Speaker 1: Amongst the myriad attacks on civil liberties that have characterized
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's second term of government, the assault on trans
Speaker 1: rights across American society have been particularly horrifying and far reaching,
Speaker 1: from executive orders limiting gender affirming care for young people
Speaker 1: to bans on trans people serving the armed services. The
Speaker 1: demonization and minimization of the human experience of people on
Speaker 1: the basis of their gender alienates and endangers entire communities.
Speaker 1: It is culturally a pretty terrifying time to be a
Speaker 1: trans person in America. I was thinking about what that
Speaker 1: might mean as a backdrop to being a trans artist
Speaker 1: in America today, what it might feel like producing new
Speaker 1: work that can be personal and political and provocative, but
Speaker 1: also unabashed, that needn't represent an entire community, or be
Speaker 1: consumed by trauma, or have a responsibility to respond to
Speaker 1: a malignant government that's denying your.
Speaker 2: Very excit distance.
Speaker 1: But great art thrives in response to tyranny, and great
Speaker 1: artists find ways to be funny and fierce and utterly
Speaker 1: themselves in the face of external forces beyond their control.
Speaker 1: Tory Peters is all too aware of the weight of expectation,
Speaker 1: but with her new book, she's shown herself again to
Speaker 1: be a great artist and ridiculously fun to read. Her
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one novel, De Transition Baby was a sensation
Speaker 1: and a revelation. It follows the dynamics between three thirty
Speaker 1: something Brooklynites grappling with the idea of parenting and raising
Speaker 1: a child. That those three models of womanhood, motherhood, and
Speaker 1: adulthood formed an unconventional triangle was more a question of
Speaker 1: setting than purely subject. Reese a transwoman, Katrina a ciswoman,
Speaker 1: and Ames, who in the book has detransitioned and is
Speaker 1: navigating life as a man after no longer being amy
Speaker 1: as a mainstream literary success story in the early twenty twenties.
Speaker 1: It was incredibly frank about the lives of its characters,
Speaker 1: charmingly unconcerned with explaining cultural specifics, localized terminology, or social mores.
Speaker 1: It was just this irresistibly likable comedy of manners. That
Speaker 1: it was a book by a major new transwriter was
Speaker 1: both precisely the point and completely beside the point. Tory
Speaker 1: Peters's debut was long listed for the Women's Prize in
Speaker 1: the UK, named one of the New York Times Best
Speaker 1: Books of the twenty first Century so Far and was
Speaker 1: widely beloved and acclaimed. So the follow up, stag Dance,
Speaker 1: is a collection of four stories, each falling into a
Speaker 1: fairly specific genre. The first, infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
Speaker 1: is spec fiction in an imagined gender apocalypse. Then there's
Speaker 1: The Chaser, a teen romance, one part Brideshead Revisited, one
Speaker 1: part a kind of literary twilight with anxiety rather than
Speaker 1: vampires and werewolves. Third is the titular Story, probably better
Speaker 1: described as a short novel about a group of restless
Speaker 1: lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit who plan
Speaker 1: a dance that some of them will volunteered to attend
Speaker 1: as women. And finally, the last story, The Masker, a
Speaker 1: horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink and difficult choices.
Speaker 1: Each of the four stories is arresting and surprising in
Speaker 1: its own way. Each plays with genre and gender with
Speaker 1: equal flare and confidence. The world is unmistakably in conversation
Speaker 1: with the shit show of contemporary politics and society, but
Speaker 1: it also sits outside and above it resolutely thrillingly its
Speaker 1: own thing. This is a book of four stories and
Speaker 1: an author with big, expansive ideas about the human experience
Speaker 1: are Michael Williams and this is Read. This the show
Speaker 1: about the books we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1: Of the four stories collected in stag Dance, both infect
Speaker 1: Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self
Speaker 1: published by Tory almost a decade ago. They were published
Speaker 1: as independent novellas part of a publishing project that Tory
Speaker 1: extended to other trans writers who were unable to find
Speaker 1: homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
Speaker 1: Tory has said she's less interested in the binary between
Speaker 1: men and women and more interested in the binary between
Speaker 1: CIS people and trans people and how false and reductive
Speaker 1: that idea is.
Speaker 2: In the book's.
Speaker 1: Acknowledgment, she refers to her never ending transition, otherwise known
Speaker 1: as ongoing trans life. I wanted to begin with the
Speaker 1: book's long gestation period and the ways in which it
Speaker 1: reflects an evolving sensibility, an ongoing transition for its author.
Speaker 1: One of the products of that of genesis for this
Speaker 1: book is that it's a decade worth of work in
Speaker 1: the one book, and I'm curious about the ways in
Speaker 1: which when you look back over those first novellas, how
Speaker 1: much your appetite for what you want to do as
Speaker 1: a writer has changed, how much your capacity for what
Speaker 1: you want to do as a writer has changed, And
Speaker 1: how hard it was not to get under the hood
Speaker 1: and tinker and rewrite your earlier self.
Speaker 3: Well had I had the permission to do so. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think I'm a better writer now. So I went
Speaker 3: back to go polish the sentences. And the thing is,
Speaker 3: in twenty sixteen, I was like angrier than I was now.
Speaker 3: I was more like kind of punk and angry, and
Speaker 3: when I started polishing it, the thing is, like, it's
Speaker 3: hard to have polish and anger at the same time.
Speaker 3: And as I started polishing the sentences, yeah, they were
Speaker 3: getting better, but they were also getting less urgent. I
Speaker 3: mean I was putting the book together in like twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, twenty twenty four, where it was pre Trump
Speaker 3: and pre what's happened in the UK, but I had
Speaker 3: like an inkling that it was coming, and I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, if I'm going to start this book with
Speaker 3: it with something, I want to hand the mic to
Speaker 3: somebody who's angry and wants to speak about it. And
Speaker 3: that's really myself from ten years before. So I actually
Speaker 3: just got rid of all my changes, went back to
Speaker 3: the original, and the original was full of typos because
Speaker 3: I was really of the belief that, like everybody should
Speaker 3: be writing, and that the idea that you have to
Speaker 3: have an immaculate page is actually a thing that keeps
Speaker 3: people away from writing.
Speaker 1: I like the typos punk and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn off the little suggestions for I
Speaker 1: am too punk for that little life.
Speaker 3: There were like some typos that were like pretty embarrassing.
Speaker 3: There was I misspelled Columbia, which is a country I
Speaker 3: now live in. I spelled it like the university, and
Speaker 3: that really kind of confused the class origins of one character.
Speaker 3: But there aren't typos in this version. But at the time,
Speaker 3: I was like, I want everybody to be writing. I
Speaker 3: want everybody to be telling their stories. And I think that, like,
Speaker 3: you know, there were people I know who didn't go
Speaker 3: to college and in fact would be anxious, you know,
Speaker 3: even just crossing a college campus. But like, I don't
Speaker 3: belong here. I do have, like, you know, a college education,
Speaker 3: and I want to be like, it doesn't matter. The
Speaker 3: reason you're writing. What writing's for is to move people,
Speaker 3: And I wanted especially a lot of the trans girls
Speaker 3: who are around me, to not feel like, oh, if
Speaker 3: it's not super polished, I can't put it into the world.
Speaker 3: It's like, no, you're mad, You've got something to say,
Speaker 3: put it in the world. And this is going to
Speaker 3: be example of that.
Speaker 1: I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightly voice
Speaker 1: and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
Speaker 1: they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3: Well, I think this election has a series of different voices.
Speaker 3: But I do think that I developed a kind of
Speaker 3: sensibility out of that, which has to do with not
Speaker 3: explaining myself very much. By the time I was writing
Speaker 3: d Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights
Speaker 3: with other trans women. I wasn't like, sort of starry
Speaker 3: eyed about the idea of easy solidarity along identity lines.
Speaker 3: You know. I understood that communities aren't constantly falling apart.
Speaker 3: People are having difficult times. And also I've ran into
Speaker 3: plenty of trans people who don't like my writing, you know,
Speaker 3: So it was like, I can't say I write for
Speaker 3: all trans people except for the like you know, thirty
Speaker 3: percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So, you know,
Speaker 3: I began to think more about kind of affinity and
Speaker 3: writing for people with whom I have affinity, and also
Speaker 3: the fact that like a lot of the books that
Speaker 3: I was reading when I was reading The Transition Baby,
Speaker 3: were by this woman a little bit older than me.
Speaker 3: That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big,
Speaker 3: and I realized, I'm reading all these books by like
Speaker 3: divorce This women because divorced This women especially went through
Speaker 3: something like a transition. They had to start their lives
Speaker 3: over and like not get better. And so I began
Speaker 3: to sort of think about writing as when I say
Speaker 3: it's like to move people, it's also sometimes to speak back.
Speaker 3: You know, early on, I wanted to speak back to
Speaker 3: all the trans women around me. I slowly began to
Speaker 3: want to speak back to these Divorced This women who
Speaker 3: were writing books where they were asking questions just like
Speaker 3: mine but slightly scance, and I wanted to be like, well,
Speaker 3: look at my perspective, and that sort of decision to
Speaker 3: speak back, but also to speak back without necessarily always
Speaker 3: explaining myself as though I'm the outsider.
Speaker 2: It's my favorite thing about your writing.
Speaker 1: And it hit me with The Transition Baby, which was
Speaker 1: the first of yours that I read, but is the
Speaker 1: exhilarating thing of the confidence of saying, no, this is
Speaker 1: the world the story exists in, and it's your job.
Speaker 1: Whether it's lumberjack slang or whether it's whether it's the
Speaker 1: very particular conversations going on in the trans family in
Speaker 1: New York, whatever it is, you can be a radar
Speaker 1: wherever and catch up with this your own space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, I give I think I give
Speaker 3: readers credit for being able to do it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically
Speaker 3: be like, let me slow down for you and and
Speaker 3: essentially ruin the momentum of a story because I actually
Speaker 3: think you're like too stupid to understand it. You know.
Speaker 3: I tend to give my readers credit. There was like
Speaker 3: a really funny tweet when you Transition Baby came out
Speaker 3: of like this grandfather sending his gay grandson like a
Speaker 3: series of what is a twink? What is a bareback? Like?
Speaker 3: What is like all these different you know, and it
Speaker 3: was like that's what I want. You know. It's like, look,
Speaker 3: you have resources for figuring out that grandpa his resource
Speaker 3: was apparently his grandson by.
Speaker 1: Text, but you know you can probably history that his grandson.
Speaker 2: It's probably the best.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was really like I don't know, I
Speaker 3: just give I give people credit for and I think
Speaker 3: that sensibility shows up, you know, even now where it's
Speaker 3: like in this new book, the biggest piece in it
Speaker 3: is written in lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all,
Speaker 3: and so people are like, oh, you didn't explain the
Speaker 3: trans terms, and it's like, well, I don't even explain
Speaker 3: obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know, and that
Speaker 3: some of it has given me the confidence to basically
Speaker 3: be like you just get in it, you go hard,
Speaker 3: and that actually if you're doing that people, people will
Speaker 3: keep up, whether you're doing trans brook line or whether
Speaker 3: you're doing turn of the century lumberjack dances.
Speaker 1: This is a digression, but I'm curious as a rader,
Speaker 1: is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
Speaker 1: you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
Speaker 1: work to meet them?
Speaker 3: I mean, sometimes, you know, I think that the thing
Speaker 3: is like I've been trained to have the books be
Speaker 3: easy for me, and I've been trained by school to
Speaker 3: think if I don't understand every single word, I'm like
Speaker 3: somehow fail the book, and I think that that's not
Speaker 3: a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me, like with
Speaker 3: the Lumberjack stuff, that like, I read this book the
Speaker 3: way that I felt when I was a kid, when
Speaker 3: you're reading a book when you're a kid and you
Speaker 3: just like don't know one word persons. The most magical
Speaker 3: reading I had for myself as a kid was oftentimes
Speaker 3: where I was like trying so hard to build a
Speaker 3: world and being like I think this is what that
Speaker 3: word means. I think this is what that world. But
Speaker 3: there was like all this possibility and all this texture
Speaker 3: to it. And my joke is that like, oftentimes when
Speaker 3: you don't understand things that people are telling you, you'll
Speaker 3: pay attention to so much more things and you end
Speaker 3: up with a much more textured experience. When I go
Speaker 3: to the car mechanic, you know, he opens up the
Speaker 3: hood of the car and he's like your alternator is
Speaker 3: something something with the camshaft or this or that, and
Speaker 3: it's like I'm struggling to understand what you're selling me.
Speaker 3: But I sure do know that I'm at the car
Speaker 3: mechanic right now. The experience of being at the car
Speaker 3: mechanic is incredibly vivid because I have so little idea
Speaker 3: what you're saying. That is actually a really interesting experience
Speaker 3: in language that is not so frequently captured in what
Speaker 3: is often valued in language right now, which is either
Speaker 3: language that is quite transparent or readers that are so
Speaker 3: knowledgeable that they can read a whole passage of Joyce
Speaker 3: and know every single reference. There's something interesting about struggling
Speaker 3: and about creating context and texture and possibilities that might
Speaker 3: not exactly be what the author is saying, or that
Speaker 3: might not be like correct.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways you get to do exactly
Speaker 1: that so effectively in stag dance is through genre as well.
Speaker 1: Like so you mentioned speculative fiction, but you know there's
Speaker 1: also horror, there's teen romance.
Speaker 2: By playing with genre, you've got convention.
Speaker 1: Which helps set up expectation, and then you've got freedom
Speaker 1: to take that way you take it.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely right, it's very well said. Some of it
Speaker 3: is that, like these genres have been so developed that
Speaker 3: it saves me a lot of work in in fact,
Speaker 3: your finds and loved ones, Like, there are these guys
Speaker 3: on the road who are like hunting the main character.
Speaker 3: It's like, if you've read The Road by CORNK. McCarthy,
Speaker 3: if you've seen Mad Max or whatever, like, you don't
Speaker 3: really need to explain their motivations. You can just be
Speaker 3: like their hunters on the road, just like gesture that
Speaker 3: was great. That would have been a whole chapter of
Speaker 3: explaining something that everybody already knows. And I can just
Speaker 3: sort of like point over there and be like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know those guys and then get on with what
Speaker 3: I care about, which is the relationship between the two
Speaker 3: women in the book, which you know, there are people
Speaker 3: who want to know everything about those hunters on the
Speaker 3: Road and they want to know that entire world. And
Speaker 3: I discovered I'm not that kind of writer.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
Speaker 1: set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
Speaker 3: I like the fact that teens don't know anything that
Speaker 3: sounds condescending, by I mean it actually with a lot
Speaker 3: of respect. At the time, like you know, people were
Speaker 3: talking about trans stuff and it was just nobody was
Speaker 3: hearing each other. Everybody had their sort of arguments that
Speaker 3: they'd already predigested, and they're just sort of like bumping
Speaker 3: their predigested arguments into each other. When it came to
Speaker 3: trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything. And
Speaker 3: I was thinking about the last time that happened, I think,
Speaker 3: you know, in a massive way in the United States,
Speaker 3: was over the Vietnam War, and that out of that
Speaker 3: came new journalism, where journalists were sort of like, I
Speaker 3: can't tell you facts and figures anymore because nobody believes them.
Speaker 3: There's no shared reality and these kinds of facts, and
Speaker 3: so journalists started taking the techniques of novelists Joan Diddyon,
Speaker 3: Tom Wolf, Gayta Lease, and they started writing sort of
Speaker 3: things that were like, let me just try and get
Speaker 3: to an emotional truth and then never mind all of
Speaker 3: the facts and figures around it. Something similar has happened
Speaker 3: with not just trans stuff, but with any kind of
Speaker 3: identity sort of thing. As soon as a reader says
Speaker 3: this is a story about misogyny, everyone's sort of got
Speaker 3: this liberal arts discourse, the analysis that can just be
Speaker 3: snapped onto it. This is a story about homophobia snaps
Speaker 3: in place. You know, certainly transphobia the same thing, and
Speaker 3: so one of the things that was fun was writing
Speaker 3: number one is fun to write from the perspective of
Speaker 3: like a bro. That was fun and like having a
Speaker 3: bro who didn't know anything about his own emotions. But
Speaker 3: then two, to not have him understand his own feelings
Speaker 3: meant that if he doesn't know what he's feeling exactly,
Speaker 3: it's harder for a reader to come in with their
Speaker 3: predigested analysis, and then you just have to feel what
Speaker 3: he's feeling. So the teen romance story was is a
Speaker 3: story of a kind of bro athlete. Cis white guy
Speaker 3: who starts hooking up with his roommate and it's unclear
Speaker 3: what his roommate is. They end up treating each other cruelly.
Speaker 3: They love each other. He can't admit that he loves
Speaker 3: his roommate, but they love each other. And you know,
Speaker 3: you could say, like, well, is he cruel and in
Speaker 3: love because he thinks that Robbie is a boy and
Speaker 3: he's secretly gay and this is a homophobic story. Is
Speaker 3: he cruel because Robbie's very feminine and disdains femininity and
Speaker 3: this is a story of misogyny. If you know that
Speaker 3: this is written by Tory, you could say, well, maybe
Speaker 3: Robbie's a pre transition trans girl, and this is a
Speaker 3: story of transphobia, but actually it's all of those things
Speaker 3: and none of those things all at once, and so
Speaker 3: you actually just get to sort of the emotions that
Speaker 3: this character is going through without quite being able to
Speaker 3: name them, and therefore you can't sort of bring a
Speaker 3: lot of your pre digestive analysis to what's happening. And
Speaker 3: my hope then is what you discover is the character
Speaker 3: who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie, the feminine roommate,
Speaker 3: has all the things that the strong cis character is
Speaker 3: supposed to have. That character has agency, that character is
Speaker 3: able to state his desires, able to sort of carry
Speaker 3: through a plan, And the character who's supposed to be
Speaker 3: the sort of like strong centered character has all the
Speaker 3: hallmarks of a trans character. Where there's a big gap
Speaker 3: between how he wants to be and how the world
Speaker 3: perceives him, and he's trying to close that gap through performance,
Speaker 3: through like acting out in a certain way. He's full
Speaker 3: of shame, he's sort of stuck in that he knows
Speaker 3: he needs to make some sort of big move, but
Speaker 3: he can't make that big move, and as a result,
Speaker 3: both love and sex are closed off to him and
Speaker 3: the way they might be to somebody who is trans
Speaker 3: but pre transition or something that like those things that
Speaker 3: are supposed to be trans are actually things that the
Speaker 3: Cis character goes through, which is kind of my larger
Speaker 3: point that like, we're all we're all kind of going
Speaker 3: through this stuff.
Speaker 1: I think that's what I love about that story is
Speaker 1: the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters,
Speaker 1: but it is also an active engagement with your readers
Speaker 1: and their expectation of what they get from a Tory
Speaker 1: Peters story as well. That in this collection, And I
Speaker 1: might be wrong, but I would say you can come
Speaker 1: on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
Speaker 1: who identify as trans. That doesn't mean that their relationship
Speaker 1: to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff
Speaker 1: isn't actively in play. But it's not about self identified
Speaker 1: trans identity as such.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm actually very uninterested in trans identity. The longer
Speaker 3: I've been trans, the less I know what it means
Speaker 3: to be trans. And for me, being trans is like
Speaker 3: I'm kind of standing with a bunch of other people
Speaker 3: and we have each other's box. You know in a
Speaker 3: sort of political way, but in a sort of like
Speaker 3: ontological like are we the same in some like you know,
Speaker 3: deep deep way, Like no, I don't necessarily see that
Speaker 3: we are. This person has come from the east and
Speaker 3: I have come from the west, and you know, I
Speaker 3: have people arriving at this place from all cardinal directions,
Speaker 3: from all different types of experiences metaphorically speaking, and I
Speaker 3: don't understand many other people's experiences. I don't understand, Like
Speaker 3: you call yourself trans, but like it was because you
Speaker 3: talk to your therapist and your therapist suggested it and
Speaker 3: it sounded good to you. Well, like that sounds totally
Speaker 3: alien to me given my experience in somebody else's experience
Speaker 3: and what I've been through sounds totally alien and weird
Speaker 3: to them other than we're all here. So I don't
Speaker 3: really know what it means to be trans. And then
Speaker 3: once I say I don't really know what it means
Speaker 3: to be trans, then it doesn't really matter whether you
Speaker 3: call yourself trans or not. I'm just kind of interested
Speaker 3: in the experience of, oh, you have weird gender feelings,
Speaker 3: and you're like interested in essentially having my back or
Speaker 3: me having or back or us understanding each other. So
Speaker 3: I don't really care what you call it. I'm just
Speaker 3: interested in what those experiences might be that they got
Speaker 3: you here. Recently, I ended up on a reddit that
Speaker 3: had to do with ozimpic and making your own ozimpic
Speaker 3: or your own GLP one, whatever those things are, and
Speaker 3: the formats in the reddit discussions we're almost the same
Speaker 3: as what you find in a transreddit. Whereas before and
Speaker 3: after photos arguments about whether or not one should conform
Speaker 3: to these conventional beauty standards, the transversion is like, why
Speaker 3: should I have to pass? Why should I not get
Speaker 3: to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I have
Speaker 3: to take hormones? Why should you have to take hormones
Speaker 3: to be trans? All these things? So the experiences are
Speaker 3: like emotionally so resonant, and the identities had nothing to
Speaker 3: do with one another. I feel the same thing when
Speaker 3: I look at so many of the men that are
Speaker 3: out in the world today, where I'm like, you're really
Speaker 3: mad because you want to be seen and with your
Speaker 3: gender in a certain way, and you're failing at this
Speaker 3: gender and it hurts your feelings and you're mad about it.
Speaker 3: You want to be a rugged man, and then you
Speaker 3: go on the dating apps and everybody sells your four
Speaker 3: inches too short, and you're furious about it, and so
Speaker 3: you go and you get like a home construction supplies
Speaker 3: that you stack around you to sort of compensate for that,
Speaker 3: you know, and I'm making fun of it, but like,
Speaker 3: that's also the trans experience. You feel like your body
Speaker 3: doesn't do a certain thing you wish it would, and
Speaker 3: you get a bunch of accouterments to surround you to
Speaker 3: make it look a certain way. We're all doing it,
Speaker 3: We're all kind of failing at it. And I'm interested
Speaker 3: in the people who have the guts to look at
Speaker 3: this and be like, what's going on? Or many of
Speaker 3: the characters in these stories, I think I'm seeing them
Speaker 3: through that lens rather than through like naming them along
Speaker 3: their identity.
Speaker 2: I really love that.
Speaker 1: But I wonder how complicated that is. By becoming the
Speaker 1: visible face of trans literature and the representative voice of
Speaker 1: you know, the ways in which you are claimed by
Speaker 1: others or stuff is ascribed to you. After the success
Speaker 1: of d Transition, Baby, does it make it that much
Speaker 1: harder not to have to be the good trans voice,
Speaker 1: the giver of advice?
Speaker 2: Do you think about yourself.
Speaker 1: Differently off the back of the stratospheric fame that is
Speaker 1: D Transition Baby.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that the nice thing is that D
Speaker 3: Transition Baby did well enough that the publishers gave a
Speaker 3: bunch of other trans women a chance. I can think
Speaker 3: of like fifteen other trans women who have books out
Speaker 3: in the States this spring. I can think of a
Speaker 3: handful of others in the UK. I wish I was
Speaker 3: more up to date on who's getting published here in Australia,
Speaker 3: and I apologize for not knowing that. But the more
Speaker 3: people that there are out there, the more I get
Speaker 3: to be my own idiosyncratic weirdo, you know. And that's
Speaker 3: the freedom I want for myself. And I think that
Speaker 3: while I was doing Detransition, maybe I had to be
Speaker 3: a little bit more buttoned up. But the success of
Speaker 3: it has opened up things enough that I can just
Speaker 3: point to other people. You want a story about that
Speaker 3: kind of representation, here's five, right. I mean, we haven't
Speaker 3: even talked about the Lumberjacks story, but I think nobody
Speaker 3: would say, like, the representative story of the trans experience
Speaker 3: in the twenty first century and the United States is
Speaker 3: a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance,
Speaker 3: wearing triangles over their crouches like that's not and that's sort.
Speaker 1: Of all I think they're saying it now, and I'm
Speaker 1: sorry about that. Coming up after the break, Tory reveals
Speaker 1: the genesis behind her title story and explains why you
Speaker 1: have to truly love someone to be cruel to them.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back.
Speaker 3: Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings that
Speaker 3: held fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and
Speaker 3: saw that he was potlatching with Mikels and stubbed Nelson,
Speaker 3: and the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure.
Speaker 3: It was Lison, a pretty whistle punk from somewhere in Scandinhouvia.
Speaker 3: Old timber beasts like Mickels took a special pleasure in
Speaker 3: ordering Lison about making him scamper to fetch this or that.
Speaker 3: But at night Lison liked to do a strange thing.
Speaker 3: While other men sprawled down to roll the guff, Lison
Speaker 3: would pull out a little book. He had a diary
Speaker 3: of sorts, filled with blank pages, and without asking leave,
Speaker 3: he'd select a man and begin to sketch him, holding
Speaker 3: a pencil in his fine, slim hands that made a
Speaker 3: set with the fine bones of his cheek and jaw,
Speaker 3: which slanted at just the same angle as his glinting
Speaker 3: eyes as he stared brazen at his chosen jack. He
Speaker 3: never once selected me for his drawing diary, which I
Speaker 3: told myself was no matter, because in fact his sauciness
Speaker 3: disturbed me, or rather I was disturbed by the unctious
Speaker 3: temptation it engendered in me, a queer need, like how
Speaker 3: it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even
Speaker 3: as you know somewhere in near mind you must have
Speaker 3: the word that you don't lack it at all, only
Speaker 3: its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leson's presence,
Speaker 3: which made the needy lacking feeling worse, and my stiltness
Speaker 3: clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a
Speaker 3: saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, And
Speaker 3: him being so amused that me struck me as ever,
Speaker 3: the more saucy.
Speaker 1: We couldn't resist giving you a taste of the lumberjack
Speaker 1: slang that defines the title story of this book, stag Dance.
Speaker 1: It's tory giving it a raid and the story's the
Speaker 1: longest in the collection. It's also maybe the most fun.
Speaker 1: Tory Flex's impressive skills as a stylist, and the whole
Speaker 1: thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious. To fully
Speaker 1: appreciate the complexity of this story, I asked Tori too
Speaker 1: set up for the genesis behind stag dance.
Speaker 3: A stag dance is something that men would do when
Speaker 3: they were working camps that were like all male, like
Speaker 3: mining camps, rail camps, some Civil war battalions, and logging camps,
Speaker 3: like way out in the woods. They'd be working all men,
Speaker 3: they get lonely and they would put on dances where
Speaker 3: some of the men would attend the dance as women,
Speaker 3: and the logger specifically would cut a triangle of brown
Speaker 3: fabric like maybe three inches to a highpot noose and
Speaker 3: they would turn it upside dowance was inverted, and then
Speaker 3: they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is probably evident
Speaker 3: to anybody listening to this podcast, and then they would
Speaker 3: go to the dance as women. And I was just like,
Speaker 3: I love this because I mean not this is just
Speaker 3: like so on the nose where it's like this is
Speaker 3: transition like broken down to its like most basic symbol,
Speaker 3: but also the fact there's like an upside down triangle
Speaker 3: which has resonances with like the Second World War, with
Speaker 3: like the reclaimed upside down triangle, and like HIV activism.
Speaker 3: And here it was like with lumberjacks doing it.
Speaker 1: So so weird that history, and how like if you'd
Speaker 1: made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3: Contrived totally, it would have been like, oh, come on, Tory,
Speaker 3: like but it was like, no, they did that. And
Speaker 3: so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in the
Speaker 3: States there's this tradition of tall tales and one of
Speaker 3: them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the greatest
Speaker 3: lagger in the country. If you like drive to certain
Speaker 3: parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on the
Speaker 3: roadside stands, you'll see the statue of this like big
Speaker 3: bearded man and like a red flannel with an axe,
Speaker 3: and that's Paul Bunyan, the greatest, strongest, and he was like,
Speaker 3: you know, a giant, and he had a giant also,
Speaker 3: a giant blue ox named Babe. So the main cacharacter
Speaker 3: my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a nickname
Speaker 3: given to him by other loggers because he's as tall
Speaker 3: and as good with an ax as Paul Bunyan, and
Speaker 3: he's as ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a face
Speaker 3: like Paul Bunyan's, a big blue ox. And the story
Speaker 3: is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to go
Speaker 3: to the stag Dance as one of the women, and
Speaker 3: like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray
Speaker 3: and he ends up in like a rivalry with like
Speaker 3: the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things kind
Speaker 3: of just go from there.
Speaker 1: It's such a wonderful story and such an exciting kind
Speaker 1: of shift from you as a writer as well, because
Speaker 1: while it carries all the hallmarks of what at this
Speaker 1: point two books and we've come to know and love
Speaker 1: as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And
Speaker 1: that's partly about language and partly about the voice you've found.
Speaker 2: How did you find your way into that.
Speaker 3: Vo Well, I was I was building a sauna in
Speaker 3: the woods.
Speaker 2: Good. That was exactly what I thought, So.
Speaker 3: I, like, you know, there were a couple of things
Speaker 3: up and like the sort of reception to de Transition
Speaker 3: Baby was a little bit overwhelming, and I like, I
Speaker 3: had a couple different responses to that. One was to
Speaker 3: start spending more time out of the city. And I
Speaker 3: got really into sauna, the proper Finnish style sauna, like
Speaker 3: what makes for a good sauna. So I decided I
Speaker 3: was going to build a really good, finish sauna. And
Speaker 3: I don't know that much about construction or anything, so
Speaker 3: I started learning about tools, and then also I had
Speaker 3: to start like learning a chainsaw to clear a place
Speaker 3: with the sauna, and also to make firewoods. I began
Speaker 3: like learning that's a spruce, that's a maple, that's you know,
Speaker 3: learning my trees. So the area in which I was
Speaker 3: doing it was a former logging country, and I was
Speaker 3: dirty and I was uncomfortable all the time, and I
Speaker 3: was a little bit like thinking about my gender as
Speaker 3: I was in the woods, like I'm doing this these
Speaker 3: very typically masculine things of cutting down trees with chainsaws,
Speaker 3: and how do I feel about my gender? So that
Speaker 3: was on my mind, and I was also feeling like
Speaker 3: all of this pressure to follow up the Transition Baby
Speaker 3: in a sort of you know, domestic comedy kind of sphere.
Speaker 3: And not feeling like I had the thing to follow
Speaker 3: it up. And then I was thinking also kind of
Speaker 3: like about what if I just did a really different voice,
Speaker 3: maybe that would free me up. And then I found
Speaker 3: this book published in nineteen forty one, and it's a
Speaker 3: collection of logger slang collected by the children of bloggers,
Speaker 3: which I normally would have like totally ignored, except that
Speaker 3: I was building the sona and thinking about logging, and
Speaker 3: the language was so interesting and weird. You know, I'm
Speaker 3: used to sort of like cowboy language and as an
Speaker 3: American or like other language, but it was something like
Speaker 3: really different and just like totally gone. And so the
Speaker 3: examples of words would be, like, I mean, the one
Speaker 3: I always say because it's sort of easy to see
Speaker 3: just like the weird patterns of thought that are behind it.
Speaker 3: There's cackleberry for an egg, because like a hen cackles
Speaker 3: and then it lays an egg and need to like
Speaker 3: find it and pick it like a berry, So that's
Speaker 3: your cackleberry. A preacher is a sky pilot because they
Speaker 3: guides you to heaven. Your hand is a lunch hook
Speaker 3: because you sort of scoop your lunch and hook it
Speaker 3: into your mouth. Chewing tobacco is Scandahoovian dynamite. I don't
Speaker 3: know why they say Scanda Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but
Speaker 3: it's just really fun. There were so many strange expressions
Speaker 3: that just felt like very lived in. Like when you
Speaker 3: had dinner with like all the other men, it was
Speaker 3: a symphony in tin because everybody's just they're eating so
Speaker 3: fast with their tin dishes that there's just the sound
Speaker 3: of tin on tin. Yeah. I read it, and I
Speaker 3: was like, I see how it's to live this. So
Speaker 3: I was like looking to follow up interested in logging,
Speaker 3: and I was also under all these expectations to follow up.
Speaker 3: And I was like, well, what if I just wrote
Speaker 3: a book in logger slang and came up with like
Speaker 3: a lagger dialect. Nobody's expecting it, probably nobody wants it,
Speaker 3: And in a weird way, that like frees me up
Speaker 3: to like actually have fun again writing. And so I
Speaker 3: started it, and I kind of wanted to do like
Speaker 3: an Americana syntax, like you know, something somewhere between like
Speaker 3: Melville and Cornick McCarthy, like that's sort of like King
Speaker 3: James rhythms, but like didn't quite get it right. And
Speaker 3: so I found this weird syntax and cadence and put
Speaker 3: all those pieces together and found that I was just
Speaker 3: like having a really good time.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so good to read. And that language has
Speaker 1: this kind of baroque play to it. That's a odds
Speaker 1: with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism that
Speaker 1: the two pull in opposite. On the one hand, you
Speaker 1: have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin, and
Speaker 1: then you have people who you assume are conditioned not
Speaker 1: to say what they want or need or who they are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually
Speaker 3: give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like
Speaker 3: the access of language actually had to do with some
Speaker 3: part of like his muteness around his desires. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like I can say all these things, but I'm
Speaker 3: like circling around the thing that I actually wanted. The
Speaker 3: like flowardness of everything around it kind of shows what
Speaker 3: is difficult to say or what needs to be sort
Speaker 3: of said in new ways.
Speaker 1: A few times before, you mentioned characters being cruel to
Speaker 1: one another, and actually, I think across all your work,
Speaker 1: you're one of the best writers I've ever read on
Speaker 1: the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in
Speaker 1: which the two of them are part of the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you have to like love somebody in
Speaker 3: a certain way to be like truly cruel to them,
Speaker 3: or at least you have to understand them, and like
Speaker 3: certainly I think that like cruelty has an aspect of
Speaker 3: betrayal to it, and you know, to be betrayed, you
Speaker 3: have to like trust and know somebody. I think for
Speaker 3: something like Detransition Baby, the structuring relationship is like mothers
Speaker 3: and daughters, but for this book, I would say it's sisters,
Speaker 3: and the ways that like your sister is the person
Speaker 3: who you go to who can understand you, who comes
Speaker 3: from where you come from, has seen you from when
Speaker 3: you're young. If you make a change, they're like, well,
Speaker 3: that's you now, but I know everywhere you've come from,
Speaker 3: and there's like a such a safety in that. But
Speaker 3: also that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the
Speaker 3: person who can betray you, who can can knife you
Speaker 3: most cruelly. And so almost everybody in the book, no
Speaker 3: matter their gender, they end up as sisters, like Babe
Speaker 3: Bunyan and Lison, who's like the pretty boy in camp.
Speaker 3: It's meant to be a little bit funny that there's
Speaker 3: this you know, big strong logger and he's essentially sisterly
Speaker 3: with the young.
Speaker 1: Pretty boy, and never more sisterly than when ultimately they're
Speaker 1: in competition. Yes, that that becomes the micro of acceptance.
Speaker 1: Isn't solidarity, it's recognition of rivalry.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The character says like, to be rivals is to be
Speaker 3: something the same, you know that, And he's almost proud
Speaker 3: when he can be in the same league of contention
Speaker 3: as Lison. They end up competing for the affections of
Speaker 3: the camp boss. And I do think that that's oftentimes, like,
Speaker 3: you know, the way that desire triangulates, like, well, how
Speaker 3: do I know if I'm pretty, the prettier girl is
Speaker 3: looking for this guy, and so if I get the guide,
Speaker 3: no matter what people say about me, if I get
Speaker 3: the guy, I must ergo be the prettiest. Really, what
Speaker 3: I'm talking about underneath all of it is my relationships
Speaker 3: with other trans women, you know, and like the ways
Speaker 3: that we negotiate what it means to be trans, what
Speaker 3: it means to be feminine. The scarcity of resources that
Speaker 3: are available for us trans women are my sisters, and
Speaker 3: they are also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 1: I knew after D Transition Baby, I wanted to read
Speaker 1: anything you write after stag Dance. I now can no
Speaker 1: longer confidently say what a Tory Peter's novel looks like,
Speaker 1: but I know I want to read it even more
Speaker 1: than ever. It's been such a trait to have you
Speaker 1: in here today.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Tory Peter's latest book is Stag Dance. It's available everywhere
Speaker 1: now and if you haven't yet read D Transition Baby,
Speaker 1: go back to that as well. It is excellent And
Speaker 1: if you're in or around Sydney, Tory will be at
Speaker 1: Sydney Riders Festival this weekend SWF dot org dot au.
Speaker 1: Before we get out of here, I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know what else I've been reading this week, and
Speaker 1: longtime listeners to the show might know that I am
Speaker 1: a bit of a crime fiction junkie. I couldn't resist
Speaker 1: picking up the new Dovla mctannan. She's Perth based, Irish born.
Speaker 1: She's returned to her detective hero Cormack Riley with this.
Speaker 1: It's the fourth Comack Riley book. It's called The Unquiet
Speaker 1: Grave and it's terrific. It's available at your local independent
Speaker 1: bookstore or library. That's it for this week's show. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and
Speaker 1: review us. It helps a lot read. This is a
Speaker 1: Schwarz Media production, made possible by the generous support of
Speaker 1: our A group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames,
Speaker 1: with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalt
Speaker 1: and Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by Posey mcacky. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening, See you next week.