June 7, 2025 • 38 mins
Torrey Peters’ debut novel, Detransition, Baby, was an instant sensation. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK and named one of the New York Times’ best books of the 21st century so far, the book catapulted Torrey into the limelight. Her second and latest book, Stag Dance, is a collection of four stories that are brutal, funny, and brilliant. On this episode of Read This, Michael sits down with Torrey to discuss the genesis of Stag Dance and why she isn’t interested in trans identity.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with
best selling author Tory Peters. As always, Michael is here
(00:22):
to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones, welcome back.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's great to be back, so Michael. Today's guest Tory Peters.
She burst onto the scene with her debut novel in
twenty twenty one, and since then, with Trump's reelection as
US president, there have been all of these attacks on
civil liberties, and the assault on trans rights across American
society has been particularly horrifying and far reaching. So what
(00:50):
does that mean for trans artists who are working in
the US today?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, it's a really good question, Ruby. How does one
go about producing new work that manages to be personal
and political and provocative but also unabashed, that doesn't feel
like it has to represent an entire community or be
consumed by trauma, or has some responsibility to respond to
this kind of incredibly malignant government that's denying your very existence.
(01:17):
It's a horrifying thought. But you know, like I do,
believe that great art thrives in response to tyranny, and
great artists find ways to do what they do, to
be funny, to be fierce, to be themselves in the
face of these terrible external forces. And Tory Peters epitomizes
that idea. She completely understands the weight of expectation. But
(01:39):
her new book shows that she is a great artist
and capable at once of these kind of really serious
ideas but also just tremendous fun You mentioned her twenty
twenty one novel Detransition Baby. That was this kind of
huge publishing sensation, and it was a kind of mainstream
literary success. It won all these wards and accolades. The
(02:00):
New York Times said it was one of the great
books of the twenty first century already, and it was
a wonderful book. But can only imagine the pressure that
puts on a writer to follow it up. What do
they come out with for the next book, How do
they manage to be both a significant trans writer and
also a significant writer regardless of questions of gender and context.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Right, And now, of course comes Tory's second book, stag Dance,
which is actually a collection of stories. So can you
tell me a bit about them?
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah? So, stag Dance is a collection of four stories,
and each one falls into a fairly specific genre. So
the first one is called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
and that one's kind of spec fiction. There's this imagined
gender apocalypse. Then the second story is called The Chaser,
and it's a kind of teen romance that owes as
much to kind of Brideshead Revisited as it does to
(02:50):
let's say, Twilight. But don't worry, no vampires or wear
wolves here. It's just gender anxiety all the way. Then
the third story in the collection is the titular Story,
and that one's basically a short novel. Stag Dance is
the story about a group of lumberjacks who are planning
a dance where some of them are going to attend
as women, and it's this kind of incredible story of
(03:12):
jealousy and betrayal and identity. It's fantastic. And then the
last story of the collection is called The Masker, and
it's this horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink
and difficult choices. Each of the four stories is incredibly
arresting and entertaining, surprising in their own way. Each plays
with genre and gender with equal flair and confidence. Language
(03:36):
is absolutely on point, the voices are compelling. It's a
thrilling read, and I can't recommend it highly enough. This
chat was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Coming up in just a moment. Tory Peter's never Ending Transition.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Of the four stories collected in stag Dance, both infect
Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self
published by Tory almost a decade ago. They were published
as independent novellas part of a publishing project that Tory
extended to other trans writers who are unable to find
homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
(04:18):
Tory has said she's less interested in the binary between
men and women and more interested in the binary between
CIS people and trans people and how false and reductive
that idea is. In the book's acknowledgment, she refers to
her never ending transition, otherwise known as ongoing trans life.
I wanted to begin with the book's long gestation period
(04:41):
and the ways in which it reflects an evolving sensibility,
an ongoing transition for its author. One of the products
of that kind of genesis for this book is that
it's a decade worth of work in the one book.
And I'm curious about the ways in which when you
look back over those first novellas, how much your appetite
(05:02):
for what you want to do as a writer has changed,
how much your capacity for what you want to do
as a writer has changed, And how hard it was
not to get under the hood and tinker and rewrite
your earlier self.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Well, had I had the permission to do so. I mean,
I think I'm a better writer now. So I went
back to go polish the sentences. And the thing is,
in twenty sixteen, I was like angrier than I was now.
I was more like kind of punk and angry. And
when I started polishing it, the thing is like, it's
(05:34):
hard to have polish and anger at the same time.
And as I started polishing the sentences, yeah, they were
getting better, but they were also getting less urgent. I mean,
I was putting the book together in like twenty twenty three,
twenty twenty four, where you know it was pre Trump
and pre What's Happened in the UK, but I had
like an inkling that it was coming, and I was like,
(05:56):
you know, if I'm going to start this book with
it with something, I want to hand the mic to
somebody who's angry and wants to speak about it. And
that's really myself from ten years before. So I actually
just got rid of all my changes, went back to
the original. And the original was full of typos because
I was really of the belief that, like everybody should
(06:18):
be writing, and that the idea that you have to
have an immaculate page is actually a thing that keeps
people away from writing.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I like the typos of punk, and I'm not going
I'm going to turn off the little suggestions. I am
too punk for that little lie.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
There were like some typos that were like pretty embarrassing.
There was I misspelled Columbia, which is a country I
now live in. I spelled it like the university, and
that really kind of confused the class origins of one character.
But there aren't typos in this version. But at the
time I was like, I want everybody to be writing.
(06:54):
I want everybody to be telling us stories, and I
think that, like, you know, there were people I know
who didn't go to college and in fact would be anxious,
you know, even just crossing a college campus. But like,
I don't belong here. I do have, like, you know,
a college education, and I want to be like, it
doesn't matter the reason you're writing. What writing's for is
(07:14):
to move people. And I wanted, especially a lot of
the trans girls who are around me, to not feel like, oh,
if it's not super polished, I can't put it into
the world. It's like, no, you're mad, You've got something
to say, put it in the world. And this is
going to be example of that.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightily voice
and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Well, I think this collection has a series of different voices.
But I do think that I developed a kind of
sensibility out of that, which has to do with not
explaining myself very much. By the time I was writing
Due Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights
with other trans women. I wasn't like sort of starry
(08:08):
eyed about the idea of easy solidarity along identity lines.
You know, I understood that communities aren't constantly falling apart,
people are having difficult times. And also I've ran into
plenty of trans people who don't like my writing, you know.
So it was like, I can't say I write for
all trans people except for the like, you know, thirty
percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So you know,
(08:32):
I began to think more about kind of affinity and
writing for people with whom I have affinity. And also
the fact that, like a lot of the books that
I was reading when I was reading The Transition Baby
were by CIS women a little bit older than me.
That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big,
and I realized, I'm reading all these books play like
Divorced This women because Divorced This women especially went through
(08:56):
something like a transition. They had to start their lives
over and like not get better. And so I began
to sort of think about writing as when I say
it's like to move people, it's also sometimes to speak back,
you know. Early on, I wanted to speak back to
all the trans women around me. I slowly began to
want to speak back to these divorced women who were
writing books where they were asking questions just like mine,
(09:19):
but slightly askance, and I wanted to be like, well,
look at my perspective, and that sort of decision to
speak back, but also to speak back without necessarily always
explaining myself as though I'm the outsider.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
It's my favorite thing about your writing. And it hit me
with The Transition Baby, which was the first of yours
that I read, but is the exhilarating thing of the
confidence of saying, no, this is the world the story
exists in, and it's your job. Whether it's lumberjack slang,
or whether it's whether it's the very particular conversations going
on in a trans family in New York, whatever it is,
(09:53):
you can be a reader wherever and catch up with
this at your own space.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, And you know, give I think I give readers
credit for being able to do it. You know, I
think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically be like,
let me slow down for you and and essentially ruin
the momentum of a story because I actually think you're
like too stupid to understand it. You know, I tend
to give my reader's credit. There was like a really
funny tweet when you transition baby came out of like
(10:18):
this grandfather sending his gay grandson, like a series of
what is a twink? What is a bareback? Like? What
is like all these different you know, and it was like,
that's what I want, you know. It's like, look, you
have resources for figuring out that grandpa. His resource was apparently, uh,
his grandson by text.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
But you know you can probably history probably the best.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I mean, it was really like, I don't know, I
just give I give people credit for it. And and
I think that sensibility shows up, you know, even now
where it's like in this new book, the biggest piece
in it is written in lumberge slang, which I don't
explain at all, and so people are like, oh, you
didn't explain the trans terms. I was like, well, I
don't even explain obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know,
(11:10):
and that some of it has given me the confidence
to basically be like, you just get in it, you
go hard, and that actually, if you're doing that people,
people will keep up, whether you're doing trans brookline or
whether you're doing Turn to the Century Lumberjack dances.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
This is a digression. But I'm curious as a reader,
is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
work to make them?
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I mean, sometimes, you know, I think that the thing
is like I've been trained to have the books be
easy for me, and I've been trained by school to
think if I don't understand every single word, I'm like
somehow failing the book. And I think that that's not
a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me with the
Lumberjack stuff that like, I read this book the way
that I felt when I was a kid, when you're
(12:01):
reading a book when you're a kid and you just
like don't know one word persons. The most magical reading
I had for myself as a kid was oftentimes where
I was like trying so hard to build a world
and being like I think this is what that word means.
I think this is what that world. But there was
like all this possibility and all this texture to it.
And my joke is that like, oftentimes when you don't
(12:22):
understand things that people are telling you, you'll pay attention
to so much more things and you end up with
a much more textured experience when I go to the
car mechanic, you know, he opens up the hood of
the car and he's like, your alternator is something something
with the camshaft or this or that, And it's like,
I'm struggling to understand what you're selling me, but I
(12:44):
sure do know that I'm at the car mechanic right now.
The experience of being at the car mechanic is incredibly
vivid because I have so little idea what you're saying.
That is actually a really interesting experience and language that
is not so frequently captured in what is often valued
(13:06):
in language right now, which is either language that is
quite transparent or readers that are so knowledgeable that they
can read a whole passage of Joyce and know every
single reference. There's something interesting about struggling and about creating
context and texture and possibilities that might not exactly be
(13:26):
what the author is saying or that might not be
like correct.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
And one of the ways you get to do exactly
that so effectively in stag dance is through genre as well.
Like so you mentioned speculative fiction, but you know there's
also horror, there's teen romance. By playing with genre, you've
got convention, which helps set up expectation, and then you've
got the freedom to take that way you take it.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
That's absolutely right, It's very well said. Some of it
is that, like, these genres have been so developed that
it's saves me a lot of work. In fact, your
finds and loved ones, Like there are these guys on
the Road who are like hunting the main character. It's like,
if you've read The Road by CORNK. McCarthy, if you've
seen Mad Max or whatever, like, you don't really need
(14:15):
to explain their motivations. You can just be like their
hunters on the road and just like gesture that was great.
That would have been a whole chapter of explaining something
that everybody already knows. And I can just sort of
like point over there and be like, yeah, you know
those guys and then get on with what I care about,
which is the relationship between the two women in the book,
(14:35):
which you know, there are people who want to know
everything about those hunters on the Road and they want
to know that entire world. And I discovered I'm not
that kind of writer.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
I like the fact that teens don't know anything that
sounds condescending by I mean it actually with a lot
of respect. At the time, like, you know, people were
talking about trans stuff and it was just nobody was
hearing each other. Everybody had their sort of arguments that
they'd already pre digested, and they're just sort of like
bumping their predigested arguments into each other. When it came
(15:12):
to trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything.
And I was thinking about the last time that happened,
I think, you know, in a massive way in the
United States, was over the Vietnam War, and that out
of that came new journalism, where the journalists were sort
of like, I can't tell you facts and figures anymore
because nobody believes them. There's no shared reality and these
(15:35):
kinds of facts, and so journalists started taking the techniques
of novelists Johan Dideon, Tom Wolf, Gayta Lease, and they
started writing sort of things that were like, let me
just try and get to an emotional truth and then
never mind all of the facts and figures around it.
Something similar has happened with not just trans stuff, but
(15:58):
with any kind of idea sort of thing. As soon
as a reader says, this is a story about misogyny,
everyone's sort of got this liberal arts discourse, the analysis
that can just be snapped onto it. This is a
story about homophobia snaps in place. You know, certainly transphobia
(16:19):
the same thing. And so one of the things that
was fun was writing number one is fun to write
from the perspective of like a bro. That was fun,
and like having a bro who didn't know anything about
his own emotions. But then two, to not have him
understand his own feelings meant that if he doesn't know
what he's feeling exactly, it's harder for a reader to
(16:41):
come in with their predigested analysis, and then you just
have to feel what he's feeling. So the teen romance
story is a story of a kind of bro athlete.
Cis white guy who starts hooking up with his roommate
and it's clear what his roommate is. They end up
(17:03):
treating each other cruelly. They love each other. He can't
admit that he loves his roommate, but they love each other.
And you know, you could say, like, well, is he
cruel and in love? Because he thinks that Robbie is
a boy and he's secretly gay, and this is a
homophobic story. Is he cruel? Because Robbie's very feminine and
(17:23):
he disdains femininity, and this is a story of misogyny.
If you know that this is written by Tory, you
could say, well, maybe Robbie's a pre transition trans girl,
and this is a story of transphobia. But actually it's
all of those things and none of those things all
at once, And so you actually just get to sort
of the emotions that this character is going through without
(17:44):
quite being able to name them, and therefore you can't
sort of bring a lot of your pre digestive analyses
to what's happening. And my hope then is what you
discover is the character who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie,
the feminine roommate, as all the things that the strong
cis character is supposed to have. That character has agency,
(18:05):
that character is able to state his desires, able to
sort of carry through a plan, and the character who's
supposed to be the sort of like strong centered character
has all the hallmarks of a trans character where there's
a big gap between how he wants to be and
how the world perceives him, and he's trying to close
that gap through performance, through like acting out in a
(18:28):
certain way. He's full of shame, he's sort of stuck
in that. He knows he needs to make some sort
of big move, but he can't make that big move,
and as a result, both love and sex are closed
off to him and the way they might be to
somebody who is trans but pre transition or something like that,
Like those things that are supposed to be trans are
(18:49):
actually things that the Cis character goes through, which is
kind of my larger point that we're all kind of
going through this stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I think that's what I love about that story is
the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters,
but it is also an active engagement with your readers
and their expectation of what they get from a Tory
Peters story as well. That in this collection, and I
might be wrong, but I would say you can count
on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
(19:19):
who identify as trans. That doesn't mean that their relationship
to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff
isn't actively in play, But it's not about self identified
trans identity as such.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Yeah, I'm actually very uninterested in trans identity. The longer
I've been trans, the less I know what it means
to be trans. And for me, being trans is like
I'm kind of standing with a bunch of other people
and we have each other's box, you know, in a
sort of political way, but in a sort of like
antological like are we the same in some like you know,
(19:54):
deep deep way, Like no, I don't necessarily see that
we are. This person has come from the east and
I have come from the west, and you know, I
have people arriving at this place from all cardinal directions,
from all different types of experiences metaphorically speaking, and I
don't understand many other people's experiences. I don't understand Like
you call yourself trans, but like it was because you
(20:17):
talk to your therapist, and your therapist suggested it and
it sounded good to you. Well, like that sounds totally
alien to me given my experience, and somebody else's experience,
and what I've been through sounds totally alien and weird
to them other than we're all here. So I don't
really know what it means to be trans. And then
once I say I don't really know what it means
to be trans, then it doesn't really matter whether you
(20:39):
call yourself trans or not. I'm just kind of interested
in the experience of, Oh, you have weird gender feelings,
and you're like interested in essentially having my back or
me having your back, or us understanding each other. So
I don't really care what you call it. I'm just
interested in what those experiences might be that they got
you here. Recently, I ended up on a reddit that
(21:02):
I had to do with ozimpic and making your own
ozimpic or your own GLP one, whatever those things are,
and the formats in the reddit discussions we're almost the
same as what you find in a transreddit. Whereas before
and after photos arguments about whether or not one should
conform to these conventional beauty standards, the transversion is like,
(21:26):
why should I have to pass? Why should I not
get to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I
have to take hormones? Why should you have to take
hormones to be trans? All these things? So the experiences
are like emotionally so resonant, and the identities have nothing
to do with one another. I feel the same thing
when I look at so many of the men that
(21:47):
are out in the world today where I'm like, you're
really mad because you want to be seen and with
your gender in a certain way, and you're failing at
this gender and it hurts your feelings and you're mad
about it. You want to be a rugged man. And
then you go on the dating apps and everybody says
you're four inches too short, and you're furious about it,
and so you go and you get like a home
(22:10):
construction supply so that you stack around you to sort
of compensate for that, you know, And I'm making fun
of it, but like, that's also the trans experience. You
feel like your body doesn't do a certain thing you
wish it would, and you get a bunch of accouterments
to surround you to make it look a certain way.
We're all doing it. We're all kind of failing at it.
And I'm interested in the people who have the guts
(22:34):
to look at this and be like, what's going on?
Or many of the characters in these stories, I think
I'm seeing them through that lens rather than through like
naming them along their identity.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I really love that, But I wonder how complicated that is.
By becoming the visible face of trans literature and the
representative voice of you know, the ways in which you
are claimed yeah by others, or stuff is ascribed to you.
After the success of D Transition Baby, does it make
it that much harder not to have to be the
(23:07):
good trans voice, the giver of advice? Do you think
about yourself differently off the back of the stratospheric fame
that is D Transition Baby.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Well, I think that the nice thing is that D
Transition Baby did well enough that the publishers gave a
bunch of other trans women a chance. I can think
of like fifteen other trans women who have books out
in the States this spring. I can think of a
handful of others in the UK. I wish I was
(23:36):
more up to date on who's getting published here in Australia,
and I apologize for not knowing that. But the more
people that there are out there, the more I get
to be my own idiosyncratic weirdo, you know. And that's
the freedom I want for myself. And I think that
while I was doing D Transition Baby, I had to
be a little bit more buttoned up. But the success
(23:56):
of it has opened up things enough that I can
just point to other people want a story about that
kind of representation. Here's five, right. I mean, we haven't
even talked about the lumberjacks story, but I think nobody
would say, like, the representative story of the trans experience
in the twenty first century and the United States is
(24:17):
a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance
wearing triangles over their crotches. Like that's not and that's
sort of.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
All I think they're saying now, and I'm sorry about that.
Coming up after the break, Tory reveals the genesis behind
her title story and explains why you have to truly
love someone to be cruel to them. We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings held
fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and saw
that he was potlatching with Mickels, and stubbed Nelson, and
the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure. It
was Lison, a pretty whistle punk from somewhere in Scandinhouvia.
Old timber beasts like Mickels took a special pleasure in
(25:17):
ordering Lison about making him scamper to fetch this or that.
But at night, Lison liked to do a strange thing.
While other men sprawled down to roll the guff, Lison
would pull out a little book. He had a diary
of sorts, filled with blank pages, and without asking leave,
he'd select a man and begin to sketch him, holding
a pencil in his fine, slim hands that made a
(25:38):
set with the fine bones of his cheek and jaw,
which slanted at just the same angle as his glinting
eyes as he stared brazen at his chosen jack. He
never once selected me for his drawing diary, which I
told myself was no matter, because in fact his sauciness
disturbed me, Or rather I was disturbed by the unctious
temptation it engendered in me, a queer need, like how
(26:00):
it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even
as you know somewhere in your mind you must have
the word that you don't lack it at all, only
its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leeson's presence,
which made the needy lacking feeling worse. And my stiltedness
clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a
saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, and
(26:21):
him being so amused that me struck me as ever,
the more.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Saucy we couldn't resist giving you a taste of the
lumberjack slang that defines the title story of this book,
stag Dance. It's toy giving it a raid, and the
story's the longest in the collection. It's also maybe the
most fun. Tory Flex's impressive skills as a stylist, and
the whole thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious.
(26:47):
To fully appreciate the complexity of the story, I asked
Torrid set up for the genesis behind stag Dance.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
A stag dance is something that men would do when
they were working camp that were like all male, like
mining camps, rail camps, some Civil war battalions, and logging
camps like way out in the woods. They'd be working
all men, they'd get lonely and they would put on
dances where some of the men would attend to dance
(27:15):
as women. And the logger specifically would cut a triangle
of brown fabric like maybe three inches to a highpot
noose and they would turn it upside down so was inverted,
and then they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is
probably evident to anybody listening to this podcast. And then
(27:35):
they would go to the dance as women, and I
was just like, I love this because I mean not
this is just like so on the nose where it's
like this is transition like broken down to its like
most basic symbol but also the fact that there's like
an upside down triangle which has resonances with like the
Second World War, with like the reclaimed upside down triangle
(27:57):
and like HIV activism. And here it was like with
lumberjacks doing.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
It so so weird that his and how like if
you'd made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Contrived totally it would have been like, oh, come on,
toy like but it was like, no, they did that.
And so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in
the States there's this tradition of tall tales and one
of them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the
greatest lagger in the country. If you like drive to
(28:29):
certain parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on
the roadside stands, you'll see the statue of this like
big bearded man and like a red flannel with an axe,
and that's Paul Bunyan, the greatest, strongest, and he was, like,
you know, a giant, and he had a giant also,
a giant blue Ox named Babe. So the main character
(28:50):
in my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a
nickname given to him by other Laggers because he's as
tall and is good with an axe as Paul Bunyan,
and he says ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a
face like Paul Bunyan's, the big blue Ox. And the
story is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to
(29:11):
go to the Stag Dance as one of the women,
and like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray,
and he ends up into in like a rivalry with
like the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things
kind of just go from there.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It's such a wonderful story and such an exciting kind
of shift from you as a writer as well, because
while it carries all the hallmarks of what at this
point two books and we've come to know and love
as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And
that's partly about language and partly about the voice you've found.
(29:47):
How did you find your way into that voice?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Well, I was I was building a sauna in the woods.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Good. That was exactly what I thought the answer.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So, like you know, there were a couple of things up,
like the sort of reception to de Transition Baby was
a little bit overwhelming, and I had a couple different
responses to that. One was to start spending more time
out of the city. And I got really into sauna,
the proper finish style sauna, like what makes for a
(30:20):
good sauna. So I decided I was going to build
a really good finish sauna. And I don't know that
much about construction or anything, so I started learning about
tools and then also I had to start like learning
a chainsaw to clear a place for the sauna and
also to make firewoods. I began like learning that's a spruce,
that's a maple, that's you know, learning my trees. So
(30:43):
the area in which I was doing it was a
former logging country, and I was dirty, and I was
uncomfortable all the time, and I was a little bit
like thinking about my gender as I was in the woods,
like I'm doing this these very typically masculine things of
cutting down trees with chainsaws. How do I feel about
my gender? So that was on my mind, and I
(31:04):
was also feeling like all of this pressure to follow
up De Transition Baby in a sort of you know,
domestic comedy kind of sphere, and not feeling like I
had the thing to follow it up. And then I
was thinking also kind of like about what if I
just did a really different voice, maybe that would free
(31:25):
me up. And then I found this book published in
nineteen forty one, and it's a collection of lagger slang
collected by the children of bloggers, which I normally would
have like totally ignored, except that I was building the
sona and thinking about logging, and the language was so
interesting and weird. You know, I'm used to sort of
(31:46):
like cowboy language and as an American or like Southern language,
but it was something like really different and just like
totally gone. And so the examples of words would be, like,
I mean, the one I always say, it's sort of
easy to see just like the weird patterns of thought
that are behind it. It's cackleberry for an egg, because
(32:07):
like a hen cackles and then it lays an egg
and you need to like find it and pick it
like a berry, so that's your cackleberry. A preacher is
a sky pilot because they guides you to heaven. Your
hand is a lunch hook because you sort of scoop
your lunch and hook it into your mouth. Chewing tobacco
is Scandahoovian dynamite. I don't know why they say scanda
(32:27):
Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but it's just really fun. There
were so many strange expressions that just felt like very
lived in. Like when you had dinner with like all
the other men, it was a symphony in tin because
everybody's just they're eating so fast with their tin dishes
that there's just the sound of tin on tin. Yeah.
(32:49):
I read it and I was like, I see how
it's lived.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
So I was like.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Looking to follow up, interested in logging, and I was
also under all these expectations to follow up, And I
was like, well, what if I just wrote a book
in lagger slang and came up with like a lagger dialect.
Nobody's expecting it, probably nobody wants it. And in a
weird way, that like frees me up to like actually
(33:13):
have fun again writing and so I started it, and
I kind of wanted to do like an Americana syntax,
like you know, something somewhere between like Melville and Cornick McCarthy,
like that's sort of like King James rhythms, but like
didn't quite get it right. And so I found this
weird syntax and cadence and put all those pieces together
(33:35):
and found that I was just like having a really
good time.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Oh, it's so good to read, and that language has
this kind of baroque play to it that's at odds
with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism. That
the two pull in opposite directions. On the one hand,
you have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin,
and then you have people who you assume are conditioned
not to say what they want or need or who
(33:59):
they are.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually
give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like
the excess of language actually had to do with some
part of like his muteness around his desires. You know,
it's like I can say all these things, but I'm
like circling around the thing that I actually wanted, the
(34:21):
like flowdness of everything around it kind of shows what
is difficult to say or what needs to be sort
of said in new ways.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
A few times before, you mentioned characters being cruel to
one another, and actually, I think across all your work,
you're one of the best writers I've ever read on
the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in
which the two of them are part of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, I think you have to like love somebody in
a certain way to be like truly cruel to them,
or at least you have to understand them, and like,
certainly I think that like cruelty has an aspect of
betrayal to it, and you know, to be betrayed, you
have to like trust and know somebody. I think for
(35:10):
something like Detransition Baby, the structuring relationship is like mothers
and daughters, But for this book, I would say it's sisters,
and the ways that like, your sister is the person
who you go to who can understand you, who comes
from where you come from, has seen you from when
(35:30):
you're young. If you make a change, they're like, well,
that's you now, but I know everywhere you've come from,
and there's like such a safety in that. But also
that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the person
who can betray you, who can can knife you most cruelly.
And so almost everybody in this book, no matter their gender,
(35:52):
they end up as sisters, like Babe Bunyan and Lison,
who's like the pretty boy in camp. It's meant to
be a little bit funny that there's this you know,
big strong logger and he's essentially sisterly with the young
pretty boy.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
And never more sisterly than when ultimately they're in competition. Yes,
but that becomes the micro of acceptance. Isn't solidarity, it's
recognition of rivalry. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
The character says, like to be rivals is to be
something the same, you know that, And he's almost proud
when he can be in the same league of contention
as Lisa, and they end up competing for the affections
of the camp boss. And I do think that that's oftentimes, like,
you know, the way that desire triangulates, like, well, how
(36:41):
do I know if I'm pretty the prettier girl is
looking for this guy, And so if I get the guy,
no matter what people say about me, if I get
the guy, I must ergo be the prettiest. Really, what
I'm talking about underneath all of it is my relationship
with other transmitmen, you know, and like the ways that
(37:03):
we negotiate what it means to be trans, what it
means to be feminine, the scarcity of resources that are
available for us. Trans women are are my sisters, and
they're also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
I knew after D Transition Baby, I wanted to read
anything you write after stag Dance. I now can no
longer confidently say what a Tory Peter's novel looks like,
but I know I want to read it even more
than ever. It's been such a trait to have you
in here today.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Tory Peter's latest book is Stag Dance. It's available everywhere now,
and if you haven't yet read D Transition Baby, go
back to that as well. It is excellent.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
to read this. As always, if you want to dive
further into the show, you can search for it wherever.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
There are more than ninety episodes in the Read This
archive for you to enjoy.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
See you next week.
Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with
best selling author Tory Peters. As always, Michael is here
(00:22):
to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones, welcome back.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's great to be back, so Michael. Today's guest Tory Peters.
She burst onto the scene with her debut novel in
twenty twenty one, and since then, with Trump's reelection as
US president, there have been all of these attacks on
civil liberties, and the assault on trans rights across American
society has been particularly horrifying and far reaching. So what
(00:50):
does that mean for trans artists who are working in
the US today?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, it's a really good question, Ruby. How does one
go about producing new work that manages to be personal
and political and provocative but also unabashed, that doesn't feel
like it has to represent an entire community or be
consumed by trauma, or has some responsibility to respond to
this kind of incredibly malignant government that's denying your very existence.
(01:17):
It's a horrifying thought. But you know, like I do,
believe that great art thrives in response to tyranny, and
great artists find ways to do what they do, to
be funny, to be fierce, to be themselves in the
face of these terrible external forces. And Tory Peters epitomizes
that idea. She completely understands the weight of expectation. But
(01:39):
her new book shows that she is a great artist
and capable at once of these kind of really serious
ideas but also just tremendous fun You mentioned her twenty
twenty one novel Detransition Baby. That was this kind of
huge publishing sensation, and it was a kind of mainstream
literary success. It won all these wards and accolades. The
(02:00):
New York Times said it was one of the great
books of the twenty first century already, and it was
a wonderful book. But can only imagine the pressure that
puts on a writer to follow it up. What do
they come out with for the next book, How do
they manage to be both a significant trans writer and
also a significant writer regardless of questions of gender and context.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Right, And now, of course comes Tory's second book, stag Dance,
which is actually a collection of stories. So can you
tell me a bit about them?
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah? So, stag Dance is a collection of four stories,
and each one falls into a fairly specific genre. So
the first one is called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
and that one's kind of spec fiction. There's this imagined
gender apocalypse. Then the second story is called The Chaser,
and it's a kind of teen romance that owes as
much to kind of Brideshead Revisited as it does to
(02:50):
let's say, Twilight. But don't worry, no vampires or wear
wolves here. It's just gender anxiety all the way. Then
the third story in the collection is the titular Story,
and that one's basically a short novel. Stag Dance is
the story about a group of lumberjacks who are planning
a dance where some of them are going to attend
as women, and it's this kind of incredible story of
(03:12):
jealousy and betrayal and identity. It's fantastic. And then the
last story of the collection is called The Masker, and
it's this horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink
and difficult choices. Each of the four stories is incredibly
arresting and entertaining, surprising in their own way. Each plays
with genre and gender with equal flair and confidence. Language
(03:36):
is absolutely on point, the voices are compelling. It's a
thrilling read, and I can't recommend it highly enough. This
chat was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Coming up in just a moment. Tory Peter's never Ending Transition.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Of the four stories collected in stag Dance, both infect
Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self
published by Tory almost a decade ago. They were published
as independent novellas part of a publishing project that Tory
extended to other trans writers who are unable to find
homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
(04:18):
Tory has said she's less interested in the binary between
men and women and more interested in the binary between
CIS people and trans people and how false and reductive
that idea is. In the book's acknowledgment, she refers to
her never ending transition, otherwise known as ongoing trans life.
I wanted to begin with the book's long gestation period
(04:41):
and the ways in which it reflects an evolving sensibility,
an ongoing transition for its author. One of the products
of that kind of genesis for this book is that
it's a decade worth of work in the one book.
And I'm curious about the ways in which when you
look back over those first novellas, how much your appetite
(05:02):
for what you want to do as a writer has changed,
how much your capacity for what you want to do
as a writer has changed, And how hard it was
not to get under the hood and tinker and rewrite
your earlier self.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Well, had I had the permission to do so. I mean,
I think I'm a better writer now. So I went
back to go polish the sentences. And the thing is,
in twenty sixteen, I was like angrier than I was now.
I was more like kind of punk and angry. And
when I started polishing it, the thing is like, it's
(05:34):
hard to have polish and anger at the same time.
And as I started polishing the sentences, yeah, they were
getting better, but they were also getting less urgent. I mean,
I was putting the book together in like twenty twenty three,
twenty twenty four, where you know it was pre Trump
and pre What's Happened in the UK, but I had
like an inkling that it was coming, and I was like,
(05:56):
you know, if I'm going to start this book with
it with something, I want to hand the mic to
somebody who's angry and wants to speak about it. And
that's really myself from ten years before. So I actually
just got rid of all my changes, went back to
the original. And the original was full of typos because
I was really of the belief that, like everybody should
(06:18):
be writing, and that the idea that you have to
have an immaculate page is actually a thing that keeps
people away from writing.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I like the typos of punk, and I'm not going
I'm going to turn off the little suggestions. I am
too punk for that little lie.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
There were like some typos that were like pretty embarrassing.
There was I misspelled Columbia, which is a country I
now live in. I spelled it like the university, and
that really kind of confused the class origins of one character.
But there aren't typos in this version. But at the
time I was like, I want everybody to be writing.
(06:54):
I want everybody to be telling us stories, and I
think that, like, you know, there were people I know
who didn't go to college and in fact would be anxious,
you know, even just crossing a college campus. But like,
I don't belong here. I do have, like, you know,
a college education, and I want to be like, it
doesn't matter the reason you're writing. What writing's for is
(07:14):
to move people. And I wanted, especially a lot of
the trans girls who are around me, to not feel like, oh,
if it's not super polished, I can't put it into
the world. It's like, no, you're mad, You've got something
to say, put it in the world. And this is
going to be example of that.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightily voice
and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Well, I think this collection has a series of different voices.
But I do think that I developed a kind of
sensibility out of that, which has to do with not
explaining myself very much. By the time I was writing
Due Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights
with other trans women. I wasn't like sort of starry
(08:08):
eyed about the idea of easy solidarity along identity lines.
You know, I understood that communities aren't constantly falling apart,
people are having difficult times. And also I've ran into
plenty of trans people who don't like my writing, you know.
So it was like, I can't say I write for
all trans people except for the like, you know, thirty
percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So you know,
(08:32):
I began to think more about kind of affinity and
writing for people with whom I have affinity. And also
the fact that, like a lot of the books that
I was reading when I was reading The Transition Baby
were by CIS women a little bit older than me.
That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big,
and I realized, I'm reading all these books play like
Divorced This women because Divorced This women especially went through
(08:56):
something like a transition. They had to start their lives
over and like not get better. And so I began
to sort of think about writing as when I say
it's like to move people, it's also sometimes to speak back,
you know. Early on, I wanted to speak back to
all the trans women around me. I slowly began to
want to speak back to these divorced women who were
writing books where they were asking questions just like mine,
(09:19):
but slightly askance, and I wanted to be like, well,
look at my perspective, and that sort of decision to
speak back, but also to speak back without necessarily always
explaining myself as though I'm the outsider.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
It's my favorite thing about your writing. And it hit me
with The Transition Baby, which was the first of yours
that I read, but is the exhilarating thing of the
confidence of saying, no, this is the world the story
exists in, and it's your job. Whether it's lumberjack slang,
or whether it's whether it's the very particular conversations going
on in a trans family in New York, whatever it is,
(09:53):
you can be a reader wherever and catch up with
this at your own space.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, And you know, give I think I give readers
credit for being able to do it. You know, I
think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically be like,
let me slow down for you and and essentially ruin
the momentum of a story because I actually think you're
like too stupid to understand it. You know, I tend
to give my reader's credit. There was like a really
funny tweet when you transition baby came out of like
(10:18):
this grandfather sending his gay grandson, like a series of
what is a twink? What is a bareback? Like? What
is like all these different you know, and it was like,
that's what I want, you know. It's like, look, you
have resources for figuring out that grandpa. His resource was apparently, uh,
his grandson by text.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
But you know you can probably history probably the best.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I mean, it was really like, I don't know, I
just give I give people credit for it. And and
I think that sensibility shows up, you know, even now
where it's like in this new book, the biggest piece
in it is written in lumberge slang, which I don't
explain at all, and so people are like, oh, you
didn't explain the trans terms. I was like, well, I
don't even explain obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know,
(11:10):
and that some of it has given me the confidence
to basically be like, you just get in it, you
go hard, and that actually, if you're doing that people,
people will keep up, whether you're doing trans brookline or
whether you're doing Turn to the Century Lumberjack dances.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
This is a digression. But I'm curious as a reader,
is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
work to make them?
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I mean, sometimes, you know, I think that the thing
is like I've been trained to have the books be
easy for me, and I've been trained by school to
think if I don't understand every single word, I'm like
somehow failing the book. And I think that that's not
a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me with the
Lumberjack stuff that like, I read this book the way
that I felt when I was a kid, when you're
(12:01):
reading a book when you're a kid and you just
like don't know one word persons. The most magical reading
I had for myself as a kid was oftentimes where
I was like trying so hard to build a world
and being like I think this is what that word means.
I think this is what that world. But there was
like all this possibility and all this texture to it.
And my joke is that like, oftentimes when you don't
(12:22):
understand things that people are telling you, you'll pay attention
to so much more things and you end up with
a much more textured experience when I go to the
car mechanic, you know, he opens up the hood of
the car and he's like, your alternator is something something
with the camshaft or this or that, And it's like,
I'm struggling to understand what you're selling me, but I
(12:44):
sure do know that I'm at the car mechanic right now.
The experience of being at the car mechanic is incredibly
vivid because I have so little idea what you're saying.
That is actually a really interesting experience and language that
is not so frequently captured in what is often valued
(13:06):
in language right now, which is either language that is
quite transparent or readers that are so knowledgeable that they
can read a whole passage of Joyce and know every
single reference. There's something interesting about struggling and about creating
context and texture and possibilities that might not exactly be
(13:26):
what the author is saying or that might not be
like correct.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
And one of the ways you get to do exactly
that so effectively in stag dance is through genre as well.
Like so you mentioned speculative fiction, but you know there's
also horror, there's teen romance. By playing with genre, you've
got convention, which helps set up expectation, and then you've
got the freedom to take that way you take it.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
That's absolutely right, It's very well said. Some of it
is that, like, these genres have been so developed that
it's saves me a lot of work. In fact, your
finds and loved ones, Like there are these guys on
the Road who are like hunting the main character. It's like,
if you've read The Road by CORNK. McCarthy, if you've
seen Mad Max or whatever, like, you don't really need
(14:15):
to explain their motivations. You can just be like their
hunters on the road and just like gesture that was great.
That would have been a whole chapter of explaining something
that everybody already knows. And I can just sort of
like point over there and be like, yeah, you know
those guys and then get on with what I care about,
which is the relationship between the two women in the book,
(14:35):
which you know, there are people who want to know
everything about those hunters on the Road and they want
to know that entire world. And I discovered I'm not
that kind of writer.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
I like the fact that teens don't know anything that
sounds condescending by I mean it actually with a lot
of respect. At the time, like, you know, people were
talking about trans stuff and it was just nobody was
hearing each other. Everybody had their sort of arguments that
they'd already pre digested, and they're just sort of like
bumping their predigested arguments into each other. When it came
(15:12):
to trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything.
And I was thinking about the last time that happened,
I think, you know, in a massive way in the
United States, was over the Vietnam War, and that out
of that came new journalism, where the journalists were sort
of like, I can't tell you facts and figures anymore
because nobody believes them. There's no shared reality and these
(15:35):
kinds of facts, and so journalists started taking the techniques
of novelists Johan Dideon, Tom Wolf, Gayta Lease, and they
started writing sort of things that were like, let me
just try and get to an emotional truth and then
never mind all of the facts and figures around it.
Something similar has happened with not just trans stuff, but
(15:58):
with any kind of idea sort of thing. As soon
as a reader says, this is a story about misogyny,
everyone's sort of got this liberal arts discourse, the analysis
that can just be snapped onto it. This is a
story about homophobia snaps in place. You know, certainly transphobia
(16:19):
the same thing. And so one of the things that
was fun was writing number one is fun to write
from the perspective of like a bro. That was fun,
and like having a bro who didn't know anything about
his own emotions. But then two, to not have him
understand his own feelings meant that if he doesn't know
what he's feeling exactly, it's harder for a reader to
(16:41):
come in with their predigested analysis, and then you just
have to feel what he's feeling. So the teen romance
story is a story of a kind of bro athlete.
Cis white guy who starts hooking up with his roommate
and it's clear what his roommate is. They end up
(17:03):
treating each other cruelly. They love each other. He can't
admit that he loves his roommate, but they love each other.
And you know, you could say, like, well, is he
cruel and in love? Because he thinks that Robbie is
a boy and he's secretly gay, and this is a
homophobic story. Is he cruel? Because Robbie's very feminine and
(17:23):
he disdains femininity, and this is a story of misogyny.
If you know that this is written by Tory, you
could say, well, maybe Robbie's a pre transition trans girl,
and this is a story of transphobia. But actually it's
all of those things and none of those things all
at once, And so you actually just get to sort
of the emotions that this character is going through without
(17:44):
quite being able to name them, and therefore you can't
sort of bring a lot of your pre digestive analyses
to what's happening. And my hope then is what you
discover is the character who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie,
the feminine roommate, as all the things that the strong
cis character is supposed to have. That character has agency,
(18:05):
that character is able to state his desires, able to
sort of carry through a plan, and the character who's
supposed to be the sort of like strong centered character
has all the hallmarks of a trans character where there's
a big gap between how he wants to be and
how the world perceives him, and he's trying to close
that gap through performance, through like acting out in a
(18:28):
certain way. He's full of shame, he's sort of stuck
in that. He knows he needs to make some sort
of big move, but he can't make that big move,
and as a result, both love and sex are closed
off to him and the way they might be to
somebody who is trans but pre transition or something like that,
Like those things that are supposed to be trans are
(18:49):
actually things that the Cis character goes through, which is
kind of my larger point that we're all kind of
going through this stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I think that's what I love about that story is
the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters,
but it is also an active engagement with your readers
and their expectation of what they get from a Tory
Peters story as well. That in this collection, and I
might be wrong, but I would say you can count
on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
(19:19):
who identify as trans. That doesn't mean that their relationship
to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff
isn't actively in play, But it's not about self identified
trans identity as such.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Yeah, I'm actually very uninterested in trans identity. The longer
I've been trans, the less I know what it means
to be trans. And for me, being trans is like
I'm kind of standing with a bunch of other people
and we have each other's box, you know, in a
sort of political way, but in a sort of like
antological like are we the same in some like you know,
(19:54):
deep deep way, Like no, I don't necessarily see that
we are. This person has come from the east and
I have come from the west, and you know, I
have people arriving at this place from all cardinal directions,
from all different types of experiences metaphorically speaking, and I
don't understand many other people's experiences. I don't understand Like
you call yourself trans, but like it was because you
(20:17):
talk to your therapist, and your therapist suggested it and
it sounded good to you. Well, like that sounds totally
alien to me given my experience, and somebody else's experience,
and what I've been through sounds totally alien and weird
to them other than we're all here. So I don't
really know what it means to be trans. And then
once I say I don't really know what it means
to be trans, then it doesn't really matter whether you
(20:39):
call yourself trans or not. I'm just kind of interested
in the experience of, Oh, you have weird gender feelings,
and you're like interested in essentially having my back or
me having your back, or us understanding each other. So
I don't really care what you call it. I'm just
interested in what those experiences might be that they got
you here. Recently, I ended up on a reddit that
(21:02):
I had to do with ozimpic and making your own
ozimpic or your own GLP one, whatever those things are,
and the formats in the reddit discussions we're almost the
same as what you find in a transreddit. Whereas before
and after photos arguments about whether or not one should
conform to these conventional beauty standards, the transversion is like,
(21:26):
why should I have to pass? Why should I not
get to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I
have to take hormones? Why should you have to take
hormones to be trans? All these things? So the experiences
are like emotionally so resonant, and the identities have nothing
to do with one another. I feel the same thing
when I look at so many of the men that
(21:47):
are out in the world today where I'm like, you're
really mad because you want to be seen and with
your gender in a certain way, and you're failing at
this gender and it hurts your feelings and you're mad
about it. You want to be a rugged man. And
then you go on the dating apps and everybody says
you're four inches too short, and you're furious about it,
and so you go and you get like a home
(22:10):
construction supply so that you stack around you to sort
of compensate for that, you know, And I'm making fun
of it, but like, that's also the trans experience. You
feel like your body doesn't do a certain thing you
wish it would, and you get a bunch of accouterments
to surround you to make it look a certain way.
We're all doing it. We're all kind of failing at it.
And I'm interested in the people who have the guts
(22:34):
to look at this and be like, what's going on?
Or many of the characters in these stories, I think
I'm seeing them through that lens rather than through like
naming them along their identity.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I really love that, But I wonder how complicated that is.
By becoming the visible face of trans literature and the
representative voice of you know, the ways in which you
are claimed yeah by others, or stuff is ascribed to you.
After the success of D Transition Baby, does it make
it that much harder not to have to be the
(23:07):
good trans voice, the giver of advice? Do you think
about yourself differently off the back of the stratospheric fame
that is D Transition Baby.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Well, I think that the nice thing is that D
Transition Baby did well enough that the publishers gave a
bunch of other trans women a chance. I can think
of like fifteen other trans women who have books out
in the States this spring. I can think of a
handful of others in the UK. I wish I was
(23:36):
more up to date on who's getting published here in Australia,
and I apologize for not knowing that. But the more
people that there are out there, the more I get
to be my own idiosyncratic weirdo, you know. And that's
the freedom I want for myself. And I think that
while I was doing D Transition Baby, I had to
be a little bit more buttoned up. But the success
(23:56):
of it has opened up things enough that I can
just point to other people want a story about that
kind of representation. Here's five, right. I mean, we haven't
even talked about the lumberjacks story, but I think nobody
would say, like, the representative story of the trans experience
in the twenty first century and the United States is
(24:17):
a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance
wearing triangles over their crotches. Like that's not and that's
sort of.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
All I think they're saying now, and I'm sorry about that.
Coming up after the break, Tory reveals the genesis behind
her title story and explains why you have to truly
love someone to be cruel to them. We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings held
fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and saw
that he was potlatching with Mickels, and stubbed Nelson, and
the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure. It
was Lison, a pretty whistle punk from somewhere in Scandinhouvia.
Old timber beasts like Mickels took a special pleasure in
(25:17):
ordering Lison about making him scamper to fetch this or that.
But at night, Lison liked to do a strange thing.
While other men sprawled down to roll the guff, Lison
would pull out a little book. He had a diary
of sorts, filled with blank pages, and without asking leave,
he'd select a man and begin to sketch him, holding
a pencil in his fine, slim hands that made a
(25:38):
set with the fine bones of his cheek and jaw,
which slanted at just the same angle as his glinting
eyes as he stared brazen at his chosen jack. He
never once selected me for his drawing diary, which I
told myself was no matter, because in fact his sauciness
disturbed me, Or rather I was disturbed by the unctious
temptation it engendered in me, a queer need, like how
(26:00):
it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even
as you know somewhere in your mind you must have
the word that you don't lack it at all, only
its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leeson's presence,
which made the needy lacking feeling worse. And my stiltedness
clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a
saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, and
(26:21):
him being so amused that me struck me as ever,
the more.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Saucy we couldn't resist giving you a taste of the
lumberjack slang that defines the title story of this book,
stag Dance. It's toy giving it a raid, and the
story's the longest in the collection. It's also maybe the
most fun. Tory Flex's impressive skills as a stylist, and
the whole thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious.
(26:47):
To fully appreciate the complexity of the story, I asked
Torrid set up for the genesis behind stag Dance.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
A stag dance is something that men would do when
they were working camp that were like all male, like
mining camps, rail camps, some Civil war battalions, and logging
camps like way out in the woods. They'd be working
all men, they'd get lonely and they would put on
dances where some of the men would attend to dance
(27:15):
as women. And the logger specifically would cut a triangle
of brown fabric like maybe three inches to a highpot
noose and they would turn it upside down so was inverted,
and then they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is
probably evident to anybody listening to this podcast. And then
(27:35):
they would go to the dance as women, and I
was just like, I love this because I mean not
this is just like so on the nose where it's
like this is transition like broken down to its like
most basic symbol but also the fact that there's like
an upside down triangle which has resonances with like the
Second World War, with like the reclaimed upside down triangle
(27:57):
and like HIV activism. And here it was like with
lumberjacks doing.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
It so so weird that his and how like if
you'd made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Contrived totally it would have been like, oh, come on,
toy like but it was like, no, they did that.
And so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in
the States there's this tradition of tall tales and one
of them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the
greatest lagger in the country. If you like drive to
(28:29):
certain parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on
the roadside stands, you'll see the statue of this like
big bearded man and like a red flannel with an axe,
and that's Paul Bunyan, the greatest, strongest, and he was, like,
you know, a giant, and he had a giant also,
a giant blue Ox named Babe. So the main character
(28:50):
in my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a
nickname given to him by other Laggers because he's as
tall and is good with an axe as Paul Bunyan,
and he says ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a
face like Paul Bunyan's, the big blue Ox. And the
story is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to
(29:11):
go to the Stag Dance as one of the women,
and like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray,
and he ends up into in like a rivalry with
like the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things
kind of just go from there.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It's such a wonderful story and such an exciting kind
of shift from you as a writer as well, because
while it carries all the hallmarks of what at this
point two books and we've come to know and love
as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And
that's partly about language and partly about the voice you've found.
(29:47):
How did you find your way into that voice?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Well, I was I was building a sauna in the woods.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Good. That was exactly what I thought the answer.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So, like you know, there were a couple of things up,
like the sort of reception to de Transition Baby was
a little bit overwhelming, and I had a couple different
responses to that. One was to start spending more time
out of the city. And I got really into sauna,
the proper finish style sauna, like what makes for a
(30:20):
good sauna. So I decided I was going to build
a really good finish sauna. And I don't know that
much about construction or anything, so I started learning about
tools and then also I had to start like learning
a chainsaw to clear a place for the sauna and
also to make firewoods. I began like learning that's a spruce,
that's a maple, that's you know, learning my trees. So
(30:43):
the area in which I was doing it was a
former logging country, and I was dirty, and I was
uncomfortable all the time, and I was a little bit
like thinking about my gender as I was in the woods,
like I'm doing this these very typically masculine things of
cutting down trees with chainsaws. How do I feel about
my gender? So that was on my mind, and I
(31:04):
was also feeling like all of this pressure to follow
up De Transition Baby in a sort of you know,
domestic comedy kind of sphere, and not feeling like I
had the thing to follow it up. And then I
was thinking also kind of like about what if I
just did a really different voice, maybe that would free
(31:25):
me up. And then I found this book published in
nineteen forty one, and it's a collection of lagger slang
collected by the children of bloggers, which I normally would
have like totally ignored, except that I was building the
sona and thinking about logging, and the language was so
interesting and weird. You know, I'm used to sort of
(31:46):
like cowboy language and as an American or like Southern language,
but it was something like really different and just like
totally gone. And so the examples of words would be, like,
I mean, the one I always say, it's sort of
easy to see just like the weird patterns of thought
that are behind it. It's cackleberry for an egg, because
(32:07):
like a hen cackles and then it lays an egg
and you need to like find it and pick it
like a berry, so that's your cackleberry. A preacher is
a sky pilot because they guides you to heaven. Your
hand is a lunch hook because you sort of scoop
your lunch and hook it into your mouth. Chewing tobacco
is Scandahoovian dynamite. I don't know why they say scanda
(32:27):
Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but it's just really fun. There
were so many strange expressions that just felt like very
lived in. Like when you had dinner with like all
the other men, it was a symphony in tin because
everybody's just they're eating so fast with their tin dishes
that there's just the sound of tin on tin. Yeah.
(32:49):
I read it and I was like, I see how
it's lived.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
So I was like.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Looking to follow up, interested in logging, and I was
also under all these expectations to follow up, And I
was like, well, what if I just wrote a book
in lagger slang and came up with like a lagger dialect.
Nobody's expecting it, probably nobody wants it. And in a
weird way, that like frees me up to like actually
(33:13):
have fun again writing and so I started it, and
I kind of wanted to do like an Americana syntax,
like you know, something somewhere between like Melville and Cornick McCarthy,
like that's sort of like King James rhythms, but like
didn't quite get it right. And so I found this
weird syntax and cadence and put all those pieces together
(33:35):
and found that I was just like having a really
good time.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Oh, it's so good to read, and that language has
this kind of baroque play to it that's at odds
with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism. That
the two pull in opposite directions. On the one hand,
you have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin,
and then you have people who you assume are conditioned
not to say what they want or need or who
(33:59):
they are.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually
give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like
the excess of language actually had to do with some
part of like his muteness around his desires. You know,
it's like I can say all these things, but I'm
like circling around the thing that I actually wanted, the
(34:21):
like flowdness of everything around it kind of shows what
is difficult to say or what needs to be sort
of said in new ways.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
A few times before, you mentioned characters being cruel to
one another, and actually, I think across all your work,
you're one of the best writers I've ever read on
the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in
which the two of them are part of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, I think you have to like love somebody in
a certain way to be like truly cruel to them,
or at least you have to understand them, and like,
certainly I think that like cruelty has an aspect of
betrayal to it, and you know, to be betrayed, you
have to like trust and know somebody. I think for
(35:10):
something like Detransition Baby, the structuring relationship is like mothers
and daughters, But for this book, I would say it's sisters,
and the ways that like, your sister is the person
who you go to who can understand you, who comes
from where you come from, has seen you from when
(35:30):
you're young. If you make a change, they're like, well,
that's you now, but I know everywhere you've come from,
and there's like such a safety in that. But also
that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the person
who can betray you, who can can knife you most cruelly.
And so almost everybody in this book, no matter their gender,
(35:52):
they end up as sisters, like Babe Bunyan and Lison,
who's like the pretty boy in camp. It's meant to
be a little bit funny that there's this you know,
big strong logger and he's essentially sisterly with the young
pretty boy.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
And never more sisterly than when ultimately they're in competition. Yes,
but that becomes the micro of acceptance. Isn't solidarity, it's
recognition of rivalry. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
The character says, like to be rivals is to be
something the same, you know that, And he's almost proud
when he can be in the same league of contention
as Lisa, and they end up competing for the affections
of the camp boss. And I do think that that's oftentimes, like,
you know, the way that desire triangulates, like, well, how
(36:41):
do I know if I'm pretty the prettier girl is
looking for this guy, And so if I get the guy,
no matter what people say about me, if I get
the guy, I must ergo be the prettiest. Really, what
I'm talking about underneath all of it is my relationship
with other transmitmen, you know, and like the ways that
(37:03):
we negotiate what it means to be trans, what it
means to be feminine, the scarcity of resources that are
available for us. Trans women are are my sisters, and
they're also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
I knew after D Transition Baby, I wanted to read
anything you write after stag Dance. I now can no
longer confidently say what a Tory Peter's novel looks like,
but I know I want to read it even more
than ever. It's been such a trait to have you
in here today.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Tory Peter's latest book is Stag Dance. It's available everywhere now,
and if you haven't yet read D Transition Baby, go
back to that as well. It is excellent.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
to read this. As always, if you want to dive
further into the show, you can search for it wherever.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
There are more than ninety episodes in the Read This
archive for you to enjoy.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
See you next week.
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