It’s that time of the year when I realize I haven’t written an awards eligibility post, attempt to gather enough energy to overcome my Midwesterner’s aversion to self-promotion and, if I’m lucky, eventually write the post anyway.
If you’re reading this, I must have successfully published it. In 2024, I’m going to say that hitting “send” counts as a win.
I loved writing These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart. I had so much fun exploring the characters and setting, and I’ve been thrilled to see reviews that expressed a desire to read further books in this setting.
I’d like nothing more than to write a sequel! The economics of publishing being what they are, the odds I get to do that go up substantially if the These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart receives award nominations. It would mean a lot to me if you’d read it and consider it when nominating for awards. (It’s eligible in the novella category.)
I also had one short story published this year, “Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition,” which appeared in Embodied Exegesis: Transfeminine Cyberpunk Futures edited by Ann LeBlanc. I’m proud of my story and I’d be delighted if you’d give it a read, but more than that, I hope you’ll give Embodied Exegesis a read. I’m biased, of course, but I think it’s excellent and deserves a wide readership!
What Were Your Favorite Reads of 2024?
Between the demands of my job, the excitement of the book release, and the widespread horrors of — gestures vaguely at the world — I am woefully under-read on work that debuted this year. I’d love to hear from you: what speculative fiction released in 2024 did you love? What burrowed its way inside you, lives rent-free in your brain, left you pumping your fist, wiping your eyes, or thrusting your copy at your friends? I’d love it if you’d leave a comment and let me know!
This post is mostly going to be about plot, community, and some craft discussion based on my recent we-watch of the show Deadwood.
But first! Did you know I’m going on a book tour? That’s right! And you can find me at the following dates and times (also listed in the image below):
Saturday, 16 March 20242:30 PM Eastern at ICFA, Orlando, FL Reading hosted by Emma Törzs, featuring Janny Wurts, Siobhan Carroll, F. Brett Cox, and me!
Note: contains major spoilers for the TV series Deadwood and discusses the death of a child.
Deadwood, David Milch’s fictionalized and highly stylized retelling of the story of boom town that rose up around a mining camp in what would later become South Dakota, is a deeply problematic show. It depicts racism, misogyny, and violence, among other notable elements. While I would argue that the show depicts these elements, rather than endorsing them, it is a difficult watch. (To pick one example: its failure to meaningfully engage with the Native American peoples who suffered mightily at the hands of colonialism is a massive flaw.)
Despite that, it is, to my mind, the best show of the “golden age” era of television, telling the story of a group of people, many of whom are capable of monstrosity, nevertheless discovering they need each other to survive. Underneath all the violence, language, and nudity is a show about community.
It’s also a show where terrible things routinely happen, and I want to talk about one of those events, because it’s the kind of storytelling choice that I generally find abhorrent, but in Deadwood, I think it works. And the reason it works has to do with the nature of plot and of the tools of characterization.
At the end of the 9th episode of season 2, 8-year-old William Bullock is trampled by a runaway horse. During the next episode, he dies of his wounds. The sequence of events is shocking, even in a series as heartbreaking and unpredictable as Deadwood. While the decision to kill of William was apparently made as a result of behind-the-scenes drama, Milch and the series’ writers take one of my least favorite tropes—a dead child used to motivate our hero—and turn it into something powerful.
To understand how they do that, we need to reflect on the situation the characters find themselves in when the tragedy strikes. William’s parents’ relationship is collapsing. An outsider has committed a series of horrific murders. Political maneuvering threatens everything the town has built; and George Hearst, fantastically wealthy and legendarily cruel (in the show’s depiction; I can’t speak for the historical figure), is on his way to Deadwood, where he will immediately be a threat to anyone and everyone.
This is the moment when poor William dies. Everything about his death, from the timing to the unpredictable nature of it, is devastating. And here is where the show makes the choice that changes this death from what could be just another “fridging” to an event that reveals to us how this community can maybe—just maybe—come together to survive the existential threats it is facing.
To do so, it forces us, and the town, to sit with the horror of what has happened. So shocking and deeply felt is William’s death that daily life in Deadwood shuts down almost entirely. Enmities aren’t forgotten, but they are at least put on hold. Almost the entire town gathers for the funeral, and even Al Swearengen, who doesn’t attend, consents to let the sex workers in his employ join the miners, businesspeople, criminals, and men of the cloth (categories that, in Deadwood, have significant overlap), to pay respect to this boy, the son a sheriff many of them loathe and more than a few of them love.
During the funeral, the camera lingers on faces in the crowd. We see every heartbroken expression, every shattered visage. William’s mother, who has held herself at a remove from the rest of the town, invites everyone into her home for a viewing. Even Swearengen, who can’t bring himself to face the event, is deeply rattled by it. Only a few figures, those who are actively working with Hearst against the town, are set apart from a town that is learning, at great cost, that it is in fact a community.
If the typical death-of-an-innocent trope is about motivating a hero (examples abound, but think of the motivating event in John Wick), then here we have something much rarer: a group of people who have had to live with the daily reality of violence suddenly face something they can’t hide from, a loss even more random and unfair than the show has taught us to expect. And, as people tend to do in a tragedy, they come together. They mourn, they offer each other what words and actions they can manage. What they can offer isn’t nearly enough, but what consolations ever are in such a situation?
Here, Deadwood tells us: sit with this grief. Watch the characters, almost all of whom are complicit in truly terrible things, face the fundamental unfairness of life. Watch them offer what they can to each other. Watch them realize, maybe for the first time, what they mean to each other.
Deadwood is a show packed with plot. But incidents like Williams’s death are rare, because most of the plot proceeds from the terrible logic of characters’ choices. It’s a plot that unfolds by carefully showing us who characters are and allowing conflict to arise from those similarities and differences.
But while plot can be a series of consequences for choices, life itself isn’t always that tidy. That’s one reason why I think of plot less as a series of related events, and more as the results of characters trying to get what they need from each other. Almost every interaction in Deadwood can be thought of in those terms, and when something like William’s death occurs, it forces characters to think of matters beyond their own wants and even needs. It defies the capitalist, everyone-for-themselves logic that most of the shows characters accept, and makes them realize the limitations of that logic.
In lingering over William’s loss, Deadwood rejects easy answers and rote motivations. In bringing its marvelous ensemble cast together to face this tragedy, it hints at the arc of the entire series, an arc that will be defined by this fragile, violent, wildly flawed community, and will show us—and them—why none of our burdens can’t be borne alone.
And if that isn’t a cool alternative to “lone hero” plot-lines that shape so many westerns and so much storytelling advice, I don’t know what is.
Do you have thoughts on Deadwood, plot, or using the deaths of innocents in storytelling? If so, I’d love to hear from you!
Somehow the first month of 2024 is almost behind us. Where does the time go? For me, the answer has been, in no particular order: teaching, writing, getting ready for the launch of These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, and re-watching Deadwood.
In the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing multiple events. I hope to see see you at them!
ONLINE: Wednesday, 1/31 (tomorrow!) at 10 pm Eastern/7 pm Pacific I’ll be reading short fiction on Story Hour along with Wole Talabi. Zoom and Facebook links are available at the link. I’ll be reading two very short stories that are among my personal favorites.
KANSAS CITY: Saturday, 2/10 at 1:45 pm Central at be be participating in the AWP panel “The Trans Fantastic: Craft, Themes, Reception” along with an amazing group of panelists: Alina Boyden, Maya Deane, Megan Milks and Nino Cipri. Location: Room 2504AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2.
LAWRENCE, KS: Also on Saturday, 2/10 at 7 pm Central, join me, Emma Törzs, and Abbey Mei Otis at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence Kansas for a reading. Emma and Abbey are immensely talented writers and awesome people. Not only will this be a very fun event, but you’ll have a chance to buy copies of Emma and Abbey’s gorgeous books and there should be some fun incentives for those who want to pre-order These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart! Those in attendance will also be among the first people ever to hear me read from it. Location: 809 Massachusetts Street, Lawrence, KS.
There are many bookstores that I love, but the Raven has a special place in my heart. Even though I no longer live in Kansas, it will always be my local bookstore and it’s one of my very favorite places in the world. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come by and say hello!
But wait, there’s more: I’ll have more events to announce, including the official book launch for These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, very soon!
This edition of the newsletter is very short, because it’s finals week here and that means three things: grading, grading, and procrastination grading. But I’m taking a quick break from two of those three to share some news.
Today my story “She Blooms and the World is Changed” is free to read at Lightspeed. This story is personal to me. It’s about sisters, colonialism, the limits of a “leave no trace” ethos, and what we do with the wreckage of the past.
It’s also a rarity for me. I don’t often write about siblings, despite being from a big family and loving my siblings. I’m not sure why they don’t appear more often. Maybe it’s for the same reason animals don’t occupy a lot of space in my fiction: I don’t want to put them through the kind of stress that characters are often facing.
Which is pretty wild; if you’re reading this, you probably know that I’m not the least bit shy about putting my protagonists through some terrible times. I’m sure siblings and animals will start showing up more, though. I’ll do my best to keep the animals out of harms way. No promises for the siblings.
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All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From received a lovely review from Maya C. James in Locus. I particularly loved this line: “I felt like I was traveling through a liminal space with little protection but tremendous wonder and hope.”
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With the semester almost over, I’m preparing for a busy summer. One of my goals for the summer is to listen to a lot of audiobooks while I’m working around the house. So I ask you, dear reader: what’s a great book you’d recommend on audiobook? Recent books and those written by marginalized folks are ones I’d particularly love to see.
I know of at least one book that I’m thrilled to see out in the world: Emma Törzs’s Ink Blood Sister Scribe. A story of two sisters and the magical library they protect, it features exquisite prose, amazing worldbuilding, and characters you’ll want to obsess over. I can’t wait for y’all to read it.
Somehow it’s already (dramatic sting) awards season. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of work come out this year, and I’d be honored if you’d consider it when you’re nominating. I’ve grouped them below by category.
My debut short fiction collection contains 14 stories, 3 of them never before published.
“Across every genre and tone, Izzy Wasserstein imbues her stories with a unique power: to reach through the page and into your chest, where they hold your heart as if it’s the last of its kind. These are gorgeously-told queer tales of grief and love, fear and wonder, for people and for entire worlds, and they give comfort and strength to the exact parts of our souls that this moment in history relentlessly erodes. Dress your wounds with these words. Drink up their warmth in the dead of winter. They’ll take care of you.”
Justine’s shadow watches her. It stands under the lamp post across from her flat, her smoky semblance, flickering and shifting under the gaslight. She’s at her window, tea cooling in her hands. Though the shadow has no eyes, Justine is certain that it stares at her, just as she is certain it is hers. She would know it anywhere.
This is my first published novelette, and it’s near and dear to my heart. If you’ve found yourself needing community in hard times, or struggling under the burdens of institutions that are supposed to support you, then please know I wrote this for you.
Everything the sea takes, it gives back in its own way and its own time. That was what Jess’s grandmother believed, what she’d told Jess as they stood in the shadow of the giant red cedar that had washed ashore, its severed roots thicker than Jess’s body. It must have drifted for a thousand years or more to return to them in that moment.
My ode to the Pacific Northwest, and a meditation on loss and how we keep going despite it. I’m hugely proud of this one, and if you only have time to read one story of mine, this is the one I’d recommend.
I pull myself up from the morgue table, from the fragments of bone that were once a young woman, then vomit bile and not much else into a trash can. I’ve long ago learned not to eat before communing with the dead. Jensen holds my hair back as I empty my stomach, and when I straighten, wiping my lips with the back of my sleeve, his brow is furrowed.
“Don’t tell me,” I say, but he does anyway.
“Worse than ever,” he says, meaning the shaking, the sweating, the pained cries that come along with the ability to share the dead’s experiences. Jensen calls communing my gift. If so, it’s a cruel one.
This story is about grief, burnout, and what we owe the dead. It’s also my response to the many deeply problematic elements of the “true crime” genre.
“Blades, Stones, and the Weight of Centuries,” “The Case of the Soane Museum Thefts,” and “Hopper in the Frying Pan” all appear for the first time in All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, and all are eligible for nominations.
We deserve stories as rich and varied as the stories about cis people. We need stories like “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” and stories of joy. When we write trans tragedies, they’ll be the tragedies we need to tell, ones that center us, that help us make meaning of this transphobic world. And we won’t limit ourselves. We’ll write comedies, romances, erotica, weird tales, thrilling space adventures, and stories of triumph.
Even in our worst times, we will find joy. We’ve always found ways to have it and we’ll keep doing so. And when those joys seem impossibly far away, fiction can help us hold on.
This one does what it says on the tin, or at least in the title.
I’ve been remiss in updating this blog. Too many demands on my time, too little focus to go around. But now that Elon Musk is busy remaking Twitter into a somehow-even-worse product, I’ll be working to keep this space much more active going forward.
The Necessity of Trans Joy
Thanks to Uncanny for giving me the chance to write about trans joy and how much I crave seeing it depicted in fiction. Thanks in particular to Meg Elison, who edited the piece and and without whose support and insightful feedback it would never have existed. And thanks to the trans community, without whom I’d surely have given up on this whole writing thing.
World Fantasy 2022
I’ll be at World Fantasy this weekend. If you’re there, I hope you’ll say hi! And please don’t be offended if I have to glance at your nametag to be sure of who you are. I wasn’t good with faces even in the Before Times. You can find me at the following events:
Thursday, 3 PM: Queer in the Market: The State Of LGBTQ+ Representation in Fantasy and Horror Publishing (Location: Celestin ABC)
Friday, 4:30 PM: I’ll be reading from All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From. (Imperial 11)
I hope yo see you there!
Speaking of My Book
All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, my debut short story collection, which Elly Bangs praised as “gorgeously-told queer tales of grief and love, fear and wonder,” is out in the world! You can buy it through Neon Hemlock, order it through your local independent book store, or ask your local library to get a copy!
“The Futures Are Queer”
If you’ve read this far, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll like my newsletter. In it I talk about writing, media, food, TTRPGs, and whatever else crosses my mind.
Somehow it’s already July! That means it’s book launch month, and that I’m going to be doing a lot of fun events. All of the following are online except the reading on
Wednesday, July 13, 9 PM Central (2 AM GMT): Story Hour featuring yours truly and Karl Dandenell. (FB Live and Zoom info at the link above). I’ll be reading a story from All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From.
Thursday, July 14, 7 PM Central (midnight GMT): “The Imagination of Resistance: Community and Solidarity in Speculative Fiction” panel discussion at the 1455 Festival of Storytelling. Featuring me, Craig Laurance Gidney, RB Lemberg, Victor Manibo, and dave ring. Info about attending the festival is as the link above.
Thursday, July 21, 7 PM Central (midnight GMT): The wonderful Argo bookshop is presenting an evening of reading and discussion. I’ll be appearing alongside my dear friends (and Clarion West 2017 classmates) Andrea Chapela, Elly Bangs, Iori Kusano, Gordon B White, and Emma Törzs.
Andrea is hosting the event, Emma is moderating the Q&A, and we’ll be reading from each other’s work! Come hear us share some of our favorite works and genuinely just love on one another! Register via EventBrite.
Tuesday, July 26, 5 PM Central (10 PM GMT): “That Classic You Always Meant To Read.” I’ll be co-facilitating with the brilliant Alexandra Manglis a discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. You can register for free here, though registration is limited to those participating in Clarion West’s write-a-thon. Registration for the write-a-thon is free and available here.
Wednesday, July 27, 6 PM Central (11 PM GMT): I’ll be appearing on Neon Hemlock Live! I’ll read something and try not to be too obvious about how bad I am at using Instagram’s video features.
Tuesday, AUGUST 23, 7 PM Central:[Note the new date!] I’ll be appearing live and in-person at The Raven bookstore in Lawrence, KS. The Raven’s been my beloved local bookstore for many years, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that they’re hosting the in-person release celebration for All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From!
That’s a lot of events with a lot of awesome people. I hope to see you there!
In 2021 I published four stories, all of which I’m quite proud of. They’re listed here in the order they were published. I’d be honored if you’d read any or all of them.
There is no avoiding it: your story will end with you dead at the feet of a god. Your divinations have told you this. There is no ambiguity. The portents float at the edge of your vision, haunt your dreams, shake themselves free with each throwing of the bones.
A few seasons is long enough to pull apart our roads, a few lifetimes to erase most signs of our passing, and if birds are still singing elsewhere, maybe the ravens will remember us and tell our stories, laughing at all we had and couldn’t keep…
“I was part of the Free Zone downtown,” she tells him at last. “Kam swore we could hold the cops off if we stuck together, but they tore through our wards, bashed in the walls—and I fled. When my family needed me most, I ran.” She has never told anyone this. The words twist in her. Bile rises in her throat.
Death takes much and in return it offers Susan P— only clarity. She finds herself in a great gray desert and knows her life has ended. Clad in a royal dress, she carries a bow and quiver, and a finely-carved ivory horn dangles from her throat. A tremor of fear shakes her. She’s not possessed such things in many years. Has she returned to His world?
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues.”
I’ll start with an admission: I sometimes wish I could write happy, feel-good stories. But that’s not my temperament, and the world seems to have taken from me whatever small gift I had for such tales. So instead I write about how bad things can be, and about how we can press on anyway.
Things are bleak, and almost certain to get much worse. But nihilism and despair serve the interests of the worst people, so in my writing I try to be face the truth without being consumed by it.
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All of which is to say, my newest story isn’t as grim as its title might suggest. “This Shattered Vessel, Which Holds Only Grief” is a deeply personal story for me, with origins in my obsessions with memory, community, and anarchism and anti-authoritarianism. It’s also shaped by my attempts to deal with the trauma of the Trump administration, the capture of democratic institutions by fascists, and the pandemic.
It also owes a massive debt to Andrea Martinez Corbin, whose gorgeous story “Raise the Dead Cobbler” is a direct influence on “Shattered Vessel.” Seriously, you should read it. It’s great. Andrea was kind enough to let me borrow her “Witch of _____” framework, and after several years, I finally found a story where my own witches were needed.
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I hope you like my story. But more than that, I hope it marks a small contribution to an essential conversation.
We can’t avoid suffering. But may survive. We may triumph. And whatever comes, we’ll need each other.
