don't share that person's experience
and that person is explaining to me,
I really don't get much out of that.
And if the person is trying to render something
that's true to herself or that gets a little bit closer to it
beyond explanation then I gain much, much more from the art.
So I try to give the same thing myself.
So how do you balance the sort of anti-establishment mindset,
the ideology, with the fact that you've
come here and given this meeting at a large university
establishment in a generally red state and so on and so forth?
It's just kind of seems interesting to have done
this in that way, you know.
Yeah.
Well, I think that sharing work that
might push against some sort of normative or mainstream culture
in like a red state seems even more valuable to me
and more radical than sharing that work in maybe
a more liberal environment or something like that.
Although I would imagine that within Tucson and then
specifically within the Poetry Center that
it might be a stretch to think of this as a totally
conservative environment.
[LAUGHTER]
But that said, yeah, I mean it's--
I myself do struggle often with wanting
to have more radical intentions behind my life
and the kind of demands of institutions
and how institutions can reinforce these other things
that we're talking about along commodification
and all that kind of stuff.
I don't think that--
I'm trying to think of what else I could say that would
be productive about that.
Wait.
Let me pause to finish this thought.
And do you want to add anything?
Sure.
I mean I guess I am not unfamiliar with institutions.
And you know, I've done things like gone
and gotten to different graduate degrees in creative writing.
What's that about.
Highly institutional behavior.
I teach at an institution, I'm a subject
of hopefully late Western capitalism.
I mean, I don't-- like I'm compromised because we all are.
None of us are bigger than capitalism or socialization
or heteronormativity or it's--
I'm really happy to be here.
I was really honored and excited to be invited.
And I like to come to places where
there are lots of readers and writers
wanting to talk about reading and writing.
Yeah.
And I guess the other thing I wanted to say.
I think that all our making and our sharing
ends up being in some ways a compromise, right?
There are ways that we can create community
and collectives and these types of things
that are 100% outside of institutional spaces.
But if we're going to be participating
in any sort of mass culture we are compromising
and we do have to let go of some of those things.
And that's not or for myself that's how I feel.
And that's not something that is necessarily pretty or nice
but I do think it's a reality.
And as we kind of negotiate our own survival
and as we negotiate these cultural moments
and historical moments that we're in,
I think being aware of the compromise
and being aware of what we're giving up is what I can do.
I for one just want to thank both of you for your readings
and for standing up there.
And I want to apologize that people seem like we're placing
the whole world's burden on--
[LAUGHTER]
--explain everything that's unlike ourselves.
And I just think it's very refreshing
and I very much appreciate which performances
take me [INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]
I actually also have a question about the formal qualities
of your writing just because I noticed
that you were both working sort of hybridly- T
in terms of the stream of consciousness narrative
that would shift, and Andrea in terms
of switching between the story of Paul and the fairy tales.
And so I was sort of curious how you approach,
including hybridity in your work.
Yeah.
So I approach my work through process primarily.
So I think mostly about what my writing process is.
And I think the process has embedded in life
and embedded in things outside of the writing as well.
So I'm always writing and taking notes and revising old things
and playing with all the old things
and pulling from old things.
And I have a kind of giant mess of things that I bring together
and I try to make work in different ways and all that.
So in the times the thing about in those through
there's the two main forms.
There's the kind of prose narrative thing
and the kind of essay in verse type thing.
And there's other forms that come in as well.
But each of those are only a kind
of small part of much larger writing projects
that I then kind of piece together and brought
into each other.
And I think of--
hybrid as- I sometimes push against a little bit;
everything I think is a hybrid, right?
And I think that a hy-- things that we name as hybrid
are also cohesive and whole in the same way
that something that might not be labeled as hybridized is.
But what's kind of pleasurable for me
and what I try to do with my work
is to take things from different moments
and to let things kind of rest over time and return to them
and do a layering and that kind of process
until something clicks together and I feel satisfied
that it's speaking to itself and giving me
that sense of cohesion.
So even though the process itself might include
this hybridization, it's when it comes together
and when I feel like there's one cohesive project there that I
feel like it's done.
I think there's actually something
similar in the process for me.
The novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.
I worked on it, it began life as a short story
and then my teacher Samuel Delaney said
I think you're not done with this and then I like just
do whatever he says.
So I wrote a novel and that took many years.
And in the course of that one of the things
I kept saying to people like I don't know my parents,
for instance, were like you're still working on that?
Yes I am.
Is that novels can be baggy.
You can put a lot of stuff in them.
I just recently was introduced to this terrific essay
by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Carrier Bag
Theory of Fiction which probably many of you have read.
So there's a way in which I wanted to put--
I think this is a first novel thing too
like I want to put everything in there.
It's also my sort of like trans autobiography, thinly veiled.
But one of the things that I really
have been thinking a lot about and noticing
in my own experience and in the scenes I've been in
and the communities and worlds I've
been kind of traveling through was the ways in which,
as queer and trans people we're always sort of--
we're being asked to come up with these narratives
about our lives sometimes for really coercive reasons,
sometimes as a way to share and build community with others.
But narrative I think is really--
it's something that we also have to make for ourselves
and we don't see models of ways to be a person around us.
And so for me like how I have learned to be a person
was through reading books.
And so for me, it was really important to try
to also cram all that queer literary lineage into the book
as much as possible.
And I did a lot of playing around with ordering
and it was I think through taking poetry workshops
towards the end of the process of completing
the draft of the book that helped
me think a lot about endings and ordering.
So some of the sections were in very different places.
I probably cut like 30,000 words.
There was a lot of different things that- many outtakes.
So I think some of it is just kind of jumbling it in there
and then ordering it in a more intentional way.
But I think part of the jumbling get
in is part of being a queer and trans-ish, trans, non-binary.
I mean like i also hate all these words.
None of them even work for me anymore.
So I had to write a book because I'm like I can't really--
I don't have a word that works.
But I wrote a book and maybe that will help.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]