Understanding Your Characters...

This post is tailored specifically to those who are developing characters in historical fiction, but is, I believe, applicable to the craft of understanding your characters in general.  It also builds on some previous posts I have done about women in the revolutionary war.

You can read the earlier posts (I hope you do!) about Molly Pitcher(s) and their role not only during the war (camp followers) but after the war (loyal wives, in-the-moment-soldiers).  Given how these women are celebrated, as I noted earlier, it is not surprising that Deborah Sampson was given little attention for many decades:  she didn't fit neatly into the women-who-followed-her-husband-into-combat mold that felt "safe" to 19th century readers and writers.

When I began the research for my first novel, Revolutionary, I wanted to look at as wide a range of sources as I could on Deborah.  The earliest material is filtered through her biographer, Herman Mann and the later material is filtered through the biases and predispositions of the era in which they were written.

So here's the first part of the craft lesson for writers of historical fiction: make sure you look at your "real life" characters not just from one historical vantage point.  Get the fullest picture of them that you can by considering how they were written about by their contemporaries, by their children, by their friends, by their rivals, and by later writers.  It is poor history (and poor historical fiction) to rely only on one source or from sources all from the same era (even if it is "eye-witness").

For Deborah, two visual images will suffice to prove my point.  Here they are:

Both are early-mid 19th century depictions of Deborah Sampson that accompanied pamphlets or short writings on her. In both she is in uniform and with a weapon (or two!).  But, as those who read the earlier blogposts might note... she is also posed near a cannon.  It is not impossible that Deborah might have been near cannons in her service.  Certainly, she was at sites that would have had them.  But it is quite hard to argue that she used cannons at all.  Cannons were for pitched battle and Deborah was involved in small skirmishes only.  (Granted, she did claim to have been at Yorktown, or Mann placed her there, or both, but this is not true.)

So, when I was researching her character, I asked myself: why is she depicted this way?  What is being said about her?  I believe that both artists are making a subtle nod to the Molly Pitcher(s) legends.  By putting Deborah near a cannon, they are indicating to the viewer that this is a woman on the battlefield.  It is somewhat comforting -- suggesting that she served in the familiar and acceptable manner -- to have her depicted thus.  Much more comforting than Deborah just waving a sword or holding a gun, I'd argue.

To leave my particular case and look at craft in general, what I'd suggest is this.  Read (and look) widely as you explore your historical character.  Chip away at bias.  Consider how your character has shifted and been reinvented over the course of history.  And then...

Take good stock of how you wish to depict your character.  Realize that you are situated on this continuum that you have just explored.  Your depiction will be no less biased, no less a product of your own time and expectations (and this, I would argue is true for fictional characters that aren't historical) than any other.  It is better to be upfront and aware of your bias though.

In my own case, I knew that being transgender, I would come to Deborah's story from a particular angle.  Likewise, writing with a 21st-century understanding of gender and women's rights, I would also be biased against certain depictions of her and want to show her actions as reasonable and even virtuous -- quite the opposite of how many of her contemporaries saw her and wrote about her.

In order to fully understand, fully develop, and fully realize your characters, you need to understand your own perspective on that character!

Let me know what you think... Leave a Comment!

Review of If You Could Be Mine

Normally, I keep my reading commentary confined to the "What I'm Reading Now" section of my blog (see the tabs above).  But I just finished If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, and as I got my hands on an advance reading copy (thanks to my wonderful agent!) and as the themes of this novel are close to my heart, I thought I would give it a longer post.

A short synopsis... due to hit shelves on August 20th, this Young Adult novel takes place in modern day Iran.  Narrated by Sahar, a young woman in her senior year of high school, it tells the story of her love for her best friend, Nasrin, and her struggles with this love both in the context of Iranian society generally and also in the context of Nasrin's upcoming marriage.

This is the debut novel of Sara Farizan, and she has done a fantastic job with pacing.  The story moves quickly yet clearly, with the tension heightening in every scene.  I wouldn't call her prose sparse, but she has kept the details to a minimum, jettisoning anything extra, and the result is a stream-lined and compelling story.

Most captivating for me was the setting in Iran.  Apart from headlines in the news and Persepolis, I don't know much about the country or culture.  Farizan uses little phrases of Farsi to create an ambiance, refers to clothing and food in a way that further develops the context, and drops in delightful little details such as the way that the narrator sees the two Khomeinis (angry grandpa and disappointed grandpa) whose images appear everywhere.  

Even more, the setting in modern-day Iran was compelling to me because of the LGBT angle of the book.  These two young women are in love -- they know this and acknowledge it to each other. (Thank goodness, by the way, that this wasn't another novel about a young LGBT person in love with a straight person... I feel like I have read too many of those!)  But their love has to be hidden because it is illegal.  Farizan makes the danger present but not exaggerated. She mentions that young men have been hanged for being in relationships, but she also shows the underground culture of cafes and scenes where LGBT people are relatively open and accepted.  

Once Nasrin is engaged, Sahar is desperate to find a way to stop the marriage and keep Nasrin for herself.  The middle stanza of the book is devoted to her pursuit of sexual reassignment surgery: she wants to become a man so that she can marry Nasrin.  And here's where the cultural context bowled me over.  In Iran (I'm assuming Farizan is portraying this accurately...) sexual reassignment is permitted, even paid for by the government, because it is considered an illness with a cure.  In fact, the implication seems to be that reassignment cures homosexuality.  The novel makes it clear that just because the government sanctions the surgery, it doesn't mean that post-op transsexuals have an easy life.  They face rejection by families and friends and have to keep their past hidden.  But they have a greater veneer of legitimacy than do gays and lesbians.

If I had to lodge one complaint about this novel, it would be that the narrator, Sahar, who otherwise is plausibly intelligent and thoughtful, rushes into the idea of sexual reassignment with a completely unbelievable amount of naivety, ignorance, and lack of forethought.  Even though she is desperate to keep Nasrin, I just couldn't buy that she would actually believe that she could transition in a short window (one month) and that Nasrin (and Nasrin's parents) would accept her after the transition.

But that is one small point.  Otherwise, I was delighted with this novel.  In particular, I want to praise it for the way in which it explains (implicitly) the difference between sexuality and gender.  Farizan illustrates this difficult nuance artfully and compellingly.  This is a great novel to share with a younger reader (6-9 grade?) and open up conversation about LGBT issues as well as human rights in other cultures.

Transgender Authors -- Identity and Writing

A good friend sent me this link to Lamba Literary, which features a discussion with the directors of a small press that has put out a collection of transgender fiction.

The interview hits on many fascinating subjects, including the directors/editors' desire not to include pictures of trans-people in the anthology to avoid fixation on "the body." There is so much of that -- interest in and pressure about passing and surgery.  The connection between "what you have" and "who you are" is so pervasive, both in and out of the trans community.

But, for me, the more interesting section of the conversation came a little over halfway down the page, when they discussed the sort of submissions they had received for the collection.  The answer: too many "suicide narratives and thinly veiled autobiography."

This made me harken back to a conversation I had with a trans-friend many years ago; we were discussing movies and books that had transgender main characters, and we both articulated the feeling that, while novels and movies and tv shows could now have characters who were gay without their being gay taking the central story line, that was not true of trans-folk.  If a character was transgender... that WAS the story.

So, this conversation amongst the Topside editors made the claim that trans writers need to learn how to tell their stories -- "there are no archetypes or narratives constructed for trans-people."  Agreed.  Kind of.  I do heartily agree with the notion that trans-writers need to try out form and content beyond the "coming out" and "oppression" sorts of narratives.  But I also think that archetypes and (grand) narratives are exactly that: they fit everyone.  There's the old fiction writing saw about how only two storylines exist: a stranger comes to town and someone leaves town.  Or something like that.  What's the matter with that applying to trans-folk, too?

Further down, the distinction is made between writing about "who trans people are... and what trans people are thinking."  This, to me, is much more important, a real call to action.  Transgender fiction must be beyond identity, beyond the body... and into the realm of desire, motive, idea.   But I'd argue that's just what GOOD fiction should be about.

Reflections on Giving a Talk on Transgender Identity to Teens

Yesterday I traveled up to my alma mater, Phillips Exeter, to give a talk to a group of students about transgender identity.  It was a sort of "Transgender 101," using my life story as a way to introduce them to concepts around gender.  I have to say that I love giving these talks -- I feel that it really makes a difference in creating understanding and tolerance.  Also, I love the questions that I get and how thought-provoking they can be.

There were many great questions yesterday, but the one that I've been thinking about since then is one that I get most times that I give a talk (whatever the composition of the audience) and that is: do you consider yourself straight?  

I usually give the same answer I give to "which sex box (M or F) do you check?"  which is: given the options,  I go for straight (or M).  But... I wish it were a fill in the blank sort of question.  And in that case, I'd go for Queer.  The students last night pressed me on this (and I'm glad they did).  

To start with, I gave them my premise that sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, etc.) depends upon gender identity.  That is, you can't be a lesbian (a woman attracted to women) without first knowing you are a woman.  So, in my case, with a gender identity of transgender (again, given the fill in the blank option), no sexual orientation fits easily.  It looks straight, but it's really bent.  

I'm not sure that I convinced my audience (or explained it as well as I ought to have), so I find myself still pondering over how to tackle this question the next time it comes up.  And also wondering if there are other (better?) words out there than queer.  I'll keep searching...

Transgender Teens and Sports

Today's New York Times article on transgender teens (Here) really grabbed me.  I've written on a lot of different aspects of transgender identity, mostly in nonfiction, but also in fiction, and this isn't one I've grappled with fully.

The article's gist is this: when high school students transition from one gender to the next (whatever the "direction" or end destination), it is often difficult to figure out which team that person should play on.  The catalyzing agent in this article seems to be the number of legislative initiatives cropping up to support the rights of transgender students to play sports in their reassigned gender.  

What amused me, in a dark way, about the article is that the critics from the conservative side make verbatim the same arguments that were used 17 years ago when I came out as transgender and were used 35 years ago when Renee Richards came out.  I find it baffling that anyone would think that a person would transition from one gender to another merely to get a competitive advantage (unless there are field hockey teams full of MtFs of which I'm unaware).  So unlikely for so many reasons... given the social stigma still attached to being transgender weighs much heavier than any possible advantage one could gain (professional avenues for female athletes being limited).  

I found it heartening that many states and sports governing bodies have policy on this matter -- clear cut standards about who can play on which teams after how many years of hormones or how much reassignment surgery.

Like many issues within the transgender world, this one is of greater concern for MtFs than FtMs (given that someone born biologically male would have greater natural strength and therefore athletic advantage).  However, the article gives a little airtime to FtM athletes as well, capturing with one short vignette how hard it can be for a sporty FtM to give up athletic competition.

It was for me.  I was a three sport athlete in high school and serious about two of them, ice hockey and lacrosse.  I loved to play sports - I loved to run and lift weights and be on a team.  I even loved to play pick-up games in sports I was lousy at like basketball or softball.  When I started living as a man, I felt I had to give up sports.  Briefly -- and with great personal conflict -- I skated for a season on the Harvard womens' ice hockey team.  It is a long story, and perhaps one I'll fully explore in an essay... but the NYT article brought up that sense of loss I felt.  Being an athlete had been a huge part of my identity, and I lost that when I came out.

Once I started taking hormones, years after college, I did start competing again, in running races and triathlons.  I competed against biological men and -- though certainly no superstar -- held my own.  Often placing in the top 5 or 10 in my age group.  It fills some of the gap.  I take heart from the article that, maybe, this generation of trans-folk won't have to cede their spot on a team.

Essay up at The Rumpus!

I'm thrilled that The Rumpus has published my essay "Multiplicity."  Check it out HERE.

To give an overview -- I've been married to the same woman for ten years, but in that time, we've had to get married to each other three times as laws around same sex marriage have changed, as we've moved from state to state, and as my own gender status has changed.  I hope you find it to be an interesting chronicle of this odyssey.

Reflections on Jason Collins Coming Out

The recent news that NBA Free Agent Jason Collins came out has me thinking.  I’m not a basketball fan – I don’t follow the NBA – but the news of this athlete coming out as gay (I read about it in the Sports Illustrated article here) struck me as a significant, almost seismic, shift.

Perhaps it struck me in such a way because I recently heard a presentation (see earlier posts, this was when I was speaking up at Phillips Exeter – the other keynote speaker was Ritch Savin Williams) that discussed the changing perception of gay identity.  Part of Savin-Williams’ presentation was looking at public figures who had come out.  He mentioned the huge impact of the WNBA player Sheryl Swoopes’ coming out as lesbian and remarked that, though retired male professional athletes had come out, no active players had.

Subsequent to hearing Savin-Williams speak, my own school had a diversity day on which I taught a workshop having to do with how different generations perceive gay identity.  Taking a historical perspective, I showed some clips of “Boys Beware” and then went through Time Magazine covers and other seminal images to illustrate to the students how gay people had been presented in the media and what this reflected about mainstream’s society’s understanding of gay identity as well as how it might have influenced their grandparents' and parents' perception of gays.

It was a lively conversation, and I was impressed by the number of openly gay celebrities the students came up with.  Singers, news personalities, actors, authors... I thought of how earth-shattering Ellen Degeneres’ coming out was for me – how it was the first time that I could think of that someone had come out and that person’s career not only hadn’t ended but indeed had improved.  But the students did agree that no current professional male athlete in a big market, mainstream American sport had come out as gay.  They were divided as to whether this would “matter,” but many thought it would.

And now, Jason Collins has filled in this missing gap.  When I heard about it (first on NPR and then reading more fully in the Sports Illustrated piece), I instantly felt: big news!  But why?  Plenty of people are out already.  Why do I feel this one is a game-changer?  Well, first there’s the honest forthrightness of his story.  With so much press given to those who come out earlier and earlier in life, it is striking that he didn’t come out (to others and even, it seems, to himself) until his thirties.

This makes me pause and think: as wrapped up as the GLBT movement has become in the notion of marriage equality and the forward push on that, we need to keep spending time on the core messages of self-acceptance, of handling feelings of self-loathing and denial, not to mention the cultural acceptance of GLBT identity.  Gay marriage is for those who have already arrived and passed through these trials, and by focusing on marriage equality, we can’t deceive ourselves into thinking that the basic issues have been resolved.

Second, it matters because male sports teams, professional ones in particular, remain a bastion of “straightness” – for wont of a better word.  The longer it continues without anyone being out and being in the locker room, the more it perpetuates stereotypes (that gay men aren’t athletic) and the more it permits intolerant cultures to persist (witness the recent Rutgers coach who was fired for his homophobic rant )  The moment that athletes realize that there might be or are in fact gay men on their team, is the moment when it is most likely attitudes and behaviors will shift. 

In the next few weeks and months, I’ll be interested to see the ripple effects of Collins’s declarations.  He is brave – personally and professionally – to come out.  Likely, there will be many people who say “it doesn’t matter” but I suspect there will be many (and perhaps they won’t say it) for whom it will matter a great deal.

One more post on Transgender in Print...

So, after the last three posts (comparing two New Yorker articles, one from 1994 and one from 2013, on transgender identity/individuals) I kept thinking: that's a large time span.  I started hunting around for something squarely in the middle (2001-2004) and didn't find anything I liked too much (feel free to correct me if you know of a good one).  Instead, I went back to the interviews I gave in the late 90s about my own take on trans-identity.  One is from the Baltimore Sun ( and one from the Washington Post (preview, full available for purchase) both published in 1997.

Rereading these two articles, I see in them the dominant notion that why I was interesting was that I was providing a new line under the transgender identity: the no surgery, no hormones line.  In 1994, the idea of FtMs was new and exciting (MtFs being more familiar for a variety of reasons).  In 2013, the idea of transitions (of a variety of types) earlier in life was of interest.  In the articles written about me in 1997, what appeared to fascinate the journalists was the way in which I insisted gender and sex were not the same thing. As Paula Span, in the Washington Post article captured it: gender is a feeling, a decision.

This line rubbed me the wrong way then... and it still does now.  It comes with the suggestion, for me, of "choice" and agency and also a certain lightness "nothing more than" a feeling. Yet, I do think that gender is not biology (and therefore not sex) and does come from feelings.  Of course, then, from those feelings come actions and performances and enactments and everything else.  And it might be a decision to stop hiding and live this way... but it's not a decision to feel this way in the first place.

I give Span full credit for putting together the assertion that gender is a "mutable social construct" (Ah, the 90s).  I prefer that so much to the biology as destiny implications of the surgically oriented 1994 article.  Reading through both this article and the one from the Baltimore Sun, I can assess now that both reporters found me to be asking for a lot: to remain female and be treated as a man.  To insist that biology didn't matter.  To them, I was a contradiction asking to be treated as a single fact.

Much has changed in my life since those 1997 articles.  Most salient to the issue is that I have been taking hormones for many years now.  Before rereading what had been written about me, I approached with some trepidation: would my 1997-self bash those taking hormones, call them sellouts, insist that one didn't need them to be a man?  Would my past self be disappointed in my present self?  

I am humored to see how closely I walk that line, how I assert that I was happy the way I was and didn't need to change my body.  How I maintain that I didn't need hormones (or surgery) to live successfully as a man.  I am even happier to read the end of Span's article, where she recounts my declaration that I insist upon a caveat -- I don't need hormones now, but I might want them in the future.  "I'm famous for changing my mind," she quotes me as saying.  Yes, yes indeed.  I think I anticipated my future self pretty well.

Part Three: the 2013 article

This section completes my reflections comparing two New Yorker articles on trans-identity, one from 1994 (before I came out; an article that lingered in my memory) and one from 2013.  I hope you enjoy.  As always, leave a comment -- I'd love to hear about other influential articles on this topic.

Okay.  Jump ahead to 2013.  (I know, I’m skipping over a lot.  Maybe, in my copious free time and if anyone expresses an interest in it, I will go ahead and find some articles from the middle years.)  Talbot’s article “About a Boy” also leads with a picture: a soft-colored, brushed-feeling, photo of a teen boy (think early Justin Beiber) looking away from the camera.

The shift in tone and terminology is incredible.  In one sentence, Talbot waves away the entire premise of the 1994 article saying that FtMs have “rarely sought surgery” in the past, then adding that Skylar, the subject of the article, has had top surgery.  In the following pages, surgery gets a few short mentions, a paragraph or two of description (no “pulsing hot dogs”), but is largely relegated to the margins as too expensive or impractical, with the subtext that it is regarded as unnecessary by many FtMs.

What is at the center of this 2013 article is that gender is wide-open.  The 1994 article had one line in which gender was described as a spectrum, as fluid (noting that this idea tended to make people uncomfortable).  The 2013 article celebrates this. Gone is the notion that transsexual means surgery or even a definitive moment of change.  Instead, the article is full of interviews and conversations celebrating gender as way of being and expressing, as a lived experience – it is not clinical, it is not fully biological.  Rather, it is about self and comfort and finding the right place to inhabit.

If the 1994 article alienated me (then and now), the 2013 article made feel old.  Talk of FtMs as wanting surgery and male genitalia produced the “not me!” response.  Talk of gender role exploration and puberty suppressors produced a “kids these days!” feeling.  As usual, I’m somewhere in between.  Hormones, yes; surgery, no.  The idea of being this or that… and only this or that, leaves me uncomfortable.  But so does the idea of being neither/nor.  Of course, I accept both.  I accept that gender has two end-points; I accept that gender is fluid spectrum; I accept that someone might find themselves anywhere; that that anywhere might change on a given day. 

Mostly, though, I am grateful that this discussion and exploration continues and that it is something that can be written and spoken about.  That 1994 article hit me hard: it was the first response from a universe that had, as I saw it, denied me a vocabulary.  Now, it is rare for me to use the word “transgender” and find someone unfamiliar with the term.  For all the common usage, though, I am no more certain of what it means for me, let alone for someone else.

Part Two: Revisiting an Article from 1994...

(This continues yesterday's post, in which I reflect on two New Yorker articles on trans-identity: one from 1994 and one from 2013.)

Having downloaded the 1994 article – The New Yorker’s online archives for subscribers are amazing! – I felt an immediate kinship.  There was the photograph.  Loren Cameron (back in 1997, I got him to come and speak at Harvard when I was a student there; I don’t know if I ever connected him with the article until now) and James Green, staring at themselves in the mirror.  It’s a strange picture.  It is black and white, and stark feeling.  Cameron’s side is to the camera; Green’s real (non-reflected) body isn’t visible, but their mirror images put their faces in view.  It’s oddly suggestive of not wanting to be seen, yet wanting to see oneself. 

I felt the same reaction now I felt nineteen years ago: they look like men.  And, smaller, that flip of jealousy: I want to look like that. 

But, reading through, I discovered I had largely forgotten the content of the article.  Indeed, all I remembered closely was the detailed and graphic description of a phalloplasty (including the phrase “pulsing hot dog” of flesh).  The article is so biological, so oriented on surgery, on sex as physical, as transsexual as a series of actions to complete a transformation. 

The start of the piece is the only place where gender is explored and where interviewed FtMs say things that I might have then (and do now) found resonant.  Things like the fact that they never felt comfortable with coming out as lesbian; that they had always felt misunderstood and unable to communicate exactly why.  But much of it, I think, distanced me back then from the idea of transsexual (the article doesn’t use the term transgender) identity.  In 1994, at 16, I think hormones and surgery seemed unrealistic, scary, a huge and unimaginable leap.  I liked that image at the start: the two men gazing at themselves, as if in awe of their own bodies, the realization that they had been women.  I just didn’t want to go through everything the article described.

Indeed, it wasn’t until I met transgender people who weren’t taking hormones and who hadn’t had surgery, yet were living as the other gender that I came out.  For me, it has always been about gender rather than about sex – a distinction buried by the 1994 article.  And that’s what I take away from this piece and the topic of terminology.  There it is: the term is transsexual.  Sex.  Body.  Biology.  The change.  That was the description and depiction of the identity back in the mid-90s.

FtM Across Nineteen Years (almost) Part One...

Lately, many forces in my life have been conspiring to make me think about transgender issues.  The fiction and nonfiction I've been writing... the speaking engagement I recently had... workshops at school that I've been asked to teach... I haven't done this much thinking and writing and speaking on transgender issues since my first year in college.  

When I spoke at Phillips Exeter last weekend, the other speaker was Ritch Savin-Williams, and he gave a great talk, part of which concerned the changes in gay (and lesbian) identity over time. (Check out his website here.)  He looked at terminology, perception, and self-definition.  All of that got me thinking about the same question for transgender identity.  

I can pretty much count on getting the following question when I speak: How'd you know you were transgender?  The answer I'd like to give is an obnoxious one: It wasn't knowing so much as being.  What I really say is: I knew my whole life in the sense that it was something I felt.  Sometimes a negative feeling (I know I'm not a girl) and sometimes a positive feeling (usually when someone mistook me for a boy).  But I didn't know I was transgender -- in a sense anyway -- until I had the word to go with it.  And that wasn't until high school.

At this moment, I haven't looked at the particulars of when the term transgender arose and how it was minted and so on.  But in my own personal cosmos, I remember hearing the term used by a health teacher at school (also the advisor of the Gay-Straight Alliance) and then, soon after, coming across the article "The Body Lies" by Amy Bloom in The New Yorker (July 18, 1994).  Until today, it had been nineteen years since I’d seen (or thought of, really) that article (link to the magazine's homepage here -- if you want to access the article, you need to subscribe, I believe).  What I recalled: a photograph of two transgender men, looking at themselves in the mirror.  What else?  The pure excitement, hands-shaking-as-I-turned-the-pages excitement, of thinking… Oh. My. God. This is what I am. 

It was almost exactly a year later that I came out as transgender. 

All of this came to mind in a rush as I left the speaking gig at Exeter this past weekend.  The strangeness of the terminology in the article, the fear and excitement of the word and what it seemed to suggest and allow.  And then I thought of a more recent New Yorker article, one from the March 18, 2013 edition: Margaret Talbot’s “About a Boy.”

I wondered what putting them side-by-side would say about the changes in transgender identity, specifically FtM identity.  Selfishly, I wondered what the comparison might say about me, if it would shed any particular light.

So... I'll continue this topic tomorrow, ruminating on the articles closely.

Gender and Spirituality

I posted the final essay in my nonfiction section... it is, oddly enough, the one I wrote the longest ago (all the way back in 2002) and concerns the interplay between faith and gender in my life. Check it out via the link above. With that section of my blog wrapped up, I will move on to writing more about the process of creating my first novel, finding an agent for it, and then getting it published. So look for those posts to start soon! As always... comments are welcome!

Learning Italian...

I've added another essay -- this one published back in late 2008 -- from my Harvard years.  Involving my wonderful Italian teacher, Gloria, who figures into some of my favorite stories from freshman year, the essay looks at trying to measure up to the standard expectations of masculinity.  It was originally published in Flashquake, republished in HBOMB (thanks to a former student of mine from when I taught in Naples, Florida), and I have made a copy available here on the site.  Check it out via the nonfiction link above... and let me know what you think!

Contra Dancing

Continuing with my project of posting and writing comments on my previously published nonfiction, I added a new essay.  This one, "Circle Square," first appeared in 13th Warrior Review in 2008.  It reflects on a contra dance group that I participated in during college (and a little reflection on junior high school as well) and how that all comments on gender.  Check it out via the tab above...I hope you enjoy it. And if anyone knows of a good contra dance happening in my area, let me know!

Trans in Wyoming

I've added another piece to my nonfiction archive... this one's about a summer I spent in Wyoming (or at least the start of that summer).  It was, though the essay doesn't reveal this facet, a truly wonderful three months that I stayed out there.  Again, the essay concerns being transgender and especially wrestling with being closeted, being safe, and also being true to self.  Hope you enjoy... and, in the spirit of previous posts, I dug up this photo of me (later in the summer) in Wyoming.  Note: that is snow behind me, even though the picture was taken late June/early July.  Check out the essay (published originally in Conte in 2008) via the tab above.  Let me know what you think!

Elvis...In the Nonfiction Section

I've posted another essay published a while back (2008) and added some musing about transgender identity. To pique your interest, I dredged up some photos to share. First, here I am in the role I write about... Conrad Birdie!

That's me on the right -- I'm eleven.  You can read the essay by following the "Nonfiction" tab above.

And, just because I found it and thought it made good contrast, here I am on the same stage (the one not playing the upright bass, in case you're in doubt), about three years later.  Now, in which photo am I in drag?

New Nonfiction Section

For the time being at least, I've wrapped up my posting in the research area of this site.  (I feel pretty confident I'll go back there for one last set of reflections... but not yet!).  So, on to the next stage.  I've started a new page about my nonfiction publications.  Most of these essays have to do with transgender identity, and I thought I would blog a bit about either the content of the essay or the process of composition or related aspects of gender identity.

I just posted the first entry -- it is on one of my very first published pieces: "Back of the Band," which appeared in Word Riot.  Check it out!  I've included a link to the piece as well as an alternate version and my musings on the subject of tubas and transgender.

"This I Believe Archive"

If you missed the live version today, you can listen to my "This I Believe" segment by following this link:

Identity Archived

Tomorrow 8/1... on Rhode Island National Public Radio... you can tune in to hear me read my essay on "This I Believe."  It should air twice in the morning and once in the evening.  I'll post the link once it has been archived.  For those not in the Rhode Island area, you can stream the station live:  http://www.ripr.org/
Enjoy!