Volume 3, No. 15: Reading Like I'm on a Walk

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m on my beloved island for a few weeks. I’m mostly working, but I’m also taking a few days off at the end of this week. And I’m doing a lot of this:

I love walking on this island. Partly, this is because the landscape is so beloved to me. My heart lives in these moors and beaches and winding dirt roads, in the salt wind and scrub oak. Partly, it’s because walking on an island holds a certain kind of magic. Walk far enough and you’ll always arrive at the ocean. Island walks feel small, and they feel endless. Islands invite wandering. The loops I make across the dirt paths over the moors, the tracks my footsteps leave in the sand—it’s a kind of walking that slows me down. I pick a direction, I step off, something in me unfurls.

I love my reading life the most when it’s like this, too—when it feels like one long meander through a living, shifting landscape. A good week of reading feels like a good walk: unexpected, full of surprises, with a destination that changes at least six times.

Today, I’m inviting you to take a walk with me through some of the books I’ve read over the past two months, and the connections and themes and feelings that have arisen among and between them.

In March, I took an incredible class with author Garth Greenwell about Alexander Chee’s masterpiece, Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a spectacular novel. I read it last fall and it opened up a thousand worlds inside me. During the class, Garth spoke of the novel as depthless, and I agree: it is a book without end. I could reread it a hundred times and not come to the end of it. The class itself was amazing, too. We looked closely at sentences and paragraphs, we talked about structure, we had big conversations about art, I experienced several mind-expanding revelations about point of view.

A week or so after the class ended, I read Hazel Jane Plante’s new novel, Any Other City. Her debut, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is one of my favorite novels, so my expectations for this one were extraordinarily high. I was not disappointed. It’s a stunning book, structured as a fictional memoir. Tracy St. Cyr, a semi-famous trans musican, partners with a fictional version of Hazel Jane Plante to write the story of her life. The first half is set in 1993; Tracy is in her early twenties, alone in a new city, trying to make sense of her life. She finds unexpected kinship with a group of trans women artists. Over twenty years later, in 2019, she returns to the same city in the wake of a massive trauma. She finds refuge in trans friendship, songwriting, and sex.

This novel is a queer healing spell, a shimmering, angry, tender trans femme love song. It’s hard to describe the feeling of reading it, of being comforted and stretched open at the same time. It’s the sort of queer lit that takes my breath away. How does a person translate so much life, so many swirling feelings, so much truth, into words?

The day after I finished Any Other City, I started Nicola Dinan’s upcoming novel Bellies. It’s out in August, and if you decide to preorder one book this year because of me, make it this one. Anyway, Bellies is another brilliant contemporary trans femme novel. It’s a love story in the queerest sense of the word, a love story about the queer shapes love can take, and how hard it can be to find those shapes, especially in a world that glorifies hetero relationships and the nuclear family. Ming falls in love with Tom while they’re at university, and when she decides to transition a few years later, it changes their relationship.

It’s a messy, wonderfully real story about young people trying desperately to find their way. It’s full of queer and trans characters who make mistakes, act selfishly, get it wrong, try again, get hurt. I loved reading this interview, where Nicola Dinan talks about writing fallible trans characters. I’m reminded of a meme I’ve seen going around that says, simply: Support Trans Wrongs. Ming is an incredibly sympathetic character, but she’s not a perfect. Humans are not perfect. This is what makes us interesting and lovable.

So I read these two amazing and very different queer novels, and in the back of my mind I was still thinking about Edinburgh, which is an entirely different kind of novel, it’s on a different plane of existence in the way it approaches queerness and storytelling, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the endlessness of queer lit. I thought of that word again, depthless.

A few weeks ago I read queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s story collection Happy Stories, Mostly, translated beautifully by Tiffany Tsao (out in June from The Feminist Press). It’s a weird and lovely collection. Many of the stories have surrealist or fabulist elements, and many of them are quite funny. They’re also mostly told from the POVs of straight people. There’s a story about a university student and his inability to understand his queer friend, and another one about a mother grieving her gay son’s death by suicide. I was fascinated by this choice. It never felt like Pasaribu was centering straight people. It felt more like he was declaring queerness as universal—most of us have straight people in our lives that we love. It also felt like a book written on a different planet from Any Other City, in which straightness is distant, unimportant.

Back in March, during the Trans Rights Readathon, I read What About the Rest of Your Life by sung. It had been recommended to me as a queer memoir by a trans writer. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking book about trauma and survival and storytelling. sung writes about their abusive mother, as well as abusive romantic relationships they’ve experienced, and about the ongoing work of living through and afterward. It’s not a neat recovery narrative; rather, it’s a vulnerable memoir about ongoingness: ongoing recovery, ongoing loss, ongoing grief, ongoing love.

sung uses they/them pronouns, and the book was a 2018 Lambda Award finalist for Transgender Nonfiction. I have no idea if sung identifies as trans or nonbinary; it’s not in their bio, and I don’t go snooping around the internet trying to gather information about author identities. I’m guessing they do, but I don’t know. Either way, I likely would not have considered this book queer if it hadn’t been recommended to be in a queer context—sung doesn’t mention queerness (that I can remember) and doesn’t speak much about gender, either.

And who cares. Who am I (who is anyone?) to gatekeep what is queer and what isn’t? I’m thinking again about that word, depthless, and about expansiveness, and about what is possible when we don’t rush to pin and label and explain. What queerness lurks in the beautiful depths of What About the Rest of Your Life? How do the less visible but no less real aspects of an author’s identity shape a narrative? I picked up sung’s book during a week of intensely queer and trans reading. How did that affect my experience of it?

And now I’m thinking about My Tender Matador, which I read way back in January, and how it’s a book that refuses to be defined by language and lexicon. It’s a trans book, a queer book, a book about a trans woman, a drag queen, and all of these words matter, sure, but they don’t matter more than the actual beating heart of a person. And I’m thinking about Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, a soft coming-of-age story about a queer Pakistani American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, and how her queerness is there from the beginning, but it doesn’t show up in the novel until close to the end.

This walk through a thousand kinds of queer lit isn’t leading me to some kind of profound and certain destination. It’s merely an observational walk—look, I read this book, and it made me think about this other book, which made me think of this one, and isn’t it beautiful, this web I’m building, this knotted tangled of all the ways there are in the world to be queer, and to write a little bit of it down?

I could have taken a different an entirely different route through the last month and a half of reading. I recently read Jessica Q. Stark’s incredible poetry collection Buffalo Girl. It’s a series of erasure poems and retellings of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s about Stark’s mother’s immigration to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War, and about how that journey lives on inside of her. It’s about sexual violence and the legacies of imperialism, and the weight women are forced to carry, and fairy tales, and the woods. Mostly, I think, it’s about the woods: the woods as metaphor, and the actual woods: a place of wildness, possibility, experimentation, danger, freedom.

Purely by coincidence, over the same weekend, I read Em by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman. It’s a short and beautiful novel, also about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It reads like a collection of prose poems. Like Buffalo Girl, it’s as much about the way we tell stories as it is about the stories themselves.

These two books, which felt like they were made to be read together, reminded me of The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia, which I read back in March. The Bruising of Qilwa feels like a different version of Em, written in fantasy world full of blood magic. I don’t mean to imply that the two books are the same. What I mean is: both of these novels translated for me a particular feeling. They both made visible something true and heartbreaking about the way people are forced to move through the world—about exile and migration and home.

The Bruising of Qilwa is a fantasy, but mostly it's a story about the ordinary life of a refugee, a person living in a hostile and unfamiliar world, a person who loves their family, who loves their work, who longs for justice, whose back aches, who is pouring themself into a place they want to make into a home. It's about community care and what happens when it fails. And it's about questions that don't have simple answers—Firuz wants to put everyone and everything, including themself, into neat boxes: colonizer, colonized; friend, enemy; right, wrong; home, not-home. But it turns out nothing and no one fits into any of those boxes.

And now we’re back at the depthlessness of queer lit, because while Qilwa is certainly a queer novel—the main character Firuz is nonbinary, their brother is trans, queer family plays a central role—its queerness is soft. It’s not the main event. It feels most connected to the few non-queer books I’ve read in the last few weeks. Reading Em enriched my reading of Qilwa. So let’s return to Happy Stories, Mostly, and the truth that I’m starting to think is at the heart of all those straight POVs: not that we are all the same (we are absolutely not), but that we are all connected—sometimes violently, and sometimes in ways that heal. We cannot extricate ourselves from ourselves. From each other. From the world.

I’m currently listening to Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I’m loving it. It’s about a young Cree woman who goes home to her small Alberta town to finally face the grief of losing her sister, after a year. It’s eerie and haunting and very warm—warm with aunties and stories. And it’s about what's inextricable. It’s about the ways in which Mackenzie is inextricably rooted to her homeland, her family, and her grief.

I could loop back through a dozen other books from here. Instead I’ll leave you with this passage from a poetry collection I finished yesterday: 'Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Kanaka ʻŌiwi poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. McDougall’s words are lingering in my heart and brain like gentle, ghostly imprints, as I walk the these dirt roads and listen to all the unfolding stories: Bad Cree and the spring wind and the red-winged blackbirds and the crashing surf and my own breath.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI’m teaching you to seelike me, and I can’t seea cloud or a river ora stone without its historyor consequence,a glimpse of its conclusion.