Helen H. Wu is a children’s book author and illustrator, as well as a translator and publisher. She is the author of Tofu Takes Time, illustrated by Julie Jarema (Beaming Books, 2022) and Long Goes To Dragon School, illustrated by Mae Besom (Yeehoo Press, 2023). Helen is the Publisher of Yeehoo Press, an independent children’s book publisher based in San Diego, California. Being fascinated by the differences and similarities between cultures, Helen loves to share stories that empower children to understand the world and our connections. Born and raised in Hefei, China, Helen moved to the US in her 20s. Currently, she resides in sunny Southern California, with her family and two kids. You can follow Helen on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
I had the opportunity to interview Helen, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Thank you so much, Michele for having me!
I’m a children’s book author, illustrator, translator and publisher. My books include Tofu Takes Time, illustrated by Julie Jarema (Beaming Books, 2022) and Long Goes To Dragon School, illustrated by Mae Besom (Yeehoo Press, 2023). I’m the Publisher of Yeehoo Press, an independent children’s book publisher based in San Diego, California. Fascinated by the differences and similarities between cultures, I love to share stories that empower children to understand the world and our connections..
What can you tell us about your latest book, Long Goes to Dragon School? Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
My new picture book, Long Goes to Dragon School, was inspired by my own experience as a minority immigrant student. It follows a Chinese dragon who struggles to breathe fire in his new Western dragon school, only to discover he must carve his own path to finding a sense of belonging. In this story, Long’s name is based on the Chinese word for dragon, “龙(lóng).” Like in Western culture, dragons are intricately intertwined with Chinese culture. However, Chinese dragons do not typically breathe fire. Instead, they are known as water spirits. I have always been fascinated by the differences and similarities between cultures. And living in America, I’ve realized that everyone is different and that learning from others helps you discover your own talents, while still allowing you to find your own path.
As a first-generation immigrant, I’ve felt impostor syndrome ever since—including throughout my journey as an author. But here’s the good news: while I don’t think these thoughts will ever go away completely, I’ve learned to control them. In fact, I’ve learned to let them motivate me to think outside the box and find my own unique path in writing and publishing.
I managed to use those feelings of insecurity to motivate myself to keep learning, keep going, and seizing every opportunity that came my way. A few years ago, I was invited to talk about publishing and my stories on a podcast. I was so nervous and my English wasn’t as fluent as I wanted it to be, and unfortunately, the recorded podcast wasn’t aired. Despite feeling discouraged, I also realized that I had taken a brave step by accepting the opportunity to be on the podcast. This experience pushed me forward and taught me to embrace every small success. I learned that taking even a small step forward is a significant achievement and should be celebrated.
So eventually, I embraced my multicultural identity and began to tell stories that were not only personal to me but also unique and universal.
I identified with Long’s story because I could relate to feeling like an outsider and struggling to find my place. I wanted to write a story that celebrates cultural differences and encourages readers to embrace their individuality.
In Long Goes to Dragon School, Long struggles to fit in with his classmates because he cannot breathe fire like the other dragons. This mirrors my own experience of feeling inadequate because I did not have the same background as my peers. That’s why I wanted to include the theme of growth mindset in this story. Long is a water dragon and he can’t match his fire-breathing classmates. But he keeps practicing and finally manages to turn water into something surprising. By persisting with a growth mindset, he discovers his own unique talents. I’m very honored that this book has received some glowing reviews. “Using a dragon as the main character strengthens the overall message that everyone is different and has unique gifts to share. Besom’s appealing watercolor illustrations wonderfully complement the text, clearly representing the story’s events. From beginning to end, the images will likely enchant youngsters as they get to know Long’s world.” –Kirkus Reviews. “An insightful picture book in which a young dragon with unique abilities struggles to fit in.” –Foreword Reviews. Like Long, I found my own unique path and learned to embrace my differences. I hope readers of all backgrounds will be able to relate to Long’s journey and find inspiration in his perseverance and self-discovery.
How would you describe the process behind this book? How would you describe your general creative process?
I had the opportunity to serve as the editor and be involved in every single step of the process – from text editing, illustration thumbnails, sketches, and coloring, every revision to graphic design. I provided a lot of input into the layout design, cover design, and jacket design. In fact, I even came up with the idea for the poster on the back of the book and designed it myself. Working so closely with the team was an incredible experience, while effort-consuming. I always appreciate the efforts from a publishing house, including the editorial team, design team, marketing and sales team, that goes into making a book possible and ensuring that it is the best it can be.
Chinese dragons are typically visually different from western dragons, with their long snake-like bodies. However, in this book, the focus is not on their physical differences but on their unique inner abilities. To bring each character to life, I designed them with distinct personalities and body shapes, and Mae Besom’s exceptional talent made them even more captivating with her mesmerizing illustrations. Mae’s specialization in drawing cute childlike Chinese dragons, coupled with her mastery of traditional Chinese watercolor art style, added another layer of beauty to the book. When our team pitched the story to Mae, she immediately jumped on board and brought her artistic magic to the project.
Collaborating with Mae Besom is an absolute delight! During the character design phase, she meticulously explored each dragon’s background and personality, and the results were breathtaking! From Camila, the fiery dragon who loves to read, to Willy, the hilarious double-headed dragon who breathes lightning, and to Mia, the fluffy dragon who spews lava – each character had a unique and captivating design that perfectly matched their distinct personalities. Mae’s artistry was truly remarkable, making the characters jump off the page and into our hearts! I’m thrilled that Mae’s talent and passion contributed to the project and that people of all ages can now enjoy the story and its characters.
What are some of your favorite things about picture books?
Children’s picture books have the potential to pass on the joy from generation to generation. Picture books are one of the channels that children can learn about the world when they snuggle on the laps of parents and grandparents. As an art lover, I also find it’s very entertaining and soothing to simply enjoy the artwork of picture books.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet, but wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
Can you briefly speak about the Kickstarter campaign of the Dragon Plushies? What is it like seeing these characters come to life and holding actual merchandise of your book characters?
Children’s picture books have the power to spark joy and curiosity in young minds, and with Long Goes to Dragon School, we wanted to take that experience beyond the pages of the book. That’s why we created these adorable dragon plushies that can bring happiness to not just kids, but also teenagers and adults. Made with super-soft premium plush fabric, these huggable toys are perfect for playtime or as a comforting companion during difficult times.
But that’s not all – we’ve also expanded our product line to include pins, stickers, key chains, and animated gif emojis that can be used on social media. Our hope is that these cute and loveable dragon characters can become more than just book characters, but also everyday companions for people of all ages. And with their heartwarming message of self-discovery and self-love, these plushies and accessories can help spread kindness and compassion in the world.
What advice might you have to give for aspiring creatives, especially picture book creators?
As a creator, I believe in the power of imagination and bringing ideas to life. Pursuing your dreams takes hard work, dedication, and the courage to take risks, whether it’s creating a plushie, writing a book, or starting a business. But the rewards are incredible. When you see your idea come to life and hold the finished product in your hands, it’s a feeling of accomplishment that is priceless. That’s what motivates me to keep creating.
As I create, I’m inspired by the endless potential of what could be. I hope to inspire others to take that first step towards their own dreams, to believe in themselves, and to take that leap of faith towards something they love. Remember, the world needs your unique ideas and creativity. Anything is possible if you believe in yourself and put in the effort to make it happen.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
Currently, I am working on expanding the product lines of plushies, pins, and keychains, as well as developing a few other picture books that showcase Chinese culture. Stay tuned for more updates!
Finally, what books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Wes Molebash is the creator of several popular webcomics, most notably You’ll Have That (Viper Comics) and Molebashed (self-published). He has also created cartoons for companies and organizations such as the Ohio State University, Target, and PBS Kids. Travis Daventhorpe for the Win! is his debut graphic novel.
I had the opportunity to interview Wes, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT. Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Thanks for inviting me to participate! I’m honored! My name is Wes Molebash, and I’m a cartoonist in Southern Ohio. I’ve been drawing comics for a couple of decades now; mostly webcomics, but I’ve recently published my first graphic novel!
What can you tell us about your debut graphic novel, Travis Daventhorpe for the Win!? Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
Travis Daventhorpe for the Win! is my first graphic novel, and it came out at the end of March from 01:First Second Books. It’s the first in a four-book series. The story follows a socially awkward eleven-year-old who discovers he’s the prophesied hero of a kingdom in another dimension. The book has robots, wizards, magic, dinosaurs, and tons of video game references. It’s a lot of fun!
The biggest inspirations for the series are my two sons, Parker and Connor. When they were really little, I started brainstorming ideas for a story I thought they’d enjoy. The initial idea for Travis Daventhorpe popped in my head while I was playing with them on the living room floor one afternoon.
How did you find yourself getting into storytelling, particularly comics? What drew you to the medium?
Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved cartoons and animation. Newspaper comics were also fun to read, but I didn’t fall in love with the medium of comics until I discovered Calvin and Hobbes. That changed everything. It inspired me to learn everything I could about making comics.
During middle school, I began collecting comic books like Batman and Superman. They were fun, but I didn’t love them the way I loved Calvin and Hobbes. But then I found Bone by Jeff Smith, and that book was another game changer. It had the heart, imagination, and visuals of a comic like Calvin and Hobbes, but it was in this much larger comic book format. So the worlds could be bigger; it felt like there was more to explore. I loved that, and I wanted to make comics like that.
As a creative, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration?
Well, as I said before, Bill Watterson and Jeff Smith are the BIG TWO. But I’m also inspired/influenced by other cartoonists like Mike Cavallaro, James Burks, and Michael Jantze. Movies, books, and video games are also huge influences. Speaking of video games, Travis Daventhorpe was heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn. So if you like those games, you’ll probably find some nods to those series in my books.
Besides your work as a creative, what are some things you would want readers to know about you?
I was the 3rd Grade Spelling Bee Champion, I was class president my junior year of high school, and I can play the guitar.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but wish you were (and the answer to that question)?
No one has ever asked me who I would want to voice Belazar if Travis Daventhorpe for the Win! was made into an animated movie. The answer is Andre Braugher from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Are there any projects you are working on or thinking about that you are able to discuss?
Right now we’re wrapping up the edits on Travis Daventhorpe Book 2, and I’ve started writing Book 3!
Finally, what books/comics would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Kika Hatzopoulou writes stories for all ages, filled with lore and whimsy. She holds an MFA for writing for children from the New School and works in foreign publishing. She currently splits her time between London and her native Greece, where she enjoys urban quests and gastronomical adventures while narrating entire book and movie plots with her partner. Find Kika on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok @kikahatzopoulou.
I had the opportunity to interview Kika, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m so excited to be here! I’m Kika, a native Greek who’s been writing in English since childhood. I completed my MFA in Writing for Children at the New School in New York and have held teaching and publishing positions in the past. I love all things fantastical, both as a writer and as a reader!
What can you tell us about your debut book, Threads That Bind? What was the inspiration for this story?
Threads That Bind is my debut YA fantasy noir, the first in a duology that comes out from Razorbill in May 2023. It’s a twisty story about a detective with the powers of the Greek Fates that is charged with solving a series of otherworldly murders while navigating a soulmate romance and her complicated family dynamics. The story came together by combining a lot of the things I love: Greek myth, especially side characters such as the Fates, the Furies, and the Muses, noir settings, murder mysteries, post-(climate)-apocalyptic scenarios!
With many novels inspired by Greek mythology, there’s often a sense of these stories lacking original cultural context, i.e. relating back to real-life Greece or Greek culture. As an author of Greek descent, what does it mean to you writing a novel like this?
It truly means a lot. Back when I was first querying this story to agents in 2019-2020, I often got the feedback that Greek-inspired fantasy is oversaturated or that my particular mix of Greek myth and noir would be a hard sell. The feedback discouraged me at the time, particularly as a Greek writing about their own culture, and because so many of the books referenced in the rejections were retellings written by non-Greeks and set in antiquity – which is vastly different to the Greece of today. Modern Greece is an amalgamation of cultures with a rich recent history of wars, immigration, and political upheavals. In Threads That Bind, I attempted to pull this modernity into the story and form a world that reflects our own. I feared such a weird combination of Greek myth, noir plot, and contemporary setting wouldn’t resonate with readers, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by early reactions that praise these very same elements!
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically speculative fiction, and young adult fiction?
I love creating and exploring new worlds – it’s one of my favorite parts of writing and one of the foundations of speculative fiction. When I first started writing as a teen, I was mostly imitating the stories I was reading at the time: Meg Cabot’s works and modern YA classics such as Eragon, Graceling, and The Hunger Games. But as my writing matured, I became more interested in reinventing the tropes I loved and exploring new ways to tell a story, which has led to manuscripts that range widely in age group and genre. Fun fact: when I signed with my agent, I was pitching Threads That Bind as adult, but after discussing it with my agent, we chose to send it to young adult publishers – both because Io’s character arc is one of coming-of-age and because YA fantasy is my first (true) love. I’d love to continue writing widely in middle grade, young adult, and adult in the future, but I doubt I’ll ever tell a story where there isn’t at least some small magical element. The act of reading is its own kind of magic; and for me, it’s all the better if there’s actual spells and powers in it!
How would you describe your writing process?
I think the best way to describe it is explorative. Strictly speaking, I’m a planner, but I like to pants the first chapters, take my time with the first act of each new story, and try different things before settling on the voice, world, and themes. And beyond that, I’m the sort of book nerd that enjoys every part of publishing. I love the first light bulb moment, I love brainstorming and outlining, I love the messy first draft and revising with my editor, I love nitpicky copyedits and pass pages (all of which shows you what a wonderful team I’m surrounded by!).
Many authors would say one of the most challenging parts of writing a book is finishing one. What strategies would you say helped you accomplish this?
Oh, yes, finishing a book is definitely one of the hardest parts! Every writer is different, but what personally helps me is dividing the story in smaller chunks. I love a 3 or 5 act structure, depending on the needs of the story, and I like to pause between acts and reorganize my plans for both the plot and the character’s journey. In the duology of Threads That Bind, I structured each act to end on a twist or revelation, which created some momentum as I wrote – I really wanted to get to that twist and put my vision into words! In more practical terms, I’d suggest using placeholders: for names, descriptions, worldbuilding elements, nitpicky things you need to research further. Keeping up momentum is crucial in finishing a first draft!
Growing up, were there any stories in which you felt touched by/ or reflected in? Are there any like that now?
I love this question! The first one that comes to mind is The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. My jaw was on the floor the entire time I was reading it when I was 18. I remember I kept thinking, “I didn’t know we could write that!” For those unfamiliar with the book, it’s a character-driven zombie story that centers on religion and faith in a way I had never seen before. It really resonated with my experience growing up as an inquisitive kid in a religiously conservative community. More recently, I had the same experience with Naomi Novik’s The Scholomance trilogy, which are my absolute favorite books in the world. I guess something about teens picking apart the system they’ve been raised with really resonates with me!
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
Definitely myth and history, but also other media! I love that moment where you’re reading a book or watching a movie and a completely random small element of the story makes you go, “Oooh! This could be interesting to explore!” In terms of prose, and especially as someone writing in their non-native language, I have found that reading a text closely greatly helps in learning new words, new turns of phrases, new ways to structure a sentence or paragraph. And personally, because I love setting so much, I’ve lately been enjoying researching natural phenomena, scientific discoveries, and different types of governing systems.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or challenging?
As I mentioned above, I have enjoyed all parts of writing so far, because I’ve been blessed with a really great publishing team! I particularly love the exploration of the brainstorming stage, but I think my absolute favorite part of writing is those internal monologue moments towards the end of the book when the character comes to terms with their own self-sabotage and chooses a new way to live their life. (If you enjoy character journey arcs, do check out Michael Hauge’s Six Stages!) What I usually have trouble with is trying to narrow the world I’ve created into a cohesive elevator pitch to send to my agent or editor!
What advice might you have to give for other aspiring writers?
KH: I’d second the advice often given by other authors that you need to read a lot, read outside your genre and read critically. But I’d also suggest to seek the joy; do you love voice and character, romance, twisty plots? Hold on to that joy as you write, seek new ways to embrace that feeling, make writing time into a little ritual. Writing can be lonely and publishing is a hard business, so the joy that you find in your own creative process is vital to sustain you during the hard times!
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
I’m putting finishing touches on the sequel to Threads That Bind as I’m writing this. I’m so excited for readers to experience the conclusion of Io’s story and find out how the Muses’ prophecy comes to pass. I’ve also seen the sequel’s cover and I’m in awe – Corey Brickley have really outdone themself with this one!
Finally, what books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
I love this question! Some of my recent favorites are: Bitterthorn by Kat Dunn, which is a dark gothic fairytale with a swoony f/f romance; Bonesmith by Nicki Pau Preto which is a sprawling fantasy world with a kick-ass necromancer at its center; and Seven Faceless Saints by M.K. Lobb, a murder mystery in a fantasy world with one of the most well-drawn angry girls I’ve ever read!
Zachary Sergi is a queer author of Interactive Fiction, including the print Choices novels, Major Detours and So You Wanna Be A Pop Star?, and the digital Heroes Rise, Versus, and Fortune The Fated series. Zachary was raised in Manhattan, studied Creative Writing at Regis High School and the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives in Los Angeles with his husband, where he also writes for television. Learn more by following Zachary on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
I had the opportunity to interview Zachary, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
This is where I get to write a whole novel, right? Okay, I’ll keep it relatively brief. I’m a queer author of (mostly) interactive fiction. Nine digital novels for Choice of Games (I’m exhausted just saying that) across the Heroes Rise, The Hero Project, Versus, and Fortune the Fated interconnected books (which readers—not me, I swear!—dubbed the Sergiverse). I also write a whole bunch of episodic series for various apps that are in-universe. But in the past few years, I’ve gotten to translate my interactive style into two hardcover Choices novels, Major Detours and So You Wanna Be A Pop Star? I’m from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, have lived in LA since graduating college (an unspecified number of years ago), and am a massive geek at heart: I have the action figure and comic book collection to prove it.
What can you tell us about your latest book, So You Wanna Be A Pop Star?: A Choices Novel? What was the inspiration for this story?
The other things I am a geek for are pop music and reality television competitions (I won’t list them because I watch all of them). I’ve been an avid watcher of American Idol, X-Factor, and The Voice since the start, plus a fanatic for most pop girl groups. If you follow me on Instagram (which my editor does), you’d know this. So it was actually Britny (editor) who emailed me asking if I’d like to do another Choices novel about a pop group. I had mostly written science fiction stuff up until then, and our first novel together (Major Detours) was about a tarot card cult. But I actually had a long-running idea about going behind the scenes of a Fifth Harmony / One Direction type group who are thrown together against their will and become famous overnight, but to make them mostly queer and gender-diverse so they could be dating (and hating) each other. This became the basis for Pop Star, which is by far the juiciest and most dramatic novel I’ve ever written (he says with devious glee).
One of the things that stands out about this book is that it’s an interactive novel (which is pretty unusual for young adult fiction.) What made you decide to go with this type of format?
Unusual indeed—and in print, maybe one of a kind? The print CYOA novels are mostly middle-grade, right? Anyway, I had spent many years writing digital interactive novels (Heroes Rise, Versus) and honing in on my own unique style for the publisher Choice of Games. My interactive fiction is like layering an RPG on top of a novel. I’m not super interested in open-world plot control, but instead providing the basis for the reader to build a character and their relationships, then using a series of statistics to determine alternate scenes and endings. My goal when a reader gets to a big choice is to make them stop and think. There’s rarely any winning or losing, it’s about making tough calls for gaining and sacrificing and defining all at once.
It’s a long story, but I was on sub for a different print novel (This Pact Is Not Ours, more on this later) and my now-editor couldn’t take on that book but had read my interactive work and asked if I was interested in adapting that for a print format. The answer was obviously yes, and that’s how Major Detours was born. Britny (editor) and I put our heads together to invent a new interactive format for young adult, based on my body of work. Every formatting choice was made by us and the team, from how often to use choices, how they look, how many options—the list goes on. But the two biggest defining factors are that you always move forward in the page count and that there’s a personality-quiz like matrix in the back of the novel where you can plug in your choices and get a kind of reader horoscope, based on the decisions you made.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically young adult fiction?
My favorite titles tend to have something in common (Busiek’s Avengers run, Hickman’s X-Men run, the Crossgen universe, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Everything Everywhere All At Once)—they all cross genre boundaries in a tone that is young adult/new adult adjacent. So I often say I write what feels organic to my instincts and influences in a blender brew, and it comes out young adult more often than not. I’m definitely a product of the WB-era teen TV dramas, and I’m so thrilled that Y2K vibe seems to be cycling back in (which I think has more to do with the age of editors/development execs/artists now in their 30s/40s and calling the shots, but who knows).
That said, I am so proud to be a queer author in this space now more than ever representing queer teens. Pop Star also has a drag queen PoV character—I was not intending this to be a bold statement back in early 2022, but alas here we are. But I also know so much of the young adult audience is actually made up of geeky adult readers (like me), drawn to the genre because there just feels like there is more freedom to tell really big, open-hearted, diverse, fun stories.
How would you describe your writing process?
Outlines so thick they accidentally turn into novels? The following is also blasphemous for a mostly-digital writer, but I draft everything by hand at first (even when writing in interactive formatting language/code). I can get into the flow if it’s just me and a pen and some paper, no computer or phone in reach. Whatever time I lose typing my drafts up, I gain back in focus-without-internet-procrastination and using the typing as an edit process. I’ll do it as long as my aging wrists allow. I am also very intense about curating specific playlists for projects (most of which can be found on my Spotify profile). Bouncing between so many mediums, genres, and titles, I find the mood of music really helpful in re-anchoring myself in a project (and the lyrics don’t interfere with my process, thankfully).
Many authors would say one of the most challenging parts of writing a book is finishing one. What strategies would you say helped you accomplish this??
First, it helps to understand there’s a pretty standard cycle every creator goes through. It’s usually something like THIS IS THE BEST IDEA ANYONE HAS EVER HAD to THIS IS THE WORST IEA ANYONE HAS EVER HAD back to Hey This Is Okay to I Can’t Look At This One More Second. You bounce between those poles until a deadline arrives, basically. These downturns are inevitable, and I think that’s where many creators get stuck. Also, setting very small and realistic daily goals is everything, otherwise, the whole thing can feel daunting. Lastly, it’s essential to experiment and find a writing process that works for you—it usually involves lots of mental trickery, but the best guiding principle is that there is no such thing as a bad first draft.
Growing up, were there any stories in which you felt touched by/ or reflected in? Are there any like that now?
I mentioned the big ones already (Buffy and EEAAO), but The Perks of Being a Wallflower always really hit home with me. It was books like The Magicians, The Hazel Wood, We Were Liars, and Surrender Your Sons that made me want to return to YA publishing after my digital run.
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
It used to be a much more unique answer when I discovered it in college long before the TV show, but The Handmaid’s Tale remains my favorite novel of all time. It does everything I ever want to as a writer in terms of character, prose, and societal allegory. I’m also constantly blown away by the work of Kristin Cashore. If you haven’t read Jane, Unlimited—run don’t walk. That book blew my plotting mind, and I write complicated interactive fiction for a living.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or challenging?
I love outlining and editing. First-drafting is maybe my least favorite part of the process—but there’s also nothing like the feeling of being in flow on a project and feeling things click. Outside of process, I find being a writer in the social media age—where we are basically expected to be full-time PR/Marketing people and author personalities who are also subject to the full whim of every criticism ever uttered about us—really exhausting. But on the flip side, we can reach and connect to readers in a truly unprecedented way, which is always what makes every ounce of perspiration worth it.
Aside from your work, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
I am a rabid Bravo / Real Housewives fan. If anyone is looking for someone to write The Real Housewives of Earth 616, I’m your writer. But we said no work…Kelly Clarkson is my diva avatar of choice. Symone is my favorite drag queen. I have always hated and will always hate melted cheese. And I was outed in high school by someone who eventually became a very famous pop star, a story I wrote into Pop Star.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
Will you accept our invitation to be on the next season of The Traitors? (The answer is yes).
What advice might you have to give for other aspiring writers?
The only thing that makes you a writer is actually writing, the rest is a matter of scale. If you can find a day job you love (or feel fulfilled by at least), take that day job and write on the side. If you absolutely have to write full-time, be prepared to make a lot of sacrifices, because most working writers live paycheck to paycheck. We hear a lot about the big success stories, but they’re the 1% of the 1% who ever get published. Finding an agent and an editor is largely not about your talent level or the quality of your writing, it is more like dating—it’s about finding your writing love match who gets you. Never spend more time absorbing a review than it took a person to write it.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
Yes! So remember that novel I mentioned? This Pact Is Not Ours is a non-interactive (gasp) queer horror novel and it is being published this October by a killer new indie queer press (they have 5 books out right now, each one of them stellar): Tiny Ghost Press. The novel is another genre layer for me, my homage to early Kevin Williamson, I Know What You Did Last Summer set on Dawson’s Creek, with a dash of Stranger Things and We Were Liars. Here’s the premise: four college-bound best friends return to the idyllic campsite their families have visited every summer, only to discover they are cursed by an ancestral pact that threatens to tear their friendships–and the world—apart. It’s maybe the most personal and horrifying work I’ve ever written, and arriving just in time for spooky season (10.3.23). Preorders should be up next month!
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
In no particular order, these fellow young adult authors all have A+ queer books, and all happen to be absolutely lovely people too: Robbie Couch, Emery Lee, Adam Sass, Erik J. Brown, Aaron Aceves, Claire Winn, and Adib Khorram, to mention just a few. Their (multiple!) titles can be found wherever books are sold.
Sarah Adler writes romantic comedies about lovable weirdos finding their happily-ever-afters. She lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter and spends an inordinate amount of her time yelling at her mischievous cat to stop opening the kitchen cabinets.
I had the opportunity to interview Sarah, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Hello, and thanks so much for having me! I’m Sarah Adler (she/her), and I write romantic comedies out of my mustard yellow home office (and various coffee shops) in beautiful Frederick County, Maryland. I’m also an avid reader, baked goods fanatic, and casual but enthusiastic bird nerd.
What can you tell us about your debut book, Mrs. Nash’s Ashes? What was the inspiration for this story?
Mrs. Nash’s Ashes is the story of a former child actress on a mission to reunite three tablespoons of her elderly best friend’s remains with the woman she fell in love with while serving in World War II. But flights are grounded and she’s forced to drive to Florida with her ex-boyfriend’s grad school rival. Hijinks, of course, ensue.
Back in the fall of 2020, I heard a radio interview with a musician who talked about how, when his mother passed away, he took her ashes on tour with him to sprinkle on every stage he played. I couldn’t stop thinking about that! Like, as a memorial gesture but also just the logistics. Around the same time, I was brainstorming what a modern-day version of the classic screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, might look like. Eventually, those two ideas converged in my head and a story was born.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically romance?
I’ve always been fascinated by people—trying to understand how they work, what makes them tick—and I think romance is an ideal way to explore that. When I make my characters fall in love, I’m basically chucking them into a crucible and testing what they melt down into, and how they’ll re-form. It’s a really fun way to study the human condition. It’s possible to do this with other genres, too, of course. But I’ve also always been very anxious, so the promise of a happily ever after, that everything is going to be okay, is not only incredibly appealing but somewhat necessary for me as both a reader and a writer.
How would you describe your writing process?
When I first have an idea, I make sure that it has not only a premise but also enough of a plot to become a full book. If it doesn’t, I write it down for later and move on to the next one. If it does, I start writing the first few chapters and see how it feels—if the voice is coming naturally, if the characters are forming on the page. Next is a very loose, almost stream-of-consciousness outline that’s 90% dialogue I know I want to use in future scenes, and that guides me as I head toward the middle. By the time I hit the 50,000-word mark, I usually get stuck and miserable for a while, but I’ve done this enough times now that I know it’s temporary. So I take a break, refill my creative well, and eventually dig back in and reach the end. I tend to revise at the line level as I go, so by the time I have the full story on the page, it’s time to get some feedback from my critique partners and/or editor about bigger, structural stuff. Then it’s time to tinker with whatever doesn’t work until it suddenly does.
One of the hardest things about writing a book is finishing one. What strategies or advice might you have to say about accomplishing this?
I’m not a planner. I don’t do a formal outline. I don’t do goal-motivation-conflict charts. That’s not me, not how my brain works. But what I’ve learned is crucial to a manuscript’s success is that I make sure before I get started that I have a plot and not just a premise. It’s really easy to generate premises—the “what if…?” question that sets up the situation—but it’s a lot harder to actually respond to that question with a novel-length answer. Most of the projects I’ve started and abandoned were great premises, which meant I could start, but then there wasn’t a middle or an end to follow it up with. Writing a book is like getting from A to Z, and if you only have an A, well… you might eventually work your way to Z out of sheer luck but it’s not going to be an easy trip.
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
Jennifer Crusie is my favorite romance author of all time, and I turn to her books frequently for both comfort and inspiration. Music is a significant part of my process as well; I tend to listen to certain genres or artists on repeat while drafting and revising. My work is always at least a little influenced by film and television, especially ‘70s and ‘80s sitcoms like M*A*S*H, WKRP in Cincinnati,and Night Court, which are great examples of how to blend humor with heavier topics. And I’m also really inspired by my surroundings, especially the landscape (which is actually kind of ironic now that I think about it, considering I don’t spend a ton of time describing settings in my writing).
There’s also an element of finding inspiration within myself. Each book I write is a semi-subconscious effort to work through some feeling or aspect of my life I haven’t been able to grapple with in real time. What I mean is, I don’t think it was a coincidence that I realized I was bisexual while writing Mrs. Nash’s Ashes, which has a sapphic love story B-plot.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult?
I love that feeling of starting a new project and watching the characters come alive on the page. It feels so magical when it’s working well as if the people in my head are real and eager to tell me all about themselves. I also love the moments during the revision process when one new sentence or paragraph suddenly makes everything click into place—extremely satisfying.
Usually, the place I get most frustrated is the middle of the book, when I often feel like I’ve lost the thread of what I’m trying to do. That’s the point where I often have to step away, rest, recalibrate, reread what I’ve written so far, and find my way back into the story.
Aside from writing, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
Hmm… I have a master’s degree in history that I’ve never really had an opportunity to use in any formal professional way, and I’ll jump at any excuse to do research. I’m also an atrocious gardener, just absolutely terrible at it, yet I keep trying every year anyway because I’m slow to learn a lesson.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
What’s my favorite Fleetwood Mac song? Wow. That’s impossible to answer, really. But I have a soft spot for “Sara” (even if they did omit the ‘h’).
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
It feels almost cliche at this point but read. Especially when you’re first starting out, it’s the most important thing you can do. Read in your genre. Read outside of your genre. Read old stuff. Read new stuff. Read things you love. Read things you hate. It’s the number one way to improve your craft, understand the market, and make connections. A writer who thinks they can write a good book without ever reading is as absurd, in my opinion, as a chef who thinks they can make good food without ever eating.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
I can’t say too much except that my second book is currently scheduled for spring 2024, and it’s an enemies-to-lovers romance featuring a fake spirit medium, a goat farmer, and a ghost.
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
I’m a huge fan of Bridget Morrissey’s A Thousand Miles, and I’m excited for her upcoming sapphic romance, That Summer Feeling. Rachel Runya Katz’s Thank You For Sharing is coming out in September and I can attest to its excellence. And Tori Anne Martin’s wlw romcom, This Spells Disaster, is high on my TBR. Outside of the romance genre, C.J. Connor has a queer cozy mystery (a quozy, if you will) pubbing this summer that’s going to be my birthday present to myself.
Jonah Kramer is a New York City-based actor, singer, dancer, and now children’s book author. He has traveled as a performer both nationally and internationally. He is delighted to coauthor his first book with his amazing mom. Find him on Instagram @jonahekramer.
Zach Manbeck is a children’s book author and illustrator who loves to create stories that advocate for characters that haven’t yet had a chance to live in books. He lives in Philadelphia. Find him on Instagram @zachmanbeck.
I had the opportunity to interview Jackie, Jonah, and Zach which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Jackie:: I’m a picture book author and to date, I’ve published about eight books including Manolo & the Unicornwith more releasing in 2023 and 2024. I’m thrilled that between three of my books, they’ve been translated into a total of ten languages. I would describe my writing and books as eclectic, as the inspiration to my stories come from many sources—travel, movies, history, music, art, and the natural world. However, my Latinx cultural roots, experiences, and memories play a big part in my storytelling. In the end, I hope to write stories that meet children where they are and reflects what they see in their mirror, and out their windows.
Jonah: I am a performer and now first-time children’s book author. I have a degree in musical theatre from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and I have worked as a professional actor in regional theatres as well as touring both nationally and internationally.
Zach: I am an author and illustrator from Pennsylvania. Manolo & the Unicorn is the third book I’ve worked on. My other titles You Are Here (Chronicle, May 2022) and Stanley’s Secret (written by John Sullivan, Paula Wiseman Books, Jan 2023) are available now! As an artist, people describe my work as modern vintage—nostalgic, yet fresh. As a writer, I aim to tell stories from a fresh perspective—stories that advocate for characters that haven’t yet had a chance to live in books, and stories sprinkled with lessons that encourage the forming of healthy minds.
Jackie Kramer
What can you tell us about your most recent project,Manolo & the Unicorn? Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
Jackie: Manolo & the Unicorn was written with my son, Jonah, and was inspired by a bullying experience he had as a child. I was interested in writing an odd friendship story. But our love of mythology and unicorns pulled the two themes together. We both have acting backgrounds so it was fun to act out scenes we envisioned for the story before drafting a word. The story explores gender identity and believing in oneself wrapped in magical realism and mythology. When I was a child, or even later, when I had my own children, there weren’t any books that explored the theme of gender norms and identity. I feel good knowing that today kids have access to books like Manolo & the Unicorn.
Jonah: I wrote Manolo & the Unicorn with my mom and it was inspired by experiences I had as a child. Growing up I often felt alone or ostracized because my interests didn’t match with what my peers expected of me. An early memory I have is being told that my favorite color couldn’t be the color purple because “purple is for girls.” When I shared some of these experiences with my mom she felt like we could write a meaningful story together. As a kid, I was obsessed with fantastical creatures and would spend hours drawing unicorns, mermaids, fairies, and dragons. So, having our story based in magical realism felt like the perfect fit.
Zach: Visually, my biggest inspiration for the book came from very early Disney concept art by the renowned Mary Blair. No one can paint magic the way that she did.
How did you find yourself getting into storytelling, and children’s books? What drew you to the medium?
Jackie: Since I was a young kid, I was cutting comics out from the Sunday papers and then pasting them onto another sheet of paper with my own story written underneath. I have always loved picture books. I loved to let my imagination step into another world. In addition, the stories helped me to understand the world around me. I started out planning on becoming an actor and trained at NYU, but my life’s journey took me in another direction. Ironically, my experience as an actor has helped me as a writer. In theatre, you have a beginning, middle, and an end with characters and settings. Page turns to me are like the end of a scene in a play, the curtain goes up and comes down. In the end, I felt I had something to say, and I hoped others felt the same way.
Jonah: I actually didn’t expect to get into the medium of children’s books. During the height of the pandemic, the theatre industry was hit extremely hard and I was out of work. My mom asked if I would be interested in writing a story with her based on some of my childhood experiences that I had shared with her. Coming from a theatre background I had already been telling stories, but now I got to tell them through a new medium. So, I kind of fell into the medium of children’s books, but I am so happy and grateful that I did.
Zach: I think picture books are healing—for myself, and for readers. I create books that I wish I had access to when I was a child. Manolo & the Unicorn would have certainly had a home on my bookshelf.
Jonah Kramer
How would you describe your creative process? And what went into collaborating with others for Manolo & the Unicorn?
Jackie: Lots of daydreaming, musing, percolating, long walks, and Swiffering, before I put even one word on paper. Once I have the beginning and end, with the middle a bit fuzzy, I begin to draft the story. Sometimes I have a title that I love and work around that. If you write or illustrate picture books you need to accept and trust that it takes a creative village to make beautiful and meaningful books. I have been fortunate to work with a terrific team at Cameron Kids that had the same vision for Manolo & the Unicorn.
Jonah:Both my mom and I have a background in theatre, so we viewed a lot of the story as if it was a play or a movie. Typically one of us would write a section and then we would act it out for the other person almost as if it were a play. I remember we spent a lot of time trying to capture the nuances of what the first interaction would be between the Unicorn and Manolo. In the research we did on unicorn stories, we found that there is an etiquette and a level of politeness that is required when first meeting a unicorn. We went back and forth trying to find the balance of excitement, trepidation, and wonder that our two characters would be feeling when meeting for the first time. We acted this small moment out so many times. Ultimately most of what we acted out for that moment didn’t make it into the final edit, but it really helped to shape our understanding of the two characters and their relationship.
Zach: When creating Manolo & the Unicorn I spent a lot of time absorbing all of my favorite fairy tales from childhood. From there, judgment-free sketching and painting happens, and if I’m lucky things magically fall into place. The hardest part of creating anything is believing in yourself. I was lucky to have a team of people who really trusted my vision and encouraged me throughout the whole process of making the book.
As a creative, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration?
Jackie: I may have answered this in your first question. I have many, many creative influences like travel, the natural world, my childhood memories, and art. That said, my greatest creative influence is my curiosity. For example, I wrote the nonfiction picture book, Dorothy and Herbert-Ordinary People and their Extraordinary Collection of Art, after watching an amazing documentary about Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. The Vogels amassed one of the largest and priceless collections of modern art in a small, one-bedroom apartment, then donated it all to the National Gallery. I had never written nonfiction before, but I keep myself open to the muse who presents itself in many ways.
Jonah: My parents loved to share classic movie musicals with me, so I think a lot of my inspiration comes from movies and musicals. I also take a lot of inspiration from queer artists and creators.
Zach: As an artist, I have endless influences. Those influences are constantly rotated and revisited based on the nature of the project I’m working on. For Manolo & the Unicorn, Mary Blair was my biggest influence. I fell madly in love with her work my freshman year of college and that love has persisted. Her visual development, specifically for Cinderella and Peter Pan, really inspired me while painting Manolo & the Unicorn.
Zach Manbeck
Besides your work, what are some things you would want readers to know about you?
Jackie: I look forward to the fork in the road.
Jonah: I have been fortunate enough to get to explore a few different creative fields. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist, I ended up studying theatre and becoming an actor, and now I’m a published children’s book author. It’s never too late to explore other passions. You never know where they might take you.
Zach: I prefer to let my work speak for itself. In the age of social media, we have normalized constant updates and open windows into people’s personal lives. As an artist who marches to the beat of his own drum, I deliberately keep my “window” closed. Let your work speak for itself.
Are there any other projects you are working on or thinking about that you are able to discuss?
Jackie: I have three more books coming out in 2023—We Are One-about our connections to each other and the natural world, Empanadas for Everyone-about a little girl who discovers her community when she makes empanadas, and Boogie in the Bronx, a toe-tapping, dancing and singalong book which features CD audio and video animation. I can’t say too much about it, but my latest WIP is nonfiction and takes the reader far into space.
Jonah: At the moment I don’t have anything that I am working on, but I am really trying to enjoy this moment of having my first book published. It has been so gratifying to see both kids and adults interacting with our story and sharing their excitement about it.
Zach:I currently have two new projects on my desk that are in very early stages. One is a whimsical dreamy bedtime story and the other is a story about shyness and friendship. I look forward to sharing more details about them in the future!
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but wish you were (and the answer to that question)?
Jackie: Do you believe in unicorns?
I do! Magical things exist all around us and happen all the time. All we need do is to tap into our curiosity and believe.
Jonah: What animal would you be for the wild animal parade?
A unicorn, of course!
Zach: What is your favorite part of Manolo & the Unicorn?
One of my favorite parts of Manolo & the Unicorn is how I used color to tell the story. Throughout the pages, you will notice a conflict between the colors red and green. Manolo, his Unicorn, and their magic exists in a “green” world. Characters and feelings that question Manolo’s beliefs live in a ‘red’ world. When Manolo’s red-hued classmates let him know that they think unicorns aren’t real, he temporarily shifts from being green to red. However, when he meets his unicorn, he is magically restored to green. A similar color transformation also occurs at the end.
What advice might you have to give to aspiring creatives, to both those interested in making their own picture book?
Jackie: Join the Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators. Read, read, read lots of picture books old and new. Discover books that you love and use them as mentor texts, and to understand what’s being published. Finally, don’t quit. Believe in yourself and understand that a rejection isn’t personal. Rejections are completely subjective.
Jonah: I would say that it’s important to write about things that are genuine and authentic to you. When the subject matter is meaningful to you it makes the writing process that much easier, and I think as a reader you can feel the passion and the love through the writing as a result. It is also important to know your audience and who you are writing for. And for me, I am passionate about bringing more LGBTQ+-themed stories to the table. I know that there are kids out there who would both enjoy and benefit from having stories that reflect their experiences, but there are not enough stories being written for kids who may identify as LGBTQ+. So, I encourage aspiring creatives to find what they are passionate about and to find a need. What stories need to be told? What voices need to be heard?
Zach: Cliché, but don’t give up. My first picture book was sold for six figures after a multi-day auction between several publishers. I was living at home, unemployed, and broke when I got that email. I went into it just hoping one publisher would make me a small offer. Life has a way of surprising us…if you let it!
Finally, what books/authors (LGBTQ+ and/or otherwise) would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Jackie: There are many I love but here are a few of my favorites, and one written by our multitalented editor, for Manolo & the Unicorn: Girl on a Motorcycle by Amy Novesky illustrated by Julie Morstad (Viking, 2020). Your Mama by NoNieqa Ramos, illustrated by Jacqueline Alcántara (Versify, 2021), and Red: A Crayon’s Story by Michael Hall (Greenwillow, 2015).
Jonah: My favorite book is The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012) by Madeline Miller. The book is based on the Greek mythology of Achilles and it is told from the perspective of Patroclus who was Achilles’ closest companion. I love the way Miller takes Greek mythology but tells the story through a writing style that makes Greek mythology easily accessible to young readers. It is truly one of the most beautiful love stories that I have ever read. To be able to read a book that I could relate to as a member of the LGBTQ+ community was so rewarding when for so long we have been (and continue to be) underwritten, undervalued, and unrepresented in most of the media that we consume. I can’t sing enough praises for The Song of Achilles.
Zach: Matthew Forsythe’s Mina (Simon & Schuster, 2022) and Pokko and the Drum (Simon & Schuster, 2019) are my favorites. Matt is an incredible artist, a clever writer, and a wonderful friend.
Joy Ladin is the author of a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective; and ten books of poetry, including her new collection, Shekhinah Speaks (Selva Oscura Press), National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigrationand Impersonation. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors.
I had the opportunity to interview Joy, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Thank you! I grew up white, lower middle class (my father was a social worker), assimilated Jewish, terrified, marginalized, annoying, and hyperverbal (in schoolyard sports, I played announcer) in the 1960s and 70s Rochester, NY. Though I knew nothing about anything, I spoke as though I were an expert on anything I talked about (this continues to be useful as a poet), particularly on Star Trek, which was having its first brief run on our black-and-white TV. When I wrote on freshly painted walls in magic marker, I was punished by not being allowed to watch Star Trek.
Though I hid my trans identity, it wasn’t safe at home when I was an adolescent, and I more or less left after graduating from high school at 16, though I continued to see my family and get financial support through college. I was very interested in math until a college calc class I took when I was a high school sophomore taught me that, unlike poetry, you couldn’t just make things up in math.
I had started writing what I thought of poetry as soon as I learned to write, took my first writing workshop in junior high school and continued straight through till I graduated as a creative writing and social sciences major from Sarah Lawrence College. Instead of going to graduate school, I decided to focus on writing poetry, supporting my habit with what was at first my only marketable skill, typing. That decision led to ten years as an administrative assistant at The State Bar of California, during which writing piles of poetry, most of which never got published, while writing memos, managing budgets, and thinking about great writers like Kafka who were also office workers.
I left to get an MFA I hoped would jump-start the career as a poet which, despite my hard work (I wrote constantly) and occasional publications, had remained a daydream. The MFA program I got into – Umass Amherst – didn’t teach me much about writing or help with my career, but it did lead me to what became my second vocation, teaching. I fell in love with teaching during the first class I taught (ironically, on “Man and Woman in Literature”) and never fell out of love with it, though illness forced me to leave the classroom a couple of years ago.
In order to become marketable, as they say, for a tenure-track job in teaching, after I finished the MFA thesis that eventually grew into my first book of poetry, Alternatives to History, I got a Ph.D. in American Literature from Princeton, which, after a few years on the market, helped me land the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, the flagship school of modern Orthodox Judaism. I loved the students there, and the university’s support helped me write most of the work I’ve published. But it’s hard to mix openly trans identity with Orthodox Jewish culture, and uncomfortable to be the one and only openly trans person doing the mixing, and, over the twelve years following my gender transition, it got harder and harder to work at Yeshiva University.
Despite the discomfort, my experiences on the border of contemporary secular and traditional religious culture launched me on what became a third career as a speaker and writer about gender identity, particularly about the intersections and collisions between trans and nonbinary identities and traditional religions. Much of the non-literary work of which I’m proudest wouldn’t have been possible without what I learned – was forced to learn – by teaching in an Orthodox environment, and Yeshiva University’s support enabled me to write dozens of essays, a memoir of gender transition, a book of trans theology, and numerous books of poetry.
Unfortunately, over those very productive years, I was also getting sicker and sicker from ME/CFS, and in 2021 finally had to go on disability. These days, I’m mostly housebound, though still writing (I’ve just finished a collection of selected essays) and doing speaking events via (what else?) Zoom.
What can you tell us about your most recent book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective? What inspired this project?
Actually, my most recent book is Shekhinah Speaks, a collection of poems intended to give voice to the Shekhinah, Jewish mysticism’s name for the immanent, female aspect of the divine. But I couldn’t have written it without first having written The Soul of the Stranger, a book of intimate theology that grew out of a lifetime of thinking about and talking with God. I don’t think it’s unusual for children to have a sense of divine or other presence beyond the human, and from what others have told me that sense is often particularly keen for LGBTQ+ kids and others who, as I did, grow up feeling isolated by their differences from those around them. It wasn’t the easiest relationship – when you’re a lonely child, God is not the kind of companion you are longing for – but I don’t think I would have survived my childhood if I hadn’t felt God there with me. Without God, I wouldn’t have anyone to talk with who didn’t mistake me for the boy I was pretending to be and knew who I really was.
A lot of children have that sense of God’s presence educated or beaten out of them, or displaced by institutionalized religious ideas, worship, and community. But my family wasn’t religious, and my relationship with God has continued throughout my adult life. Though it took place outside institutionalized Judaism, my relationship with God was still connected to Jewish tradition, primarily through my independent reading of the Hebrew Bible, texts I saw as portraying God as someone who, like me, was isolated and often heartbroken because, like me, God doesn’t have a body that would enable the people God loves to see that God is there.
I didn’t start publicly talking and writing about my relationship with God until after my gender transition. At first, I did so as part of explaining how I grew up as a trans kid. But to my surprise, many people seemed as interested in the idea of having a personal relationship with God as they were in what I said about trans identity.
The Soul of the Stranger is a response to that interest, an effort to think through what I learned about God and the portrayal of God in the Bible from experiencing them from a transgender perspective – that is, experiencing them in the context and through the lens of my experiences as a person who doesn’t fit binary gender categories. I wanted the book to demonstrate that, contrary to what many think, trans experience is not opposed to religious experience or even religious tradition, that, as in my life, each could sustain and illuminate the other. I hoped it would help bridge the often bitter gulf between trans and nonbinary and religious communities, help trans and nonbinary people see themselves as inherently entitled to religious traditions, and help people inside and outside religious communities recognize and explore the possibility of having their own relationships with God.
Speaking as a queer Jewish person myself, I know there’s often been some tension between the queer community and the concept of religion. What are your thoughts on this and how would you describe your relationship with Judaism?
I think the opposition between religious traditions and queer identities is too often taken as a given by people in both kinds of communities. There are and have always been deeply religious LGBTQ+ people who adhere to traditional forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and I have heard many of those people tell me that they feel marginalized on both sides of the divide: marginalized by LGBTQ+ identity in their religious communities, and by their religious identification in queer circles, sometimes so much that they feel they have to “closet” their religious affinities.
The fact that there are so many people like this shows us that there is no necessary opposition between being traditionally religious and LGBTQ+ identities, that those identities are not, as we often assume, inherently secular and opposed to or incompatible with being traditionally religious. So where does this assumption come from?
One source is obviously the explicitly phobic elements in religious traditions and their expression and magnification in some contemporary religious communities – elements that have harmed generations of LGBTQ+ people, and driven many of us to reject religion and embrace secularism. But, at least in terms of Judaism, these phobic elements are fragmentary, intermittent, go in and out of mainstream fashion, and center on male homosexuality rather than general opposition to sexual or gender difference. (There’s barely enough awareness of lesbians in Jewish tradition to generate prohibitions, much less hatred.) When I came out as trans at Yeshiva University, there was no general anti-trans discourse in Orthodox Judaism (there is more now), no tradition of hating on trans people. That discourse grew in response to the increasing visibility of trans and other queer people, but, except for homophobia, this is not traditional or central to Jewish tradition.
Another thing that feeds this assumption is the historical fact that our language of sexual and gender difference is secular, a mishmash developed first by scientists (more or less) interested in describing behaviors and biological and psychological types, and more recently by activists interested in asserting and defending individual identities and rights. The assertion of individual identity as the most important aspect of our humanity is indeed a secular idea, a response to both democracy and capitalism, and it stands in opposition (as the early standard-bearers of Enlightenment knew) to not only traditional religions but to traditional modes of community, which tend to define people first in terms of their roles and relations to others and secondarily in terms of individuality.
But even in those kinds of traditional communities, people are recognized as individuals as well as who they are to others, and even in LGBTQ+ communities, people are recognized in terms of relations to others as well as individual identity. While secular and traditional societies ascribe different priorities to each, both are necessary aspects of both community and humanity. In other words, they are complementary, not contradictory – which makes queer discourses that value only individual identity limiting and damaging in ways that are analogues to the limitations and damage caused by traditional religious discourses that value only whether we fit assigned roles and categories.
Because I grew up in isolation as a trans-Jew, I managed to avoid all of this growing up. Judaism was mine, I was told, because I was born Jewish, and in the absence of teachers who promoted a strong idea of what Judaism was, I made up my own version, a version centered, as I talk about in The Soul of the Stranger, on a relationship with God and reading of the Torah based on my trans experiences of not fitting human categories. I never accepted others’ versions of Judaism, though I have learned a lot from them and participated in them, and so I never experienced a tension between being trans or queer and being a religious (though non-Orthodox) Jew. It can be lonely to have a Judaism made for one – I have never fully felt at home in any Jewish community, and Jewish community central to much of Judaism. But I have accepted that loneliness as the price for practicing a Judaism that fits and embraces both my trans identity and my idiosyncratic relationship with God.
What inspired you to get into writing? Were there any favorite writers or stories that sparked your own love and interest in storytelling?
I don’t know why I started writing poetry – I just did, even though our family didn’t read or have books of poetry around. Most of my non-school reading was science fiction, one of the few things I could really share with my father, who grew up idolizing Isaac Asimov, a writer who came from a similar background. There were boxes of SF magazines from 40s and 50s in a room in our basement, and I read my way through them, as well as experimenting with then-up-and-coming writers like Harlan Ellison, who I adored for his snarkiness, his anguish, and his overwriting, qualities I shared.
But aside from a failed (ie, unpublished) fantasy novel, I have always seen poetry, mostly lyric poetry, as the focus of my reading and writing life. The poets in my personal pantheon – the ones who keep teaching me what great poetry is and what poetry can be – include Emily Dickinson, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Basho, and Issa, among others. I have written some narrative poems – it’s something that interests me and that I can at least sometimes do, and my most ambitious literary work is The Book of Anna, a sort of novel made out of the diary entries and poems of a fictional concentration camp survivor trying to make sense of what she has survived. But my interest in storytelling was truly kindled after my gender transition when publicity in the New York Post led to my giving scores of talks about trans identity. At first, most of what I knew about trans identity was my own life story. As I told stories of my growing up hiding my identity, gender transition in middle age, and then creating a life as myself in different ways to different audiences, I learned to love storytelling, to see it as a way of not only communicating but of understanding myself and the profound questions of gender and identity that have shaped me. That love deepened as I wrote my memoir of gender transition, and though I doubt I will ever write prose fiction again, I expect that storytelling will remain central to my teaching, my thinking, and even my spiritual life.
As a poet and non-fiction writer, how would you describe your creative process within both mediums?
For me, poetry (at least good poetry) either starts somewhere other than my conscious intentions or quickly grows beyond them. A good example of the latter is Shekhinah Speaks, which started with a conscious intention to write in the voice of the Shekhinah, but only became something worth doing when I recognized that what I really wanted was not to masquerade as a divine being, but put words together in ways that would enable divinity to speak through them. The Book of Anna was even less conscious in origin – it began when I heard a voice in my head suggesting I write about Anna, a fictional character I had not yet imagined. (I don’t understand that either.) But most of my poems start just by throwing words on the page and seeing what happens – which is probably why most of my poems end up falling short of poetry. However, when the words I’ve thrown down engage my unconscious imagination and feel like they are coming from or pointing beyond me, that’s when I know a draft might grow into real poetry.
All my non-fiction prose, even my academic writing, also has an element of unconscious impulse and imagination, and the best stuff always goes beyond what I think I know, but for me, that kind of writing always starts with conscious intention. The Soul of the Stranger grew out of my desire to develop a Jewish trans theology based on Biblical texts and informed by my own experience; my memoir of transition, Through the Door of Life, started with the intention of articulating aspects of gender transition that, as far as I could tell, no one had yet written about. Both of them grew in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I had those intentions, but both of them remained driven by those original conscious intentions in ways that isn’t true of my poetry.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing/ research? What are some of the most challenging?
Even in my most conscious prose, the part of writing I have always loved most is thinking on paper, free-writing, getting high on the feeling of words and sentences coming together and of new meaning finding its way into the world through me. But I love the feeling of discovery and revelation at every stage in the writing process, including the often difficult process of revision – and I love when I discover something by editing or cutting a sentence. Even though it’s often hard work, and even though that work often leads to writing I end up cutting or abandoning, I love writing. I never want to live without it.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
I’m not sure what the question would be (good thing I’m not on Jeopardy!), but one of the big shifts in my life as an openly trans – and thus openly queer – person was from seeing myself as a deviation or an exception to humanity, as a problem to be accommodated or explained, to seeing them as simply ways of being human. Rather than assuming, as I did most of my life, that the ways I am different were inherently marginalizing and problematic, I realized that they not only need no justification or defense but that they are sources of insight and wisdom, that they offer me perspective on the common dynamics and challenges of being human. In other words, I started thinking and talking and writing about how what makes me seem different can enable those who see me that way to understand aspects of themselves and their own lives. That shifts the incentives for inclusion of those who seem different. In addition, being something we owe people who have been excluded or marginalized, inclusion becomes a way of expanding our understanding of our own humanity. This shift, I’ve found, reduces resistance to inclusion (self-interest is a more reliable motivator than high ideals), and makes it more likely that people who are seen as different are listened to and valued rather than simply tolerated or treated as virtue-signifying tokens.
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
I don’t know how good a source I am for that kind of advice, since most of my life I received little recognition, and even now, after publishing 12 books, rarely get reviewed or receive mainstream attention. But here are some things I’ve learned that has helped me.
I don’t need anyone else’s permission or recognition to be a writer – being a writer just (just!) means making writing central to my life. To do that, I need to write what delights and matters and is true to me. I also have to do the hard work of revising my writing so that it delights and matters and is true not only to me but to others. I have to simultaneously be tirelessly committed to the work of writing, and compassionate to myself when my human vulnerability (or just the need to have a life!) get in the way of it. In my life as a writer, I need to strive for greatness (by which I mean, strive for writing that is bigger, better, truer, more honest, smarter, wiser, more insightful than I am) rather than praise or recognition, because when I do that, the work is worth doing no matter what the rest of the world makes of what I write.
Most importantly: always make writing sure that in addition to working hard, you write for pleasure, that you do writing that just feels good to you, because it’s the pleasure of writing that gets us through the sometimes brutal cycles of revision and rejection and so on.
Besides your work, what are some things you would want readers to know about you?
I don’t know how much is interesting about me outside my work. That’s especially true now that my life is circumscribed by illness and disability, but I have always tried to put the best of myself into my writing, and the other aspects of life I value most – loving and being loved, friendship, conversation, reading poetry, trying to be a better, more curious, more understanding, more generous, more grateful person – are pretty common.
But I do want readers to know that even though, as someone who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and the cold war nuclear threat and who obliviously contributed to the cascading catastrophes of climate change, I am afraid of and for humanity, I love our species. I believe that we can learn to stop destroying ourselves and one another, and that our best is still to come.
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
I’m going to leave out the usual (and great) suspects like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, and recommend a couple of less-read authors I admire. In poetry, I strongly recommend the now-neglected W.H. Auden, as well as contemporary poets such as Trace Peterson (and check out her magazine EOAGH for great LGBTQ+ writing), Cam Awkward-Rich, Taylor Johnson, and Chen Chen. In terms of academic writing, I’m a big fan of Talia Bettcher‘s well-thought-out and clearly written philosophical examinations of trans identity and the issues surrounding it. Max Strassfeld‘s work on trans-Talmud is everything I think public scholarship should be, and Finn Enke is a less-known but wonderfully thoughtful and reader-writer on trans history.
Lio Min writes about music, magic, and sadness at the nexus of queer youth culture and metamorphic Asia America. Their culture reporting and fiction have appeared in The FADER, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Nylon, and many other outlets. They live in California.
I had the opportunity to interview Lio, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
At various points in my life, I’ve been a boba barista, mailroom attendant, summer camp teacher, floral clerk, and call center operator. Throughout it all, I’ve reported and written stories all over the internet and a few times for print. The things I most write about are Asian American youth and music. Beating Heart Baby is my first novel.
What can you tell us about your most recent book, Beating Heart Baby? What was the inspiration for this project? And where did the title come from?
BHB is about boys, bands, and Los Angeles—and also internet friendships, anime, viral stardom, historical trauma, and modern Asian America. The summary that I personally feel is most accurate comes from a writer for the Chicago Review of Books, who described it as a story that shows “the violence and ecstasy of what it means to become an artist, to really be seen, both as and beyond a young adult.” My joke/not joke synopsis is, imagine if The Song of Achilles was actually about a song, set in our contemporary world, and ended with something more ambiguous than death.
So. Back in 2018, I worked at a summer camp, primarily with kids aged five to thirteen. There were a couple of kids there who left an impression on me — as an adult, you can too easily build an idea about who kids are and what they want out of life, and lose sight of the wonder and mischief and dangers and desires of childhood as it plays out. (Which, of course, you lived through the whole circus yourself, but at a certain point you begin to slip into the binary thinking of “my” generation versus “other” generations.) So I came into this job thinking I knew about kids and left the job much more tender-hearted about the trials and tribulations inherent in modern childhood. Some of the kids are, based on honed intuition, definitely going to go through “gender stuff” in the future, at a time when that vector of children’s autonomy is more and more surveilled if not outright criminalized. I found myself wondering if/how I could build a vision of the future these kids deserve, one that’s set in “the real world” but imagines what could be as the template for reality.
Re: the Asian American POV centricity, there are unique cultural frameworks within the multitudes of Asian Americas that I wanted to blow up (as in photography, not explosives) and examine as someone who lives in, critically observes, and conflictingly loves the coalition and histories suggested by the term “Asian American.” Re: the music element, I wanted to play with ideas about ownership, visibility, and identity (as an aesthetic influence but also as a commercial imperative) within the music world, focusing specifically on the increasingly more meteoric journeys that increasingly younger artists have to navigate with infinitely more eyes watching their every creative but also personal move.
The name of the book comes from a song released in 2004 by the pop-punk band Head Automatica. I liked it a lot when I was a kid; I definitely downloaded it off Mediafire or some site like that and revisited it every so often, usually as a running song. A decade later, one of the editors at my then-job polled the newsroom for their favorite crush songs. That was my contribution, and when years later I tried to figure out what to name the manuscript I couldn’t stop working on, I eventually thought of “Beating Heart Baby” — its relentless pacing and pleading as the singer sounds like he’s about to get crushed by his crush.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically young adult fiction?
Growing up, I was an avid reader of pretty much everything. The stuff I wrote in my spare time was also pretty much anything. But once I got to high school, I stopped being encouraged to read widely and was definitely not encouraged to write, period. So for the most part I just didn’t. I eventually found my will to write (or rather, couldn’t keep it muzzled), but it took me well into my twenties to start reading regularly again, and then yet another internal push to start reading literary fiction again, which was a precursor to writing fiction not just for myself, as I’d done as a child, but to be read by other people.
I actually thought I was never going to write fiction as an adult. Then I started experimenting with some short stories and was like, “Okay, that’s it.” Then I had that fateful summer experience and realized that the only way I was going to export all of these ambient influences and ideas out of my brain and into the world, given my limited creative toolbox, was through…sigh…long-form fiction.
There was an early crossroads for BHB, whether it would be a YA or an “adult” book. What pushed me to choose YA was because the only time in my life when I read like my life depended on it was in childhood, because in some ways my life did depend on the worlds and ideas I only encountered and imagined through reading. And while plenty of adults read YA, there are some people who will only ever be able to (for a variety of reasons) read like their lives depended on it during childhood, and who will only have access to books through portals like teachers and librarians tasked with the job of curating books “for them” specifically. So I made that choice “for them.”
In addition to writing fiction, you are also a pop culture and music journalist. How did you find yourself getting into that line of work?
I’ve always loved music but I wasn’t allowed to go to shows as a kid, so once I moved from suburban New Jersey to Los Angeles for college, I gorged myself on all of this culture that I’d only been able to admire from a far distance. Through a stroke of divine intervention, the journalism school (of which I was initially not a part) had just started a new digital outlet and was actively soliciting writers. (This is different from most college newspapers as far as I know, in that you normally have to have more samples/experience and formally apply. I did not have to turn in a serious application and sometimes that makes all the difference.) Through another stroke of divine intervention, my editors had no interest in covering music outside of celebrity news, so with their complete blessing/indifference, I took my college press credential and shared use DSLR into LA’s music scene and never looked back.
How did you find that connecting to your work with Beating Heart Baby?
I’m generalizing wildly here, but I think music is the most galvanizing and popular force within modern youth culture. Maybe all culture throughout history, but I can only really go to bat for the “modern youth” modifier. To some extent, the relationship between artists and fans has always had the potential to be downright religious with obvious cult overtones, but these associations are growing stronger and starting younger. Those relationships are then intensified in ways both affirming (as with the markedly more gender/race diverse pool of working musicians creating art on their own terms) and debasing (cult overtones are not good!), all filtered through the distortions of social media. When you combine this with the traditional coming-of-age narrative, specifically the somewhat traditional queer coming-of-age narrative, you have an endlessly replenishing powder keg of conflicts and desires.
Also, I love describing music through writing, even though it’s a Sisyphean endeavor. You don’t always have the full creative freedom to get weird/go deep with those descriptions in reported work, but in fiction, you have that freedom and in fact must follow it in order to get readers to imagine something that, by virtue of its existence, is impossible to pin down into words alone.
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
I always tell people that BHB is the novelization of an anime. I grew up reading manga and watching anime, and the intentionality of animation is my single greatest artistic inspiration. As with writing, nothing exists until you place it just so; there are no accidental symbols, no ambient scener and sounds, or improvised moments. Every sunbeam was designed and drawn and its movement over and against someone’s outstretched hand is choreographed in sync with that hand, with the leaves that swirl in the languid late summer breeze— You get the gist. My favorite anime series simultaneously leave nothing and everything to imagination; you sense the impossible world beyond the impossible frame and long to step into it.
So, anime. And then there’s music. As I wrote BHB, I obsessively curated three playlists: one for the events of the book from the protagonist Santi’s POV, one for the events of the book from the protagonist Suwa’s POV, and one from my authorial POV. There are sequences of the book that are beat-by-beat soundtracked by a specific song; for example, the ending of Track 7 is synced with Mitski’s “Geyser.” On a structural level, the moment when the POV switches halfway through the book was my way of pulling off a beat switch; the song that inspired that choice was Frank Ocean’s “Nights.” Pretty much all of my writing is “scored” to, rather than inspired by, what I’m listening to.
And then of course, other writing. Specific to BHB, I meditated on Bryan Washington’s Lot, Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult?
I love writing sensory immersion and crescendoing a scene toward a specific action or line. Dialogue is fun to refine; I imagine it as parrying myself until both of “my” weapons have been honed to gleaming.
The most frustrating part of writing is getting not just a first draft down, but connected, which is a bear no matter if I’m reporting a story or writing something personal, and especially gnarly when I’m both the conductor and the train, so to speak. An exquisite corpse is still a corpse…
Aside from writing, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
I did marching band for three years at a big football school and learned all of my music by ear because I couldn’t read/translate the sheet music. (The double-edged sword of perfect pitch.)
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
“What, if any anime was the main inspiration for Mugen Glider?” (The fake anime in BHB.) In terms of imagery/mood, From the New World, specifically this ending credits sequence. In terms of story, the films 5 Centimeters Per Second and Millennium Actress, directed by Makoto Shinkai and Satoshi Kon respectively.
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
Live. Both as an imperative and as a person beyond writing.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
I’m doing a residency soon wherein I will supposedly be working on Book 2… More generally, I write a monthly-ish column for Catapult called Formation Jukebox, in which I deep dive into songs and relate them back to transness/transitioning, a process I am currently…undergoing? Living?
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives cleaved me to my core. There’s my writing and like, life and thinking pre-Knives and then post-Knives. I like their books too but I go up for the “other writing” (short stories, essays, criticism, reports) by Bryan Washington, Andrea Long Chu, Alexander Chee (especially this, oh my god), and K-Ming Chang. Anthony Veasna So’s “Baby Yeah.” (RIP.) If it’s a cliché to recommend Ocean Vuong, I don’t want to be original. Our Dreams at Dusk by Yuhki Kamatani is a gorgeous and tender manga for those of y’all searching in that world, as is Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi (which is also about becoming an artist, in this case within the unique ecosystem of fine art).
K. L. Cerrauses her writing to explore the complexities—and the darker sides—of relationships. When not writing or seeing clients as a trained marriage and family therapist, Cerra is likely walking her Boston terrier or exploring the local botanical gardens. She lives with her husband in a small beach town outside of Los Angeles.
I had the opportunity to interview K. L., which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
Thanks so much for having me! I’m a psychotherapist living in LA with my husband and our feisty Boston terrier. Such Pretty Flowers is my debut novel and I’m so excited for it to come out in early February!
What can you tell us about your latest book, Such Pretty Flowers? What was the inspiration for this story?
Such Pretty Flowers is about a young woman, Holly, who decides to investigate her brother’s suspicious death. In doing so, she develops a dark obsession with his girlfriend, an alluring florist who seems to have a curious connection with her plants. She also happens to be Holly’s prime suspect. As for my inspiration, I’ve always been fascinated by the power—and danger—of plants. And when I took a trip to Savannah, I was instantly enchanted. Such Pretty Flowers is what happened when I combined these two sources of inspiration.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically gothic thriller fiction?
Although I’ve been writing from as early as I can remember, I didn’t immediately find this genre—it took some experimentation. Back in fourth grade, my friends and I started mimicking our favorite authors (I still have journals filled with some very cringe-worthy Redwall imitations). I played around with writing fantasy as a teenager, then veered more literary in my 20’s, and finally settled into writing gothic thrillers/suspense. I love the spooky ambiance and that looming sense of dread: it’s exactly what I gravitate toward as a reader.
How would you describe your writing process?
Sadly, I’m not one of those people who has troves of ideas—I really have to think long and hard, matching up interests of mine to come up with a premise. Once I have a seed of an idea that excites me, I start outlining, and then attack drafting scene by scene. I give myself a lot of space to envision a scene before writing it, by taking walks and thinking up specific details to bring it to life.
Growing up, were there any stories in which you felt touched by/ or reflected in? Are there any like that now?
I was entranced by Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness books as a grade schooler. More recently, I connected with Promising Young Women by Caroline O’Donoghue, likely because the protagonist, like me, was a woman who struggled in the corporate world before eventually becoming a therapist (I also loved the speculative elements throughout the book). Other books that electrified me because I think they really effectively tapped into some of the dark realities of being a woman: Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, The Wives by Tarryn Fisher, and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
I get fired up after reading books that speak to me, like the ones I outlined above. I also like to pull from things that fascinate me in general. For instance, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of being a florist, which I channeled into Such Pretty Flowers. Since my writing is horror-leaning, I definitely pull from my own anxieties. And I can’t leave out my sister—she’s an editor and fellow writer, and we inspire each other and cheer each other on. We’ve just started taking annual writing retreats—our last one was in Salem!—and I’m loving the new tradition.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult?
My absolute favorite part of writing is when I nail down a premise and can’t stop thinking about it. It’s almost like this “pilot light” inside me switches on—there’s this excitement I carry with me all day. I’ll even wake up in the middle of the night thinking about my developing story and characters. It’s addicting! Editing said story can be daunting, however, especially when it comes to the bigger picture, developmental edits. I’m also still adjusting to seeing the public react to my work. Eventually I realized I just had to stop reading reviews (though we’ll see how long that lasts!).
Aside from writing, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
In case it wasn’t obvious, Halloween is my favorite holiday. It’s been that way ever since I was a kid—I got perhaps a bit too into it. In early grade school, I remember attending a friend’s Halloween party dressed as a dead bride. Shout-out to my mom who did the makeup so convincingly it made my friend’s little brother cry.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
This may be less of a question and more of a confession: even though I’m fascinated by all things botanical, I’m actually incapable of keeping a houseplant alive. (Don’t even ask about succulents).
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
Read voraciously in your genre. Try to find some critique partners whose opinions you trust and respect, and challenge yourself to get comfortable receiving their critical feedback.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
My second book is about a modern-day coven operating under the guise of the wedding industry. They are single-minded in their mission to “save” women from losing themselves through marriage/motherhood and . . . it gets pretty dark. At its heart, this book is about the unfair choices and sacrifices women are simply expected to make.
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Dan Clay is a writer and drag queen thrilled to be making his debut as a novelist with Becoming a Queen. Until now, he focused on spreading love and positivity online through his drag persona, “Carrie Dragshaw.” His writing as Carrie has been featured in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and television shows–from Cosmo to People to Watch What Happens Live–and his TED Talk on being your “whole self” details his first-hand experience with the healing power of drag.
I had a chance to interview Dan, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourself?
It’s an honor to chat! Thank you so much. I love what you do and the beautiful community you’ve built!
I’m Dan, and I was cruising along in a relatively traditional business career until, long story short, I started doing drag! I’d post pictures and write captions as “Carrie Dragshaw,” and it was such a source of joy for me that it motivated me to explore even more creative pursuits, which led to longer-form writing, which eventually (after a lot of studying and learning!) led to this book.
What can you tell us about your debut book, Becoming a Queen? What was the inspiration for this book?
The inspiration was two-fold. The first I must warn you is a little heavy! I had this question rattling around in my head. The more life I lived, the more amazed I became at what people can get through. So many lives are hit hard, upended by unexpected pain and heartbreaking tragedy. It’s all around us. How on earth do we get through it? And often with so much love to spare? I wanted to zoom in on someone facing what felt like one of those insurmountable tragedies. And I wanted to try my very best–based on what I know, have experienced, have observed–to help him out of it.
The second inspiration is much lighter! The biggest surprise of my own life has been the healing power of drag. Maybe there’s something in the wigs, or perhaps it’s just the simple fact that everything gets better when you learn to love your entire self. On the heels of my own enlightenment, I wanted to write a book where LGBTQ identity was not a source of pain, but rather, the spring of salvation.
Put those two together, and bippity boppity boop, you’ve got Becoming a Queen!
Since so much of the book revolves around drag, I was wondering what drag as an element personally means to you, and how you would describe your connection to it?
Yes! Well, an unexpected thing happened for me when I started doing drag, which is that I started being more myself. It’s almost ironic that dressing up as a character made me more “me.” But it just pushed me toward authenticity, encouraged me to embrace parts of myself that I was still ashamed of, pushed me toward fuller self-expression (there are confessions “Carrie Dragshaw” makes that I could never dream of making! But they are, in fact, my confessions …)
And I learned, wow … authenticity can save you from a lot more than shame! It can be the force that propels connection, growth, healing, and most of all, love. Drag, and the authenticity that it compelled in me, has been the source of so much love in my life.
So in Becoming a Queen, I tried to capture a little bit of that broader role that drag can play. The book—while, yes, it’s a story about drag—is really more about taking masks off than putting them on. Exploring that gnarly truth underneath the masks we all wear, the parts we think make us broken but really allow us to heal.
What’s something you might want readers to take away from this book?
Oh gosh! It’s a beautiful thing to consider. I think a big part of the journey that Mark goes through is about trying to see others as fully as he sees himself. He starts out incredibly interior, and while he certainly doesn’t get to some enlightened state of non-self, he gets on the path. I do believe that striving to give joy is the best way to get it—even if you only make it halfway there—so I’d be delighted if someone took that away from this book!! See others more fully, see the weight that we’re all carrying, the grace that we all deserve.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, specifically young adult fiction?
It really all started with the writing that I did as “Carrie Dragshaw.” I have always been absolutely obsessed and enamored with reading. I worship authors to the point of never even considering that I could be one! I thought books were born in the mind of genius and then dropped, fully formed, from the sky!
But when the Carrie Dragshaw writing started connecting with people, when people started playing the words back to me or sharing quotes, it was a level of fulfillment that I’d never experienced before. And I knew I absolutely had to at least try to pursue writing in what, to me, is its ultimate form: the novel!
What drew me to young adult fiction was partly functional … the story that I wanted to tell was of a teenager, and I wanted to tell it from his perspective. But it was also aspirational! I feel so very lucky that I’ve gotten to connect with folks through Carrie Dragshaw, and young adult was really exciting to me because, oh wow, maybe I could try to connect with people who’ve never even seen Sex and the City! Haha. Who don’t even know if they’re a Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha. And are maybe at an age where certain doubts and insecurities (that I personally have spent way too much of my life focusing on) haven’t fully set yet. The idea that I could help someone, in some small way, skip faster through some of that fear … that was a very rewarding prospect to me.
How would you describe your writing process?
A bizarre combination of diligence without structure!
When I first started attempting longer-form writing, I was very loose and limber with the ambition, but very diligent with the time. I told myself: you have to write every morning. What you write is up to you! But you have to write. And once the story started taking shape, it got a momentum of its own, and I became nothing less than obsessed! I knew there would be a lot of challenges on the way to publication, but I didn’t want something as controllable as “how hard I was willing to work” be the thing standing in the way.
I’d say the most rewarding part of the process was when I could carve out three full days over a long weekend, or take vacation time and fully immerse in the world of the book. The characters started to feel real then; my world started blending with theirs in this surreal and beautiful way.
Growing up, were there any stories in which you felt touched by/ or reflected in? Are there any like that now?
Oh gosh, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds! I have always absolutely loved reading. It is still a singular joy! Two particularly profound reading experiences come to mind from the “growing up” days, one I felt “reflected in” and one “touched by.” The first: Where the Red Fern Grows. The week before I read the ending to that book, my absolutely perfect family dog died. This dog was my whole entire little life! And then I read the ending of Where the Red Fern Grows (I assume we all know what happens!) and cried tears I didn’t even know I had. I was not a sobber but I sobbed on the floral couch of my childhood living room. The fact that a book could reflect, deepen, add color to something I was experiencing, help me understand my own emotions better. It was almost shocking! How did the book know? It changed my relationship with reading. Deepened it, for sure, because I felt so very seen.
But I’ve also been permanently moved by books where I didn’t necessarily see me in the book, but I grew to understand the world a bit better because of the book. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye remains one of my most profound reading experiences. I read it around my junior year of high school. I have blue eyes, and until reading that book, I hadn’t really thought too much about them. But then I read about Pecola Breedlove, a young girl who wanted nothing more than to “see the world with blue eyes.” It took me a while to understand what she was saying, but once I started to—I shifted. It has done more than perhaps any other individual thing to influence how I look at the world and how I try to interact with it. Pecola Breedlove. One of the greatest teachers I will ever know.
As a writer, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?
Well, I do feel like every book I’ve ever read is rattling around in my head in some way or another, influencing the words that come out. I have particular heart for writers who bring humor to decidedly unhumorous scenarios. Edward St. Aubyn and the Patrick Melrose novels, Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kurt Vonnegut, Maya Angelou, Gabriel Garcia Marquez—brilliant, evocative writers who also somehow make us laugh. Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment—both a lot funnier than I thought they would be! This, to me, is the height.
When I’m writing, I read a lot of poetry and listen to a lot of lyric-driven rap music, because I find the precision of language required in those forms to be particularly inspiring!
And this sounds silly, but the biggest inspiration is the world!! Perhaps my favorite thing about writing is it makes the world more vivid. For example, when you know that you have to write a description of a tree, you start looking at trees a little more closely. And that has been very rewarding for me.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or challenging?
Connecting one on one with readers is a gift beyond description. Much of what I write is quite personal, and a lot of it revolves around lessons that took me a rather long time to learn. When someone gets it, when it helps them in some way … well, it’s the reward of a lifetime. What a privilege to be a writer!
On the challenges side, I’d say, really trying to embody an alternate perspective or life experience from your own. I mean, this in some ways is simply the definition of fiction, but it’s not easy! I am me! We are us! What else do we know? Colum McCann has this great little book of writing advice, and he says, “Don’t write what you know, write toward what you want to know.” Your navel contains only lint. He advises you to step out of your own skin. Explore new lands—even if you don’t know if those lands exist yet. I absolutely love that sense of expansiveness, but it’s also a challenge because of course, you want to get it “right.” You want to be true to the experience, the land, the person you’re portraying. So that, to me, is a challenge. But one I embrace with passion and humility!
Aside from writing, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
Well! I have two other formal jobs, one at a climate change nonprofit and one at a branding agency here in New York, and I love both! I think my absolute favorite thing about growing up is realizing that the answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” can be more than one thing! I love different elements of the different jobs, and what a joy to get to work on all of these interesting/rewarding challenges.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
For fear of giving a long-winded answer to a self-created question, I will leave you in the driver’s seat …
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
I would say, be sure to find joy (or some other fulfilling emotion!) in the process. If you’re pursuing publication, it can be a long time coming, and there are so many variables that influence that outcome. But if you can find joy in the process! Well, that no one can take from you! And even finding small, direct ways to connect to people with your writing. This can be the good side of online outlets, social media.
I made a list for myself, “Ten reasons I love writing that have nothing to do with getting published.” And it kept me going with it when the prospect of getting a book into the world seemed far-fetched to the point of delusional!
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
Well, Carrie Dragshaw is always prancin’ around! A drag/writing project that I thought might last a couple weeks has now gone on almost seven years! And I can’t imagine stopping. I will be in the retirement home in a tutu. And I’m also in the process of seeing if there’s another book up there. TBD! You’ll find out when I do 🙂
Finally, what LGBTQ+ books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
Oh gosh! Millions upon millions! What a gift it is to be a reader. Two that stick out: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts—the writing is so precise and fierce and the ideas of self-creation and individual freedom very powerful–and Carmen Machado’s short stories, Her Body and Other Parties—I found them surprising, even startling, and the writing is mysterious and brilliant. Oh, and for something a little back in time, Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunteris something I revisit quite often! And we’ve talked a lot about writing, and Patricia Highsmith has an amazing book, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, that I found incredibly valuable and would be useful regardless of your genre, as any story needs at least some suspense!
What a pleasure to be able to chat with you! And thank you for such thoughtful questions. It’s really been a treat!