Serafima Mintz is one of the participants in this summer’s inaugural trans women’s writing workshop. Help make the workshop possible, by donating to our fundraiser.
Why Do I Write
I write because it’s 5:30 a.m. and the sun is rising, and I’m sleeping in the back of my car, and it’s freezing. Because I like the feel of paper under my hand, the rhythm of a moving pen. Because I’m not alone when I’m writing. I don’t know if I can explain that. Because I have anxiety. Because being trans in this world gives me anxiety. Writing helps.
I write because storytelling is an ancient art, like listening to your breath or building pyramids. I write because I’ve never been good at building pyramids. My ability to breathe deeply begins and ends with smoking cigarettes. I am almost out of cigarettes.
I write because, damn, this sunrise. Because the cat on the curb, rusted bicycle wheels. A hole in my jacket that can’t be mended. The smell and feel of dewy flowers. Memories of walking to school in third grade.
I write because there’s all these things, and all these empty lines, and I might as well fill them. Because I borrowed this pen from friends who let me sleep on their couch, and I forgot to give it back. Might as well use it.
I write because another trans woman writer killed herself this year, and when it happened I cried for days, and shook for three hours in my writing class. I woke up shaking the next morning, and the morning after that. I cried because I understood that desperation, write because it helps me process.
I write because writing is a privilege of a semi-stable mind, which I have sometimes, so might as well use it.
Because when I was 24 years old, I was still getting called “the ugly girl.” Because fuck those people. Because I’ll be a famous writer someday, and that will show all of them, right? Because even if I’m not a famous writer, I still got A’s on my papers in community college.
I write because the cat has moved from the curb to a grassy corner of somebody’s lawn, and it is licking its back. One paw is in the air. Its tail is tucked away. Because if I didn’t write, how would I, or you, remember that cat?
“Squaring the Circle” by Beatrix Tarnoff, who will be a part of our Inaugural Summer Writers’ Workshop. Donate today to help us fund this creative smorgasbord for twenty-six trans women.
Rose is one of our 25 participants for the 2016 Trans Women’s Writing Workshop, which you can donate to here. She is writing about a young trans child that she helps takes care of. She is a queer cartoonist and writer currently residing in the Pacific Northwest.
It was the Summer of 1987. I was eight years old, almost nine in three months coming. Up to that point, gender was a thing that I mostly ignored. It didn’t affect me, or so I thought. My heart was only ever about one thing: making art. Since forever, I just wanted to be a cartoonist and live in a world of dancing ice cream cones and adventurous milkshakes outrunning giant onion boulders and killer hamburgers. There was even a irritating little straw that may or may not have been my annoying little brother in disguise.
Then I discovered polka dot overalls. That’s when everything changed.
It wasn’t wearing the overalls that did much of anything. I mean, sure, I was pretty damn adorable in that extremely cute, colorful outfit with my short and sweet pixie haircut. And yeah… it totally was the first time my heart soared to new heights that only other queer femmes could completely understand. And maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny moment when I finally saw myself in the mirror for the first time. An image that looked like me, my true reflection.
But that wasn’t what changed me. Instead, it was my mother’s raging voice when she discovered my outfit a few hours later.
“What the hell are you wearing? What the fuck is wrong with you?” “If your dad ever discovered what you did, he would disown you.” “Nobody can ever find out this ever happened. NOBODY.”
Fast forward 29 years. Her name is Pearl. Every morning, I am greeted by the sweetest knock on my door. Sometimes she just wants to cuddle together and watch Steven Universe on the couch. Other times she wants me to help her pick from one of the many glorious outfits that her unbelievably supportive mama has lovingly bought her. But every night, it’s always the same. That never changes. Every night she wants me to tuck her in and read the same short story that I wrote for girls like her, girls like us. It’s about a star princess who never stopped believing she was more than just a human being, despite everything and everyone around her.
The allegory is not lost on Pearl. She could hear me tell that tale a million times and never get tired of it.
For women like me and kids like Pearl, there is hardly anything written by, and for, girls like us. They simply do not exist, not unless you look into the deepest corners of the Internet. Pearl is lucky in this respect; she’s got me, a close, creative caregiver who also happens to be a trans woman and a writer. I can tell her the stories she needs to hear when facing the horrendous obstacles that only transgender women and transgender girls deal with. But most of us don’t have that option, and I can say from first hand experience, as both a caregiver to a sweet transgender child and as a transgender woman, this needs to change. Lives are depending on it.
In one month’s time, I will be joining 25 other trans women and two world class instructors in rewriting history. Our mission: to explore strange new worlds, to boldly go where no one has gone before. But instead of traveling to outer space, we’ll be headed to our own personal frontiers. We will be braver than ever before, break open our writing devices, and share heartfelt, vulnerable stories about being women, and sometimes being girls, assigned male at birth. For five days, we’ll be writing together, for each other, and hopefully for generations after.
Hello! I wanted to write this for anyone that is curious about what has gone into this workshop. Perhaps you are interested in hosting a similar event in your town, or maybe you are a participant this year and want to see how it’s being put together, or you’re just curious about where your donation is going. With this, I hope to provide more information about our budget and resources, and to demystify the difficulty of organizing your own event.
Our total budget is 20,000 USD. This workshop is hosting twenty-six women and paying two teachers, and we are using every dollar judiciously.
Instructors [$5000]: We are paying Sarah Schulman and Casey Plett the same rate that the Lambda Literary workshop pays its instructors: $2500.
Travel [$6000]: All the participants in the workshop were given the opportunity to request travel assistance either in the form of a partial refund or outright purchase of their travel arrangements. Over half of the participants have requested assistance of some kind. When we began organizing, we knew that travel would be a large factor in limiting people’s ability to participate, so we made this a priority within the budget.
Food [$2600]: Food is an accessibility issue, if you can’t eat you can’t write. We budgeted this amount to supply food for the workshop and to offset costs for anyone coming into the city who might need it.
Accommodations & Accessibility [$5400]: This allocation covers things like the cost of printing, any additional accommodations we need to make for housing and travel within the city, costs related to the reading events that writers will participate in and any accessibility needs attendees have. Our organizing team has been in close communication with all of our writers about accessibility and we have tried to make this a big priority in planning this workshop.
Emergency [$1000]: Ack! I have nowhere to sleep! I had an intense allergic reaction to the food I ate at the airport! We ran out of paper! This part of the budget gives us a little wiggle room in case of unforeseen events.
Budgeting Beyond the Money
Additionally, we had a lot of resources that have either been donated or were available to us for free. Recognizing and utilizing these resources has been central to our organizing team.
The Space One of the biggest free assets we have for this event is the space. Having access to Brooklyn College gives us an accessible, beautiful, and academic space that is centrally located between two major transit lines. I asked the LGBTQ Resource Center director at my school to help us, and we were given access to two spaces on the campus for the week, at no cost. It also gives us a really special place in New York to host this workshop. To me that is a win/win.
The City New York City is a transit hub for the Northeast, and is easy to get to by train or bus. It has three airports. Locally, it has a ton of options for public transit. The MTA provides low-cost transportation for participants, virtually eliminating the need for cars.
The Community One of the most powerful resources New York City has to offer is its local network of queers and artists, many of whom are volunteering to house writers on their couches, floors, or air mattresses. Our community in New York City has made this workshop possible by lowering housing costs.
The Fundraiser To manage the fundraiser, we used a plugin on the Topside Press website. A mainstream fundraising site would have cost us over a thousand dollars more in fees, so this was a huge savings for our organizing team.
Where is the money coming from?
Some of the money is coming from tuition charged to participants (suggested $300 per person) on a self-determined sliding scale. Some participants are paying zero, and some participants are paying more than the suggested amount, based on their own assessments of their financial ability to participate. In fact, the participants pay their tuition simply by donating to the fundraiser. All the rest of the money for the budget is coming from individual donations. This workshop is not supported by grants or corporate sponsorship.
Lead Organizer Zoey Wolfe has spent the last couple days writing up this guide to our budget, which might be useful for other folks who would like to plan a similar workshop in their home town.
Nearly every story you’ve ever read about a trans woman was written by a cis person.
This summer, twenty-six trans women writers will gather in New York City, the publishing and literary capital of North America, with two world-class instructors, to study, and to hone our craft.
Please donate today to help us realize this unique creative opportunity. Your donations go directly to paying for tuition, travel, and accommodation costs for participants who otherwise could not afford to attend.
Trans writers of NYC are invited to join Topside Press at GENRE REASSIGNMENT. Bring 4-6 minutes of prose, poetry, or whatever you call your current genre, 2 letters from therapists or psychologists (Master’s degree or above) attesting to the veracity of your genre, notarized proof that you’ve been writing in your current genre for a period of not less than twelve (12) months, and certified original birth certificate indicating that you were assigned “writer” at birth.
Guest post by workshop participant Thel Seraphim, who you can find on twitter at @mallwizard:
There wasn’t any formal requirement that the workshop participants make grand sweeping statements about their philosophy of writing and life, but we all seeem to be doing it, so I thought I would share a short piece about the anxieties of identitarian literature. This is not exactly about the workshop but was inspired by the workshop discussion and especially conversations with Frida Fafán, Zach Ozma, & Kay Gabriel. It is cut from my digital zine, ‘… #1’ which you can find at https://gum.co/theotherellipsis, or read excerpts of on twitter @otherellipsis.
identity writing, 2
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading & thinking about the flowering of black gay men’s writing in the 1980s & 90s. I find many of the concerns recognizable. There’s a sense of writing from the crisis. There’s a sense of responsibility in writing from a complex identity & a need to be true to all parts of it. There’s a sense that this identity by its very existence challenges the self-concept of liberation movements that hold themselves above critique. There’s also a sense of advancing that critique lovingly, a recognition of an expanded sense of home, & of mutual dependence.
I don’t point to this in order to draw a simple-minded analogy to my own situation, but as an antidote to the exceptionalism of trans concerns. We have something to learn from these men. & because they wrote genuinely from their position, we can learn from them. As the past recedes, their honesty & thoroughness remain a guide. I don’t know who else went that far. Of course I don’t mean to say here that this is an honesty that excludes artifice or formal invention. You can find poetry here, & experiment, analysis, ideas that feel absolutely fresh 30 years later. If one black gay man writes as effectively a black heterosexual, & another writes in a decontextualized, implicitly white frame of sexual identity, haven’t we really described two closets?
& for me? The constituent parts of my identity are very different than say Joseph Beam’s or Essex Hemphill’s, & the problems are different too. But thinking through their words & lives I find myself spontaneously organizing new responses to my situation. There’s a sense of rebuilding in the heart, & it isn’t just gender. If I can be allowed to be unguardedly optimistic, I think that trans people, & particularly trans people of color, are speaking to something that matters now, & that continues this tradition. The future will be curious. We can dare to take ourselves a bit seriously here.
Let’s talk about a few of the problems of trans writing now, without pretending to completeness.
We can characterize a lot of contemporary trans literature in its reaction to an injunction to disclose before a hostile or interrogating gaze. The trans memoir as a genre is often kicked around as an example of an absolute capitulation to that pressure. You asked for a butterfly story, so I gave you one. Perhaps I get surgery at the end. But looking beyond the genre of the memoir, which incidentally is capable of entertaining good writing & real opacity to that gaze, we find that a lot of other trans literature can also be characterized by its response to that injunction. I say “I refuse to give you what you want,” but in the course of spiting you, I limit my own expression.
For example I might cultivate bookish impersonality, at the cost of accessibility. I might cultivate a highly analytical tone, at the cost of heart. I might cultivate a counterintuitive set of influences or references, at the cost of connection to my own communities. I might cultivate a pure literary quality, write standard issue workshop fiction, at the cost of analysis, digression, & my own presence as the author. Everybody’s got an angle. It might be necessary to stay up very late together to come to the point & really find yours.
I see that injunction in writing as a person of color as well. There are obnoxious cliches of the genre. For example, establishing your connection to the ancestral homeland through food. Or grandmother. For me, maybe this is a bite of chiktay aron so, followed by an actual madeleine. Or sacrificing a bit of that connection, telling the story of being at home neither here nor there, neither black nor white, American nor foreign, inviting your your reader to draw a false equivalence between these different failures of belonging, which carry very different kinds of social necessity & coercion. Going down into that & becoming more alone. Who refused you? Who did you refuse?
This is just to say that to write honestly doesn’t mean to write artlessly or without guile, or to capitulate to that infantilizing gaze. That’s a way of falling into traps, & it’s very boring. I want to be as aware & creative as possible in my response to the pressures that deform my writing. I’ve mentioned only two here, but there are so many others.
I don’t think I can figure all of this out alone. I also don’t think I can figure this out in a single community organized by gender or sexual identity. I’m going to keep showing up, since those spaces continue to be a home, we continue to need each other. In my earlier sonnet I felt that dedication falter, but really we are stuck here together, even if we’ve only stopped in to get out of the rain.
So how to write as a trans woman while maintaining agency? I might say, flippantly, that I’m always trans but my writing reflects that only sometimes. But that’s too easy. Look, I have a lot of issues with the idea of writing from an otherwise unmarked transfeminine position. I don’t want to accept the frame of “trans literature” as it’s beginning to be institutionalized in the form of a few small presses, a few literary awards, a set of critical concerns, workshop culture, the beginnings of a canon. But I don’t want to retreat into a position that asserts the irrelevance of my transness or my ultimate disconnection from those concerns. I am writing as a trans woman, & as I do so I’d like to find out what that amounts to.
Kay Gabriel is one of the 26 participants in this summer’s trans women writing workshop, please donate and share. Every little bit help and this is our final push for fundraising.
Usually I write cause I’ve got a polemic, right now I’ve got two.
I feel a little bit like that girl in A Chorus Line who sings “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three,” like that monologue she has? “I never heard about the Red Shoes, I never saw the Red Shoes, I don’t give a fuck about the Red Shoes!” Something like that I think expresses, albeit in an unkind way I don’t actually want to emulate, my position with respect to trans literature as it’s currently, frequently, constituted. What I mean is it’s cool if you started writing because you read Nevada, a book that’s very dear to me and has more than a few tricks up its sleeve, but that isn’t me. I want to talk about some of the reasons why I do write but first I want to talk about why I feel like I need to say so explicitly—why I need to cut against the presumption of a certain kind of shared canon.
The problem at hand is thus one of canonization: my concern isn’t with Nevada but rather its contemporary reception three years down the road from its pub date. It’s been burdened with a mythos it can’t sustain, no book can: the novel that kicked off the trans literary “renaissance” of the 2010’s, the novel that articulated and brought into being a broad-scale sophistication of trans literature by invoking trans readers as its audience. This cultural narrative is weighed down by a social counterpart, according to which reading Nevada makes you figure out you’re a girl. (Actually, this gesture arguably goes against the thrust of the novel, which turns on the failure of connection between Maria and James, really the older woman’s inability to invite her younger counterpart to entertain transition.) The problem here is, once more, not with Nevada but with the appropriateness of the historical narrative that posits this decade as the moment of a trans cultural movement. It’s certainly the case that trans people are producing more culture, and doing so via engagement with a particular, if sometimes limited, canon of art and texts. But what this situation really tracks is a certain form of massification enabled by whatever social media platforms of web 2.0, inheritors of prior forms of trans internet sociality on 4chan and LiveJournal.
More trans people making art is, like, definitely a good thing. But this quantitative expansion of trans cultural production also operates via the relatively new insitution of a canon of trans literature, an institution that is, in my understanding, gaining force as we speak. The problem is that the narrative of a renaissance in response to a relatively circumscribed and recent canon narrows the horizon for art and analysis. Treating the writers and artists of the current decade as a vanguard or renaissance renaissance misses the long and torturous history of trans art. This tradition can’t be reduced to anything so simple as the narrative whereby trans memoir for a cis audience yielded only recently its dominant position to trans literature for a trans audience: where does Alan L. Hart—who penned his work in the 20’s and 30’s!—fit in, for instance? Or how about—as Trish Salah discussed at length in her keynote address at the University of Toronto’s Trans Temporality conference in April 2016—the flourishing trans art and criticism of the 90’s and 00’s? (In which regard I can’t recommend highly enough Salah’s essay “Notes Towards Thinking Transsexual Institutional Poetics,” available in Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard [Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013]. The essay provides a neat account both of some of this cultural production—the Counting Past 2 film festival organized by Mirha-Soliel Ross at the University of Toronto from 1999-2001; the film Gendertroublemakers produced by Ross under the pseudonym Jeanne B. and her then-girlfriend Xanthra Philippa McKay—as well as the risks of the institutionalization of that cultural production: Salah argues that Counting Past 2 was more welcoming to sex workers, for instance, than many trans cultural institutions of the following decades.) Finally, we might say that the problem with a trans canon is its limitation in identity, even in a minoritarian position as the foundation for the art we make. I’m not saying should be jettisoned entirely; that position would simply rephrase the transphobic proscription against trans literature. But it’s fair to ask how the demand to see oneself reflected limits rather than expands cultural engagement, an understanding of history, and our own aesthetic commitments.
These reflections on canonization and our own cultural moment bring me to the Topside Summer Writing workshop. I’m looking forward to our week together, to benefitting from each of you as peers and mutual editors, and to engaging with your work in an intense and focused setting. The strengths of this kind of space are clear, e.g. that none of us will be placed in the awkward position of being a token, at least on the basis of gender; that we can take certain cultural and social reference points for granted and for others assume some level of shared experience; and also, maybe most importantly, that few of us have had access to this kind of dedicated formal workshop training, and I count myself in that number. So the workshop in its best capacity will expand access to peers, networks, editors, agents, and publishers. The fundraising effort is fundamentally about increasing access to this kind of educational environment. This is crucial. At the same time, I’d like to invite us to consider some of the narratives, implict or explicit, concerning the work we’re going to be doing: one of those narratives, that we are taking up the mantle of trans literature from the relatively more established writers and artists of the present decade, turns on a promise of canonization at this moment we have already described to ourselves as the point of renaissance or vanguard. What we are witnessing might equally be the intensification of institutionalizing pressures. These pressures are, to borrow a term from Lawrence Venuti, fundamentally axiological, related to the ascription of cultural, literary, and social value: their effects range from what kinds of books end up collected in libraries, hosted in archives, or taught in Trans Literature university seminars; to which and what kind of writers receive recognition and compensation for our work; to what kinds of texts are translated, into what languages and for what readerships; to what kinds of aesthetics and forms are validated by virtue of this canon. It’s true, important, and cool that you can just go out there and do shit, as merritt k tweeted recently. But that capacity, which as it concerns us here is effectively the capacity to be recognized in an alt lit scene and ultimately paid for the work you do there, depends inevitably on a transfer back and forth between social and cultural capital. My claim is that institutionalization basically raises the price of entry here—which is at heart the process that has taken place, over the past three decades, in US literature overall, in which it is now much more difficult to operate without the institutional validation of an MFA than it would have been in the 80’s, 90’s, or even 00’s.
My earlier claim about the limitations that canonization sets on aesthetics brings me to my second polemic, so let me repeat myself. The institutionalization of a certain kind of canon involves aesthetic prescriptions on the art that can belong to it. Viviane Namaste has written that “autobiography is the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak” (Namaste 2000, 273n3). Even after the heyday of the trans memoir, this prescription remains firmly in place if under a different guise. We might see it as an imperative to disclose the self or a pseudautobiographical version of it, an invitation for a woman to testify to her particular experience of bullshit, or the implication that this is if not the only then certainly the fastest way to get taken seriously as a writer within a certain scene. I get why we do this. It’s important for us to be able to show each other our scars, literal and figurative, to be met with understanding and sympathy, and to be able to express these in art, sometimes in a sophisticated way, sometimes totally raw. But there’s a difference between making space for the articulation of a life, however brutal its experiences, and setting or passing on an imperative to disclose the self via certain authenticating gestures. I resent this imperative as a structure that elicits disclosure to establish authenticity—and considering that the statuses in question often relate to trauma, sex work, addiction, mental health, and seropositivity, small wonder many of us choose to be discreet in some or other capacity—and suspect it as an implicit injunction for emerging artists to gain recognition and credibility. Like the periodization of trans art as being in the grips of a renaissance, this prescription narrows the possibility for aesthetics by closing off work that writes from outside a personal voice, from a position of abstraction, in an experimental register, or from—as Thel has persuasively discussed elsewhere—the wrong kind of subject position. What if we could entertain a more ambitious view of art? Call it arch, I’d probably like that.
But here I am engaged in negation when I haven’t even told you what’s in it for me, so let me be both more honest and more fun. Here’s my deal. I spent most of high school probably writing about the sex I wasn’t having, and none of it was even fic, which seems like a waste. Then I kept doing it because I got really excited by John Ashbery, I still do. He doesn’t tell my story but he doesn’t tell anyone’s, really, or I mean unless you’re actually a white gay ex-pat midcentury American writer and you have to beat O’Hara at the Yale Younger Poets Series, actually I forgot who won that. And then I read Bernadette Mayer’s poem “Sonnet We Are Ordinary C’Mere,” which made me gay. Consider:
Excerpts I love you from abstracts So what who cares songs of one and Experience of this is a case like Whole and I am not from there I write To you to say I know nothing as ever No rhyming no everything there is No proceeding no thinking you will be my What will you be? And that is the end
Except for the instance What are you wearing? Why aren’t you here? Where’d you put the window?
C’mere Tell me the rest of it
Which is a poem written in the mode of a letter or summons to the addressee, where the invitation to intimacy (“What are you wearing?”; “you will be my / What will you be?”) takes the form of filling in the gaps in the story, analogized through closing the gap in distance (“Why aren’t you here?) just as the colloquial C’mere collapses that phrase into itself, distance elided so hard that two words become a single phrase with an impossible consonant combination (c’m). Mayer is also a writer of, and about, the suburbs, consider The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, a long series of epistolary documents sort of about Mayer having her third child, sort of about moving from a suburb in Connecticut to one in New Hampshire, thus further from the New York poetry scene, whose snobbishness towards such towns she documents gleefully and maybe with some resentment even as her work is intensely engaged with the spatialization of economic processes that this kind of suburban living(, homemaking, childrearing, domestic labour) indicates. The distance of “Sonnet We Are Ordinary C’Mere” that forecloses intimacy is not neutral within this dynamic; for Mayer we might say the abstraction of space is always concerned with its concrete material counterpart, and conversely that her articulation of the materiality of space always has an eye on the abstract dynamics that make this space possible. Which makes me think: what if I can write poems that make other people gay, and also suburbs? What if I could attempt a representation of certain abstract structures that totally resist such representation, an attempt that is thus bound to fail but to do so, you know, sublimely, like wouldn’t that be nice? which anyways is at least one reason to write.
Video of me, Casey Plett, Imogen Binnie, and Sybil Lamb (in that order) at Red Emma’s in Baltimore, 7.6.14. I read a draft of a prose piece about monstrousness. Thanks to Casey, Imogen, Sybil, and Tom from Topside for letting me hop on this leg of their tour! So much fun.
Trans & Gender Nonconforming Author Reading. (Everett Maroon, Imogen Binnie, Trace Peterson, Kelli Dunham, Carter Sickels) Award-winning transgender and gender nonconforming writers and poets bring you their newest and best work in this reading that jettisons tropes around queer and trans people to reveal an exciting and nuanced nascent trans literature. Pushing against convention, form, and your MFA workshop leader’s advice, these authors represent some of the best work across the country in a variety of genres including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. A salon of transgender, transgenre work!
