SmokeLong Quarterly

You recently sold a memoir to Counterpoint Press! Congratulations! Can you tell us about the book? I’d also love to hear about the process of writing and selling it.

Thank you!!!!

The book started existing as a concept when, around the time I was feeling frustrated with All The Paperwork that came with changing my name, I turned in a sort of flip one-page annotated birth certificate to a writing workshop. I had scanned my original birth certificate and painstakingly smashed it into Microsoft Word, and written in these teeny awkwardly-formatted footnotes, and it was a mess (hard to read, ugly! Sorry classmates!). But what started as a one page vent sesh kept growing until eventually it was a book manuscript that had welcomed so many of the essays I’d written, from 400-word flashes to 6000-word monsters, into its fold. I realized I was writing one major theme, and it was how gestating a child was really the thing that provided a structure to my understanding of myself and my world. Basically the book is a memoir about trans parenthood that is anchored by legal documents from my life. And pictures! Of me as a baby, of Samson as a baby. Like so many writers I took to heart the idea of writing a book I wanted to read, and this trans archive is it. I have been wowed at every step, by clicking with an agent who believed in it, by finding an amazing press with a history of publishing innovative books. I feel surprised and honored and so damn excited that a strange book that is so fragmented and visual is going to be out in the world, and that I got to make it and get to share it.

What are some of the best books you’ve recently read? Is there one book in particular that you wish you could press into everyone’s hands and tell them to read?

I’m having a great streak of loving what I’m reading. Some recent favorites have been Theresa Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Ben Lerner’s The Normal School, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

Because it is so much of everything I love about reading and writing I want everyone in my life and in the world to read Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. 

What is special about flash fiction for you?

I love compression. Flash forces writers to choose everything so carefully and to make hard decisions about what is truly necessary. Sometimes that gives a story a pared-down feel and other times it amazes me the funny or heartbreaking details that “make it” into a work of so few words. I also think flash allows for some of the most exciting experimentation in any writing out there; you know that your readers won’t have to sit with your experiment for hundreds or even dozens of pages so you can really go all out. When I open a link or a book and see a story that fits on just one or two pages, especially if it has an odd look to it, that’s the most satisfying reading experience.

What kind of story would you love to find in the queue this week?

I have a really expansive idea of what a story is, and I’m excited to say I like a lot of different kinds of things. I love stories with lots of plot and also plotless imagistic stories, really, the entire gamut of fiction. When I was reading a lot of flash fiction as Managing Editor of Passages North I told readers I worked with that I was looking for a story that I just had to send someone. So as vague as it is, I’d like to read a story that I need to send to my friends ASAP.