Speaker 1: Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with
Speaker 1: best selling author Tory Peters. As always, Michael is here
Speaker 1: to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones, welcome back.
Speaker 1: It's great to be back, so Michael. Today's guest Tory Peters.
Speaker 1: She burst onto the scene with her debut novel in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, and since then, with Trump's reelection as
Speaker 1: US president, there have been all of these attacks on
Speaker 1: civil liberties, and the assault on trans rights across American
Speaker 1: society has been particularly horrifying and far reaching. So what
Speaker 1: does that mean for trans artists who are working in
Speaker 1: the US today?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really good question, Ruby. How does one
Speaker 2: go about producing new work that manages to be personal
Speaker 2: and political and provocative but also unabashed, that doesn't feel
Speaker 2: like it has to represent an entire community or be
Speaker 2: consumed by trauma, or has some responsibility to respond to
Speaker 2: this kind of incredibly malignant government that's denying your very existence.
Speaker 2: It's a horrifying thought. But you know, like I do,
Speaker 2: believe that great art thrives in response to tyranny, and
Speaker 2: great artists find ways to do what they do, to
Speaker 2: be funny, to be fierce, to be themselves in the
Speaker 2: face of these terrible external forces. And Tory Peters epitomizes
Speaker 2: that idea. She completely understands the weight of expectation. But
Speaker 2: her new book shows that she is a great artist
Speaker 2: and capable at once of these kind of really serious
Speaker 2: ideas but also just tremendous fun You mentioned her twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one novel Detransition Baby. That was this kind of
Speaker 2: huge publishing sensation, and it was a kind of mainstream
Speaker 2: literary success. It won all these wards and accolades. The
Speaker 2: New York Times said it was one of the great
Speaker 2: books of the twenty first century already, and it was
Speaker 2: a wonderful book. But can only imagine the pressure that
Speaker 2: puts on a writer to follow it up. What do
Speaker 2: they come out with for the next book, How do
Speaker 2: they manage to be both a significant trans writer and
Speaker 2: also a significant writer regardless of questions of gender and context.
Speaker 1: Right, And now, of course comes Tory's second book, stag Dance,
Speaker 1: which is actually a collection of stories. So can you
Speaker 1: tell me a bit about them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So, stag Dance is a collection of four stories,
Speaker 2: and each one falls into a fairly specific genre. So
Speaker 2: the first one is called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
Speaker 2: and that one's kind of spec fiction. There's this imagined
Speaker 2: gender apocalypse. Then the second story is called The Chaser,
Speaker 2: and it's a kind of teen romance that owes as
Speaker 2: much to kind of Brideshead Revisited as it does to
Speaker 2: let's say, Twilight. But don't worry, no vampires or wear
Speaker 2: wolves here. It's just gender anxiety all the way. Then
Speaker 2: the third story in the collection is the titular Story,
Speaker 2: and that one's basically a short novel. Stag Dance is
Speaker 2: the story about a group of lumberjacks who are planning
Speaker 2: a dance where some of them are going to attend
Speaker 2: as women, and it's this kind of incredible story of
Speaker 2: jealousy and betrayal and identity. It's fantastic. And then the
Speaker 2: last story of the collection is called The Masker, and
Speaker 2: it's this horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink
Speaker 2: and difficult choices. Each of the four stories is incredibly
Speaker 2: arresting and entertaining, surprising in their own way. Each plays
Speaker 2: with genre and gender with equal flair and confidence. Language
Speaker 2: is absolutely on point, the voices are compelling. It's a
Speaker 2: thrilling read, and I can't recommend it highly enough. This
Speaker 2: chat was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Tory Peter's never Ending Transition.
Speaker 2: Of the four stories collected in stag Dance, both infect
Speaker 2: Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self
Speaker 2: published by Tory almost a decade ago. They were published
Speaker 2: as independent novellas part of a publishing project that Tory
Speaker 2: extended to other trans writers who are unable to find
Speaker 2: homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
Speaker 2: Tory has said she's less interested in the binary between
Speaker 2: men and women and more interested in the binary between
Speaker 2: CIS people and trans people and how false and reductive
Speaker 2: that idea is. In the book's acknowledgment, she refers to
Speaker 2: her never ending transition, otherwise known as ongoing trans life.
Speaker 2: I wanted to begin with the book's long gestation period
Speaker 2: and the ways in which it reflects an evolving sensibility,
Speaker 2: an ongoing transition for its author. One of the products
Speaker 2: of that kind of genesis for this book is that
Speaker 2: it's a decade worth of work in the one book.
Speaker 2: And I'm curious about the ways in which when you
Speaker 2: look back over those first novellas, how much your appetite
Speaker 2: for what you want to do as a writer has changed,
Speaker 2: how much your capacity for what you want to do
Speaker 2: as a writer has changed, And how hard it was
Speaker 2: not to get under the hood and tinker and rewrite
Speaker 2: 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 mean,
Speaker 3: I was putting the book together in like twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four, where you know 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 2: I like the typos of punk, and I'm not going
Speaker 2: I'm going to turn off the little suggestions. I am
Speaker 2: too punk for that little lie.
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
Speaker 3: time I was like, I want everybody to be writing.
Speaker 3: I want everybody to be telling us stories, and I
Speaker 3: think that, like, you know, there were people I know
Speaker 3: who didn't go to college and in fact would be anxious,
Speaker 3: you know, even just crossing a college campus. But like,
Speaker 3: I don't belong here. I do have, like, you know,
Speaker 3: a college education, and I want to be like, it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter the reason you're writing. What writing's for is
Speaker 3: to move people. And I wanted, especially a lot of
Speaker 3: the trans girls who are around me, to not feel like, oh,
Speaker 3: if it's not super polished, I can't put it into
Speaker 3: the world. It's like, no, you're mad, You've got something
Speaker 3: to say, put it in the world. And this is
Speaker 3: going to be example of that.
Speaker 2: I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightily voice
Speaker 2: and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
Speaker 2: they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3: Well, I think this collection 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: Due 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 CIS women 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 play like
Speaker 3: Divorced 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 women who were
Speaker 3: writing books where they were asking questions just like mine,
Speaker 3: but slightly askance, 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. And it hit me
Speaker 2: with The Transition Baby, which was the first of yours
Speaker 2: that I read, but is the exhilarating thing of the
Speaker 2: confidence of saying, no, this is the world the story
Speaker 2: exists in, and it's your job. Whether it's lumberjack slang,
Speaker 2: or whether it's whether it's the very particular conversations going
Speaker 2: on in a trans family in New York, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: you can be a reader wherever and catch up with
Speaker 2: this at your own space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, give I think I give readers
Speaker 3: credit for being able to do it. You know, I
Speaker 3: think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically be like,
Speaker 3: let me slow down for you and and essentially ruin
Speaker 3: the momentum of a story because I actually think you're
Speaker 3: like too stupid to understand it. You know, I tend
Speaker 3: to give my reader's credit. There was like a really
Speaker 3: funny tweet when you transition baby came out of like
Speaker 3: this grandfather sending his gay grandson, like a series of
Speaker 3: what is a twink? What is a bareback? Like? What
Speaker 3: is like all these different you know, and it was like,
Speaker 3: that's what I want, you know. It's like, look, you
Speaker 3: have resources for figuring out that grandpa. His resource was apparently, uh,
Speaker 3: his grandson by text.
Speaker 2: But you know you can probably history 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 it. And and
Speaker 3: I think that sensibility shows up, you know, even now
Speaker 3: where it's like in this new book, the biggest piece
Speaker 3: in it is written in lumberge slang, which I don't
Speaker 3: explain at all, and so people are like, oh, you
Speaker 3: didn't explain the trans terms. I was like, well, I
Speaker 3: don't even explain obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know,
Speaker 3: and that some of it has given me the confidence
Speaker 3: to basically be like, you just get in it, you
Speaker 3: go hard, and that actually, if you're doing that people,
Speaker 3: people will keep up, whether you're doing trans brookline or
Speaker 3: whether you're doing Turn to the Century Lumberjack dances.
Speaker 2: This is a digression. But I'm curious as a reader,
Speaker 2: is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
Speaker 2: you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
Speaker 2: work to make 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 failing the book. And I think that that's not
Speaker 3: a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me with the
Speaker 3: Lumberjack stuff that like, I read this book the way
Speaker 3: that I felt when I was a kid, when you're
Speaker 3: reading a book when you're a kid and you just
Speaker 3: like don't know one word persons. The most magical reading
Speaker 3: I had for myself as a kid was oftentimes where
Speaker 3: I was like trying so hard to build a world
Speaker 3: and being like I think this is what that word means.
Speaker 3: I think this is what that world. But there was
Speaker 3: like all this possibility and all this texture to it.
Speaker 3: And my joke is that like, oftentimes when you don't
Speaker 3: understand things that people are telling you, you'll pay attention
Speaker 3: to so much more things and you end up with
Speaker 3: a much more textured experience when I go to the
Speaker 3: car mechanic, you know, he opens up the hood of
Speaker 3: the car and he's like, your alternator is something something
Speaker 3: with the camshaft or this or that, And it's like,
Speaker 3: I'm struggling to understand what you're selling me, but I
Speaker 3: sure do know that I'm at the car mechanic right now.
Speaker 3: The experience of being at the car mechanic is incredibly
Speaker 3: vivid because I have so little idea what you're saying.
Speaker 3: That is actually a really interesting experience and language that
Speaker 3: is not so frequently captured in what is often valued
Speaker 3: in language right now, which is either language that is
Speaker 3: quite transparent or readers that are so knowledgeable that they
Speaker 3: can read a whole passage of Joyce and know every
Speaker 3: single reference. There's something interesting about struggling and about creating
Speaker 3: context and texture and possibilities that might not exactly be
Speaker 3: what the author is saying or that might not be
Speaker 3: like correct.
Speaker 2: And one of the ways you get to do exactly
Speaker 2: that so effectively in stag dance is through genre as well.
Speaker 2: Like so you mentioned speculative fiction, but you know there's
Speaker 2: also horror, there's teen romance. By playing with genre, you've
Speaker 2: got convention, which helps set up expectation, and then you've
Speaker 2: got the freedom 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's saves me a lot of work. In fact, your
Speaker 3: finds and loved ones, Like there are these guys on
Speaker 3: the Road who are like hunting the main character. It's like,
Speaker 3: if you've read The Road by CORNK. McCarthy, if you've
Speaker 3: seen Mad Max or whatever, like, you don't really need
Speaker 3: to explain their motivations. You can just be like their
Speaker 3: hunters on the road and just like gesture that was great.
Speaker 3: That would have been a whole chapter of explaining something
Speaker 3: that everybody already knows. And I can just sort of
Speaker 3: like point over there and be like, yeah, you know
Speaker 3: those guys and then get on with what I care about,
Speaker 3: which is the relationship between the two women in the book,
Speaker 3: which you know, there are people who want to know
Speaker 3: everything about those hunters on the Road and they want
Speaker 3: to know that entire world. And I discovered I'm not
Speaker 3: that kind of writer.
Speaker 2: Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
Speaker 2: 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 pre digested, and they're just sort of like
Speaker 3: bumping their predigested arguments into each other. When it came
Speaker 3: to trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about the last time that happened,
Speaker 3: I think, you know, in a massive way in the
Speaker 3: United States, was over the Vietnam War, and that out
Speaker 3: of that came new journalism, where the journalists were sort
Speaker 3: of like, I can't tell you facts and figures anymore
Speaker 3: because nobody believes them. There's no shared reality and these
Speaker 3: kinds of facts, and so journalists started taking the techniques
Speaker 3: of novelists Johan Dideon, Tom Wolf, Gayta Lease, and they
Speaker 3: started writing sort of things that were like, let me
Speaker 3: just try and get to an emotional truth and then
Speaker 3: never mind all of the facts and figures around it.
Speaker 3: Something similar has happened with not just trans stuff, but
Speaker 3: with any kind of idea sort of thing. As soon
Speaker 3: as a reader says, this is a story about misogyny,
Speaker 3: everyone's sort of got this liberal arts discourse, the analysis
Speaker 3: that can just be snapped onto it. This is a
Speaker 3: story about homophobia snaps in place. You know, certainly transphobia
Speaker 3: the same thing. And so one of the things that
Speaker 3: was fun was writing number one is fun to write
Speaker 3: from the perspective of like a bro. That was fun,
Speaker 3: and like having a bro who didn't know anything about
Speaker 3: his own emotions. But then two, to not have him
Speaker 3: understand his own feelings meant that if he doesn't know
Speaker 3: what he's feeling exactly, it's harder for a reader to
Speaker 3: come in with their predigested analysis, and then you just
Speaker 3: have to feel what he's feeling. So the teen romance
Speaker 3: story is a story of a kind of bro athlete.
Speaker 3: Cis white guy who starts hooking up with his roommate
Speaker 3: and it's clear what his roommate is. They end up
Speaker 3: treating each other cruelly. They love each other. He can't
Speaker 3: admit that he loves his roommate, but they love each other.
Speaker 3: And you know, you could say, like, well, is he
Speaker 3: cruel and in love? Because he thinks that Robbie is
Speaker 3: a boy and he's secretly gay, and this is a
Speaker 3: homophobic story. Is he cruel? Because Robbie's very feminine and
Speaker 3: he disdains femininity, and this is a story of misogyny.
Speaker 3: If you know that this is written by Tory, you
Speaker 3: could say, well, maybe Robbie's a pre transition trans girl,
Speaker 3: and this is a story of transphobia. But actually it's
Speaker 3: all of those things and none of those things all
Speaker 3: at once, And so you actually just get to sort
Speaker 3: of the emotions that this character is going through without
Speaker 3: quite being able to name them, and therefore you can't
Speaker 3: sort of bring a lot of your pre digestive analyses
Speaker 3: to what's happening. And my hope then is what you
Speaker 3: discover is the character who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie,
Speaker 3: the feminine roommate, as all the things that the strong
Speaker 3: cis character is supposed to have. That character has agency,
Speaker 3: that character is able to state his desires, able to
Speaker 3: sort of carry through a plan, and the character who's
Speaker 3: supposed to be the sort of like strong centered character
Speaker 3: has all the hallmarks of a trans character where there's
Speaker 3: a big gap between how he wants to be and
Speaker 3: how the world perceives him, and he's trying to close
Speaker 3: that gap through performance, through like acting out in a
Speaker 3: certain way. He's full of shame, he's sort of stuck
Speaker 3: in that. He knows he needs to make some sort
Speaker 3: of big move, but he can't make that big move,
Speaker 3: and as a result, both love and sex are closed
Speaker 3: off to him and the way they might be to
Speaker 3: somebody who is trans but pre transition or something like that,
Speaker 3: Like those things that are supposed to be trans are
Speaker 3: actually things that the Cis character goes through, which is
Speaker 3: kind of my larger point that we're all kind of
Speaker 3: going through this stuff.
Speaker 2: I think that's what I love about that story is
Speaker 2: the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters,
Speaker 2: but it is also an active engagement with your readers
Speaker 2: and their expectation of what they get from a Tory
Speaker 2: Peters story as well. That in this collection, and I
Speaker 2: might be wrong, but I would say you can count
Speaker 2: on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
Speaker 2: who identify as trans. That doesn't mean that their relationship
Speaker 2: to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff
Speaker 2: isn't actively in play, But it's not about self identified
Speaker 2: 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: antological 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, and 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 your 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: I had to do with ozimpic and making your own
Speaker 3: ozimpic or your own GLP one, whatever those things are,
Speaker 3: and the formats in the reddit discussions we're almost the
Speaker 3: same as what you find in a transreddit. Whereas before
Speaker 3: and after photos arguments about whether or not one should
Speaker 3: conform to these conventional beauty standards, the transversion is like,
Speaker 3: why should I have to pass? Why should I not
Speaker 3: get to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I
Speaker 3: have to take hormones? Why should you have to take
Speaker 3: hormones to be trans? All these things? So the experiences
Speaker 3: are like emotionally so resonant, and the identities have nothing
Speaker 3: to do with one another. I feel the same thing
Speaker 3: when I look at so many of the men that
Speaker 3: are out in the world today where I'm like, you're
Speaker 3: really mad because you want to be seen and with
Speaker 3: your gender in a certain way, and you're failing at
Speaker 3: this gender and it hurts your feelings and you're mad
Speaker 3: about it. You want to be a rugged man. And
Speaker 3: then you go on the dating apps and everybody says
Speaker 3: you're four inches too short, and you're furious about it,
Speaker 3: and so you go and you get like a home
Speaker 3: construction supply so that you stack around you to sort
Speaker 3: of compensate for that, you know, And I'm making fun
Speaker 3: of it, but like, that's also the trans experience. You
Speaker 3: feel like your body doesn't do a certain thing you
Speaker 3: wish it would, and you get a bunch of accouterments
Speaker 3: to surround you to make it look a certain way.
Speaker 3: We're all doing it. We're all kind of failing at it.
Speaker 3: And I'm interested in the people who have the guts
Speaker 3: to look at this and be like, what's going on?
Speaker 3: Or many of the characters in these stories, I think
Speaker 3: I'm seeing them through that lens rather than through like
Speaker 3: naming them along their identity.
Speaker 2: I really love that, But I wonder how complicated that is.
Speaker 2: By becoming the visible face of trans literature and the
Speaker 2: representative voice of you know, the ways in which you
Speaker 2: are claimed yeah by others, or stuff is ascribed to you.
Speaker 2: After the success of D Transition Baby, does it make
Speaker 2: it that much harder not to have to be the
Speaker 2: good trans voice, the giver of advice? Do you think
Speaker 2: about yourself differently off the back of the stratospheric fame
Speaker 2: that is 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 D Transition Baby, I had to
Speaker 3: be a little bit more buttoned up. But the success
Speaker 3: of it has opened up things enough that I can
Speaker 3: just point to other people 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 crotches. Like that's not and that's
Speaker 3: sort of.
Speaker 2: All I think they're saying now, and I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 2: Coming up after the break, Tory reveals the genesis behind
Speaker 2: her title story and explains why you have to truly
Speaker 2: love someone to be cruel to them. We'll be right back.
Speaker 3: Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings held
Speaker 3: fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and saw
Speaker 3: that he was potlatching with Mickels, and stubbed Nelson, and
Speaker 3: the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure. It
Speaker 3: 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 your 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 Leeson's presence,
Speaker 3: which made the needy lacking feeling worse. And my stiltedness
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.
Speaker 2: Saucy we couldn't resist giving you a taste of the
Speaker 2: lumberjack slang that defines the title story of this book,
Speaker 2: stag Dance. It's toy giving it a raid, and the
Speaker 2: story's the longest in the collection. It's also maybe the
Speaker 2: most fun. Tory Flex's impressive skills as a stylist, and
Speaker 2: the whole thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious.
Speaker 2: To fully appreciate the complexity of the story, I asked
Speaker 2: Torrid 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 camp that were like all male, like
Speaker 3: mining camps, rail camps, some Civil war battalions, and logging
Speaker 3: camps like way out in the woods. They'd be working
Speaker 3: all men, they'd get lonely and they would put on
Speaker 3: dances where some of the men would attend to dance
Speaker 3: as women. And the logger specifically would cut a triangle
Speaker 3: of brown fabric like maybe three inches to a highpot
Speaker 3: noose and they would turn it upside down so was inverted,
Speaker 3: and then they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is
Speaker 3: probably evident to anybody listening to this podcast. And then
Speaker 3: they would go to the dance as women, and I
Speaker 3: was just like, I love this because I mean not
Speaker 3: this is just like so on the nose where it's
Speaker 3: like this is transition like broken down to its like
Speaker 3: most basic symbol but also the fact that there's like
Speaker 3: an upside down triangle which has resonances with like the
Speaker 3: Second World War, with like the reclaimed upside down triangle
Speaker 3: and like HIV activism. And here it was like with
Speaker 3: lumberjacks doing.
Speaker 2: It so so weird that his and how like if
Speaker 2: you'd made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3: Contrived totally it would have been like, oh, come on,
Speaker 3: toy like but it was like, no, they did that.
Speaker 3: And so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in
Speaker 3: the States there's this tradition of tall tales and one
Speaker 3: of them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the
Speaker 3: greatest lagger in the country. If you like drive to
Speaker 3: certain parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on
Speaker 3: the roadside stands, you'll see the statue of this like
Speaker 3: big 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 character
Speaker 3: in my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a
Speaker 3: nickname given to him by other Laggers because he's as
Speaker 3: tall and is good with an axe as Paul Bunyan,
Speaker 3: and he says ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a
Speaker 3: face like Paul Bunyan's, the big blue Ox. And the
Speaker 3: story is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to
Speaker 3: go to the Stag Dance as one of the women,
Speaker 3: and like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray,
Speaker 3: and he ends up into in like a rivalry with
Speaker 3: like the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things
Speaker 3: kind of just go from there.
Speaker 2: It's such a wonderful story and such an exciting kind
Speaker 2: of shift from you as a writer as well, because
Speaker 2: while it carries all the hallmarks of what at this
Speaker 2: point two books and we've come to know and love
Speaker 2: as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And
Speaker 2: that's partly about language and partly about the voice you've found.
Speaker 2: How did you find your way into that voice?
Speaker 3: Well, I was I was building a sauna in the woods.
Speaker 2: Good. That was exactly what I thought the answer.
Speaker 3: So, like you know, there were a couple of things up,
Speaker 3: like the sort of reception to de Transition Baby was
Speaker 3: a little bit overwhelming, and I had a couple different
Speaker 3: responses to that. One was to start spending more time
Speaker 3: out of the city. And I got really into sauna,
Speaker 3: the proper finish style sauna, like what makes for a
Speaker 3: good sauna. So I decided I was going to build
Speaker 3: a really good finish sauna. And I don't know that
Speaker 3: much about construction or anything, so I started learning about
Speaker 3: tools and then also I had to start like learning
Speaker 3: a chainsaw to clear a place for the sauna and
Speaker 3: also to make firewoods. I began like learning that's a spruce,
Speaker 3: that's a maple, that's you know, learning my trees. So
Speaker 3: the area in which I was doing it was a
Speaker 3: former logging country, and I was dirty, and I was
Speaker 3: uncomfortable all the time, and I was a little bit
Speaker 3: like thinking about my gender as I was in the woods,
Speaker 3: like I'm doing this these very typically masculine things of
Speaker 3: cutting down trees with chainsaws. How do I feel about
Speaker 3: my gender? So that was on my mind, and I
Speaker 3: was also feeling like all of this pressure to follow
Speaker 3: up De Transition Baby in a sort of you know,
Speaker 3: domestic comedy kind of sphere, and not feeling like I
Speaker 3: had the thing to follow it up. And then I
Speaker 3: was thinking also kind of like about what if I
Speaker 3: just did a really different voice, maybe that would free
Speaker 3: me up. And then I found this book published in
Speaker 3: nineteen forty one, and it's a collection of lagger slang
Speaker 3: collected by the children of bloggers, which I normally would
Speaker 3: have like totally ignored, except that I was building the
Speaker 3: sona and thinking about logging, and the language was so
Speaker 3: interesting and weird. You know, I'm used to sort of
Speaker 3: like cowboy language and as an American or like Southern language,
Speaker 3: but it was something like really different and just like
Speaker 3: totally gone. And so the examples of words would be, like,
Speaker 3: I mean, the one I always say, it's sort of
Speaker 3: easy to see just like the weird patterns of thought
Speaker 3: that are behind it. It's cackleberry for an egg, because
Speaker 3: like a hen cackles and then it lays an egg
Speaker 3: and you need to like find it and pick it
Speaker 3: like a berry, so that's your cackleberry. A preacher is
Speaker 3: a sky pilot because they guides you to heaven. Your
Speaker 3: hand is a lunch hook because you sort of scoop
Speaker 3: your lunch and hook it into your mouth. Chewing tobacco
Speaker 3: is Scandahoovian dynamite. I don't know why they say scanda
Speaker 3: Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but it's just really fun. There
Speaker 3: were so many strange expressions that just felt like very
Speaker 3: lived in. Like when you had dinner with like all
Speaker 3: the other men, it was a symphony in tin because
Speaker 3: everybody's just they're eating so fast with their tin dishes
Speaker 3: that there's just the sound of tin on tin. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I read it and I was like, I see how
Speaker 3: it's lived.
Speaker 2: So I was like.
Speaker 3: Looking to follow up, interested in logging, and I was
Speaker 3: also under all these expectations to follow up, And I
Speaker 3: was like, well, what if I just wrote a book
Speaker 3: in lagger slang and came up with like a lagger dialect.
Speaker 3: Nobody's expecting it, probably nobody wants it. And in a
Speaker 3: weird way, that like frees me up to like actually
Speaker 3: have fun again writing and so I started it, and
Speaker 3: I kind of wanted to do like an Americana syntax,
Speaker 3: like you know, something somewhere between like Melville and Cornick McCarthy,
Speaker 3: like that's sort of like King James rhythms, but like
Speaker 3: didn't quite get it right. And so I found this
Speaker 3: weird syntax and cadence and put all those pieces together
Speaker 3: and found that I was just like having a really
Speaker 3: good time.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so good to read, and that language has
Speaker 2: this kind of baroque play to it that's at odds
Speaker 2: with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism. That
Speaker 2: the two pull in opposite directions. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: you have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin,
Speaker 2: and then you have people who you assume are conditioned
Speaker 2: not to say what they want or need or who
Speaker 2: 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 excess 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 flowdness 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 2: A few times before, you mentioned characters being cruel to
Speaker 2: one another, and actually, I think across all your work,
Speaker 2: you're one of the best writers I've ever read on
Speaker 2: the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in
Speaker 2: 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 such a safety in that. But also
Speaker 3: that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the person
Speaker 3: who can betray you, who can can knife you most cruelly.
Speaker 3: And so almost everybody in this book, no matter their gender,
Speaker 3: they end up as sisters, like Babe Bunyan and Lison,
Speaker 3: who's like the pretty boy in camp. It's meant to
Speaker 3: be a little bit funny that there's this you know,
Speaker 3: big strong logger and he's essentially sisterly with the young
Speaker 3: pretty boy.
Speaker 2: And never more sisterly than when ultimately they're in competition. Yes,
Speaker 2: but that becomes the micro of acceptance. Isn't solidarity, it's
Speaker 2: recognition of rivalry. 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 Lisa, and they end up competing for the affections
Speaker 3: of 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 guy,
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 relationship
Speaker 3: with other transmitmen, you know, and like the ways that
Speaker 3: we negotiate what it means to be trans, what it
Speaker 3: means to be feminine, the scarcity of resources that are
Speaker 3: available for us. Trans women are are my sisters, and
Speaker 3: they're also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 2: I knew after D Transition Baby, I wanted to read
Speaker 2: anything you write after stag Dance. I now can no
Speaker 2: longer confidently say what a Tory Peter's novel looks like,
Speaker 2: but I know I want to read it even more
Speaker 2: than ever. It's been such a trait to have you
Speaker 2: in here today.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Tory Peter's latest book is Stag Dance. It's available everywhere now,
Speaker 2: and if you haven't yet read D Transition Baby, go
Speaker 2: back to that as well. It is excellent.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: to read this. As always, if you want to dive
Speaker 1: further into the show, you can search for it wherever.
Speaker 3: You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: There are more than ninety episodes in the Read This
Speaker 1: archive for you to enjoy.
Speaker 3: See you next week.