#topside press

Nevada is a novel about the terrifying exhilaration of being somewhere far from home with someone you’re, for a whole mess of reasons, drawn to but barely know. It’s about being a stranger in a strange land, generally. It’s about how the coping mechanisms and shields we put up to survive as misfit kids can fuck us up and stunt our growth as human beings the older we get; it’s about how those coping mechanisms are absurdly hard to shake because, at some point, it’s just you, and it’s hard to imagine what a you without them looks like.

Nevada is about how unresolved and twisty and Third Space actual queer experience can often be. The last act is about a queer trans woman named Maria, with so much shit going on in her life, hanging out with a guy she meets while passing through small-town Nevada. He works at Walmart and has a lot of thoughts about his gender; Maria thinks he’s a trans woman and that he doesn’t realize it. It doesn’t end in triumph; it doesn’t even resolve really. It’s messy and bleak but not tragic, any more than tragedy is inescapable for any queer human being.

Nevada is about how escape is great but complicated and probably won’t solve all of your problems on its own. It’s about how we come to understand ourselves growing up through weird, bigoted porn and confused fantasies and nerd stuff and how that’s great but also how the baggage of that is hard to shake, too. It’s hard thinking about being a stunted person, about being damaged goods or whatever, especially when sometimes you feel really good, or at least okay. I thought about that a lot while reading Nevada. It’s hard, but how could you not think about it?

Anyway, read Nevada. It’s a good book.

Topside Press is excited to announce a week-long, intensive writers’ workshop for ten trans women working in fiction and non-fiction from August 15-19, 2016. The workshop will be led by Sarah Schulman, author of nineteen books, most recently the 2016 novel The Cosmopolitans. 

2016 Reading Challenge: March

ROYGBIV 

This one was so fun! The challenge was to select a couple of books of each color, and you can’t move on to the next color until you’ve finished at least one of the two of the previous shade.  RED: Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

Graphic memoir, coming-of-age european hitchhiking adventure. Some good bits, nice art. BUT my main problem with it was that it seemed like a lot of nonconsensual sex. Yes, Ulli stood up for herself sometimes and was a woman traveling alone, but it felt like men always had the upper hand and forced sex on her over and over again. It made me uncomfortable.

ORANGE: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

I recommended this book all the time at the bookstore without having read it (#booksellerconfessions). But it’s really kind of perfect, and it certainly has something for everyone who’s going through anything. Strayed manages this amazing balance between advice, empathy, and sharing her own stories, between tough love and enveloping you in her huge huge heart.

YELLOW: Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

A memoir of friendship and connection, seeking and finding and losing and loving. Oh, and dogs. And rowing (my second book with that in as many months). Several friends have recommended this over the years, and it was definitely worth it. Also, tearjerker warning: I’m not really a bawler, but the last 60 pages had me tear up three times in one day, in three different places (at lunch, on the train, in bed). You’ve been warned.

GREEN: Improvise, Girl, Improvise by Lilith Latini

Great poetry collection from Topside’s Heliotrope imprint of trans poets. Many of Latini’s poems are about the many different ways of coming into one’s own -- first against the contrasting backdrop of not fitting in, then through the actual physical changes, and finally growing in the nurturing soil of common experience and solidarity. I loved the pinecone as a metaphor for change -- “torch the damn thing so it grows.” And also the gradual nature of changes that may seem drastic to others: “They believed I charged like a train, bright light/ and steam that broke against their turned heads,/ but I’m not sudden or new. I’ve only been walking./ I told them noon. They should have been expecting me.”  

BLUE: Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

I’ve read nearly everything Winterson has written -- her kids books are the ones I’ve avoided. This one was pretty good! Though it didn’t really remind me of what I love about her other works, or rather, it did, but only occasionally. This one involves a nefarious corporation who wants control and monetize time, time tornadoes and irregularities that swallow up entire school busses and deposit their inhabitants across the universe in the future thousands of years, and our heroine, Silver, the Child With the Golden Face, who just might save the Timekeeper.

INDIGO(ish): Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson

I love Maggie Nelson, so when I learned that she’s written two books that investigate the murder of her aunt, I thought they’d be right in my wheelhouse. Jane, the first book, is an examination in verse of her aunt’s life and tragic murder in 1969, several years before Nelson was born. In her characteristic style, it ebbs and flows between thought and emotion, between analysis and the visceral. She includes bits from her aunt’s diary and looks at the way Jane affected the family in the decades after her death.

VIOLET: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

I’m so glad that Morrison won the Nobel Prize -- I’ve been so impressed with each book of hers that I’ve read. There is just something that feels so...powerful…about her writing. This one looks at broken families and the cruelty of kids towards each other and the ways that race in America affect both of those things in different ways.

DEEP PURPLE: The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean

The final romance I wanted to fit into last month, and thankfully it fits here as well! As was the other MacLean book I read, this one is funny and episodic and female-pleasure-centered. It focuses on Sophie, a girl who grew up in a small town, and then her father came into money and they moved to London and became involved with all things aristocratic, which Sophie hated. When she flees the city after insulting a lord, she encounters all sorts of adventures, and, of course, the Marquess of Eversley. I’m liking the scandal rag framing devices. The one thing that hasn’t worked for me are these tongue-in-cheek asides insisting that they DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER, when clearly they do, and they don’t even really seem to be in denial about it. I know that the tension is really the point, but those asides detract a bit for me.

Also read: The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson