May 21, 2025 • 39 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. This week, Michael sits down with Torrey to discuss the genesis of Stag Dance and why she isn’t interested in trans identity.
Reading list:
Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters, 2021
Stag Dance, Torrey Peters, 2025
The Unquiet Grave, Dervla McTiernan, 2025
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Torrey Peters
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Amongst the myriad attacks on civil liberties that have characterized
Donald Trump's second term of government, the assault on trans
rights across American society have been particularly horrifying and far reaching,
from executive orders limiting gender affirming care for young people
to bans on trans people serving the armed services. The
(00:21):
demonization and minimization of the human experience of people on
the basis of their gender alienates and endangers entire communities.
It is culturally a pretty terrifying time to be a
trans person in America. I was thinking about what that
might mean as a backdrop to being a trans artist
in America today, what it might feel like producing new
(00:44):
work that can be personal and political and provocative, but
also unabashed, that needn't represent an entire community, or be
consumed by trauma, or have a responsibility to respond to
a malignant government that's denying your.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Very excit distance.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
But great art thrives in response to tyranny, and great
artists find ways to be funny and fierce and utterly
themselves in the face of external forces beyond their control.
Tory Peters is all too aware of the weight of expectation,
but with her new book, she's shown herself again to
(01:21):
be a great artist and ridiculously fun to read. Her
twenty twenty one novel, De Transition Baby was a sensation
and a revelation. It follows the dynamics between three thirty
something Brooklynites grappling with the idea of parenting and raising
a child. That those three models of womanhood, motherhood, and
(01:43):
adulthood formed an unconventional triangle was more a question of
setting than purely subject. Reese a transwoman, Katrina a ciswoman,
and Ames, who in the book has detransitioned and is
navigating life as a man after no longer being amy
as a mainstream literary success story in the early twenty twenties.
(02:05):
It was incredibly frank about the lives of its characters,
charmingly unconcerned with explaining cultural specifics, localized terminology, or social mores.
It was just this irresistibly likable comedy of manners. That
it was a book by a major new transwriter was
both precisely the point and completely beside the point. Tory
(02:27):
Peters's debut was long listed for the Women's Prize in
the UK, named one of the New York Times Best
Books of the twenty first Century so Far and was
widely beloved and acclaimed. So the follow up, stag Dance,
is a collection of four stories, each falling into a
fairly specific genre. The first, infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
(02:49):
is spec fiction in an imagined gender apocalypse. Then there's
The Chaser, a teen romance, one part Brideshead Revisited, one
part a kind of literary twilight with anxiety rather than
vampires and werewolves. Third is the titular Story, probably better
described as a short novel about a group of restless
lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit who plan
(03:12):
a dance that some of them will volunteered to attend
as women. And finally, the last story, The Masker, a
horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink and difficult choices.
Each of the four stories is arresting and surprising in
its own way. Each plays with genre and gender with
equal flare and confidence. The world is unmistakably in conversation
(03:37):
with the shit show of contemporary politics and society, but
it also sits outside and above it resolutely thrillingly its
own thing. This is a book of four stories and
an author with big, expansive ideas about the human experience
are Michael Williams and this is Read. This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind them.
(04:07):
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 were unable to find
homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
(04:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
In the book's.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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 and the ways in which it
reflects an evolving sensibility, an ongoing transition for its author.
One of the products of that of genesis for this
(05:01):
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 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 (05:23):
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
(05:44):
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 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,
(06:06):
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
(06:28):
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 1 (06:34):
I like the typos punk and I'm not going to
I'm going to turn off the little suggestions for I
am too punk for that little life.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
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. I
(07:04):
want everybody to be telling their 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 to move people,
(07:26):
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 1 (07:41):
I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightly voice
and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Well, I think this election 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
d Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights
with other trans women. I wasn't like, sort of starry
(08:18):
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
(08:38):
percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So, you know,
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 this woman a little bit older than me.
That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big,
(08:59):
and I realized, I'm reading all these books by like
divorce This women because divorced This women especially went through
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
(09:20):
all the trans women around me. I slowly began to
want to speak back to these Divorced This women who
were writing books where they were asking questions just like
mine but slightly scance, 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 (09:41):
It's my favorite thing about your writing.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
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 the trans family in
New York, whatever it is, you can be a radar
(10:04):
wherever and catch up with this your own space.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, And you know, I give I think I give
readers credit for being able to do it.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
You know.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
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 readers credit. There was like
a really funny tweet when you Transition Baby came out
of like this grandfather sending his gay grandson like a
(10:32):
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 his grandson by.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Text, but you know you can probably history that his grandson.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
It's probably the best.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I mean, it was really like I don't know, I
just give I give people credit for 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 lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all,
and so people are like, oh, you didn't explain the
trans terms, and it's like, well, I don't even explain
(11:17):
obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know, 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 brook line or whether
you're doing turn of the century lumberjack dances.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
This is a digression, but I'm curious as a rader,
is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
work to meet them?
Speaker 3 (11:49):
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 fail the book, and I think that that's not
a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me, like with
the Lumberjack stuff, that like, I read this book the
way that I felt when I was a kid, when
(12:11):
you're 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
(12:31):
you don't 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.
(12:54):
But I 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
in language that is not so frequently captured in what
(13:14):
is often valued 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
(13:35):
not exactly be what the author is saying, or that
might not be like correct.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
By playing with genre, you've got convention.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Which helps set up expectation, and then you've got freedom
to take that way you take it.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
That's absolutely right, it's very well said. Some of it
is that, like these genres have been so developed that
it saves me a lot of work in 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
(14:24):
really need to explain their motivations. You can just be
like their hunters on the road, 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, which you know, there are people
(14:46):
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 1 (14:52):
Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
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 predigested, and they're just sort of like bumping
their predigested arguments into each other. When it came to
(15:22):
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 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 kinds of facts, and
(15:46):
so journalists started taking the techniques of novelists Joan Diddyon,
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
(16:07):
with not just trans stuff, but with any kind of
identity 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 the same thing, and
(16:30):
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,
(16:50):
it's harder for a reader to come in with their
predigested analysis, and then you just have to feel what
he's feeling. So the teen romance story was is a
story of a kind of bro athlete. Cis white guy
who starts hooking up with his roommate and it's unclear
(17:11):
what his roommate is. They end up 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 disdains femininity and
(17:35):
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 quite being able to
name them, and therefore you can't sort of bring a
(17:58):
lot of your pre digestive analysis 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,
has all the things that the strong cis character is
supposed to have. That character has agency, that character is
able to state his desires, able to sort of carry
(18:20):
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 certain way. He's full
of shame, he's sort of stuck in that he knows
(18:43):
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 that like those things that
are supposed to be trans are actually things that the
Cis character goes through, which is kind of my larger
(19:03):
point that like, we're all we're all kind of going
through this stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
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 come
on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
(19:29):
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 (19:43):
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
ontological like are we the same in some like you know,
(20:04):
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
(20:27):
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 in 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
(20:49):
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 or 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
(21:12):
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, why
(21:36):
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 had nothing to
do with one another. I feel the same thing when
I look at so many of the men that are
(21:58):
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 sells your four
inches too short, and you're furious about it, and so
you go and you get like a home construction supplies
(22:22):
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
(22:42):
in the people who have the guts 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 (22:54):
I really love that.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
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 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 good trans voice,
(23:18):
the giver of advice?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Do you think about yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Differently off the back of the stratospheric fame that is
D Transition Baby.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
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
(23:46):
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 Detransition, maybe I had to be
a little bit more buttoned up. But the success of
(24:06):
it has opened up things enough that I can just
point to other people. You 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
(24:27):
a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance,
wearing triangles over their crouches like that's not and that's sort.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Of all I think they're saying it 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.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings that
held fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and
saw that he was potlatching with Mikels 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
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:10):
it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even
as you know somewhere in near mind you must have
the word that you don't lack it at all, only
its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leson's presence,
which made the needy lacking feeling worse, and my stiltness
clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a
saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, And
(26:31):
him being so amused that me struck me as ever,
the more saucy.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
We couldn't resist giving you a taste of the lumberjack
slang that defines the title story of this book, stag Dance.
It's tory 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. To fully
(26:58):
appreciate the complexity of this story, I asked Tori too
set up for the genesis behind stag dance.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
A stag dance is something that men would do when
they were working camps 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 get lonely and they would put on dances where
some of the men would attend the dance as women,
(27:26):
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 dowance was inverted, and then
they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is probably evident
to anybody listening to this podcast, and then they would
go to the dance as women. And I was just like,
(27:49):
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 there's like an upside down triangle
which has resonances with like the Second World War, with
like the reclaimed upside down triangle, and like HIV activism.
(28:09):
And here it was like with lumberjacks doing it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
So so weird that history, and how like if you'd
made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Contrived totally, it would have been like, oh, come on, Tory,
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 certain
(28:39):
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 cacharacter
(29:00):
my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a nickname
given to him by other loggers because he's as tall
and as good with an ax as Paul Bunyan, and
he's as ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a face
like Paul Bunyan's, a big blue ox. And the story
is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to go
(29:21):
to the stag Dance as one of the women, and
like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray
and he ends up in like a rivalry with like
the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things kind
of just go from there.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
How did you find your way into that.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Vo Well, I was I was building a sauna in
the woods.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Good. That was exactly what I thought, So.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
I, like, you know, there were a couple of things
up and like the sort of reception to de Transition
Baby was a little bit overwhelming, and I like, 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 Finnish style sauna, like
(30:29):
what makes for a 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
with the sauna, and also to make firewoods. I began
like learning that's a spruce, that's a maple, that's you know,
(30:51):
learning my trees. So 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,
and how do I feel about my gender? So that
(31:12):
was on my mind, and I was also feeling like
all of this pressure to follow up the 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,
(31:34):
maybe that would free me up. And then I found
this book published in nineteen forty one, and it's a
collection of logger 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
(31:56):
used to sort of like cowboy language and as an
American or like other 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 because it's sort of easy to see
just like the weird patterns of thought that are behind it.
There's cackleberry for an egg, because like a hen cackles
(32:18):
and then it lays an egg and 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 Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but
(32:39):
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. I read it, and I
was like, I see how it's to live this. So
(33:01):
I was like 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 logger 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
(33:23):
to like actually 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
(33:43):
all those pieces together and found that I was just
like having a really good time.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Oh, it's so good to read. And that language has
this kind of baroque play to it. That's a odds
with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism that
the two pull in opposite. 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 they are.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually
give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like
the access 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
(34:31):
like flowardness of everything around it kind of shows what
is difficult to say or what needs to be sort
of said in new ways.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
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 (34:58):
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
(35:20):
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
(35:40):
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 a 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 the book, no
(36:01):
matter their gender, 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.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Pretty boy, and never more sisterly than when ultimately they're
in competition. Yes, that that becomes the micro of acceptance.
Isn't solidarity, it's recognition of rivalry.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
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 Lison. 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
(36:52):
do I know if I'm pretty, the prettier girl is
looking for this guy, and so if I get the guide,
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 relationships
with other trans women, you know, and like the ways
(37:13):
that 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 my sisters, and
they are also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
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 (37:46):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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 And
if you're in or around Sydney, Tory will be at
Sydney Riders Festival this weekend SWF dot org dot au.
(38:18):
Before we get out of here, I wanted to let
you know what else I've been reading this week, and
longtime listeners to the show might know that I am
a bit of a crime fiction junkie. I couldn't resist
picking up the new Dovla mctannan. She's Perth based, Irish born.
She's returned to her detective hero Cormack Riley with this.
It's the fourth Comack Riley book. It's called The Unquiet
Grave and it's terrific. It's available at your local independent
(38:42):
bookstore or library. That's it for this week's show. If
you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and
review us. It helps a lot read. This is a
Schwarz Media production, made possible by the generous support of
our A group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames,
with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalt
(39:02):
and Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by Posey mcacky. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
Amongst the myriad attacks on civil liberties that have characterized
Donald Trump's second term of government, the assault on trans
rights across American society have been particularly horrifying and far reaching,
from executive orders limiting gender affirming care for young people
to bans on trans people serving the armed services. The
(00:21):
demonization and minimization of the human experience of people on
the basis of their gender alienates and endangers entire communities.
It is culturally a pretty terrifying time to be a
trans person in America. I was thinking about what that
might mean as a backdrop to being a trans artist
in America today, what it might feel like producing new
(00:44):
work that can be personal and political and provocative, but
also unabashed, that needn't represent an entire community, or be
consumed by trauma, or have a responsibility to respond to
a malignant government that's denying your.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Very excit distance.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
But great art thrives in response to tyranny, and great
artists find ways to be funny and fierce and utterly
themselves in the face of external forces beyond their control.
Tory Peters is all too aware of the weight of expectation,
but with her new book, she's shown herself again to
(01:21):
be a great artist and ridiculously fun to read. Her
twenty twenty one novel, De Transition Baby was a sensation
and a revelation. It follows the dynamics between three thirty
something Brooklynites grappling with the idea of parenting and raising
a child. That those three models of womanhood, motherhood, and
(01:43):
adulthood formed an unconventional triangle was more a question of
setting than purely subject. Reese a transwoman, Katrina a ciswoman,
and Ames, who in the book has detransitioned and is
navigating life as a man after no longer being amy
as a mainstream literary success story in the early twenty twenties.
(02:05):
It was incredibly frank about the lives of its characters,
charmingly unconcerned with explaining cultural specifics, localized terminology, or social mores.
It was just this irresistibly likable comedy of manners. That
it was a book by a major new transwriter was
both precisely the point and completely beside the point. Tory
(02:27):
Peters's debut was long listed for the Women's Prize in
the UK, named one of the New York Times Best
Books of the twenty first Century so Far and was
widely beloved and acclaimed. So the follow up, stag Dance,
is a collection of four stories, each falling into a
fairly specific genre. The first, infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,
(02:49):
is spec fiction in an imagined gender apocalypse. Then there's
The Chaser, a teen romance, one part Brideshead Revisited, one
part a kind of literary twilight with anxiety rather than
vampires and werewolves. Third is the titular Story, probably better
described as a short novel about a group of restless
lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit who plan
(03:12):
a dance that some of them will volunteered to attend
as women. And finally, the last story, The Masker, a
horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink and difficult choices.
Each of the four stories is arresting and surprising in
its own way. Each plays with genre and gender with
equal flare and confidence. The world is unmistakably in conversation
(03:37):
with the shit show of contemporary politics and society, but
it also sits outside and above it resolutely thrillingly its
own thing. This is a book of four stories and
an author with big, expansive ideas about the human experience
are Michael Williams and this is Read. This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind them.
(04:07):
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 were unable to find
homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance,
(04:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
In the book's.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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 and the ways in which it
reflects an evolving sensibility, an ongoing transition for its author.
One of the products of that of genesis for this
(05:01):
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 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 (05:23):
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
(05:44):
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 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,
(06:06):
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
(06:28):
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 1 (06:34):
I like the typos punk and I'm not going to
I'm going to turn off the little suggestions for I
am too punk for that little life.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
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. I
(07:04):
want everybody to be telling their 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 to move people,
(07:26):
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 1 (07:41):
I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah,
I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightly voice
and finding a personal identity and the ways in which
they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Well, I think this election 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
d Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights
with other trans women. I wasn't like, sort of starry
(08:18):
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
(08:38):
percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So, you know,
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 this woman a little bit older than me.
That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big,
(08:59):
and I realized, I'm reading all these books by like
divorce This women because divorced This women especially went through
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
(09:20):
all the trans women around me. I slowly began to
want to speak back to these Divorced This women who
were writing books where they were asking questions just like
mine but slightly scance, 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 (09:41):
It's my favorite thing about your writing.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
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 the trans family in
New York, whatever it is, you can be a radar
(10:04):
wherever and catch up with this your own space.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, And you know, I give I think I give
readers credit for being able to do it.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
You know.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
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 readers credit. There was like
a really funny tweet when you Transition Baby came out
of like this grandfather sending his gay grandson like a
(10:32):
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 his grandson by.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Text, but you know you can probably history that his grandson.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
It's probably the best.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I mean, it was really like I don't know, I
just give I give people credit for 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 lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all,
and so people are like, oh, you didn't explain the
trans terms, and it's like, well, I don't even explain
(11:17):
obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know, 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 brook line or whether
you're doing turn of the century lumberjack dances.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
This is a digression, but I'm curious as a rader,
is that what you like to be thrown in? Do
you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the
work to meet them?
Speaker 3 (11:49):
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 fail the book, and I think that that's not
a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me, like with
the Lumberjack stuff, that like, I read this book the
way that I felt when I was a kid, when
(12:11):
you're 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
(12:31):
you don't 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.
(12:54):
But I 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
in language that is not so frequently captured in what
(13:14):
is often valued 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
(13:35):
not exactly be what the author is saying, or that
might not be like correct.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
By playing with genre, you've got convention.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Which helps set up expectation, and then you've got freedom
to take that way you take it.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
That's absolutely right, it's very well said. Some of it
is that, like these genres have been so developed that
it saves me a lot of work in 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
(14:24):
really need to explain their motivations. You can just be
like their hunters on the road, 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, which you know, there are people
(14:46):
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 1 (14:52):
Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a
set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
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 predigested, and they're just sort of like bumping
their predigested arguments into each other. When it came to
(15:22):
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 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 kinds of facts, and
(15:46):
so journalists started taking the techniques of novelists Joan Diddyon,
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
(16:07):
with not just trans stuff, but with any kind of
identity 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 the same thing, and
(16:30):
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,
(16:50):
it's harder for a reader to come in with their
predigested analysis, and then you just have to feel what
he's feeling. So the teen romance story was is a
story of a kind of bro athlete. Cis white guy
who starts hooking up with his roommate and it's unclear
(17:11):
what his roommate is. They end up 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 disdains femininity and
(17:35):
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 quite being able to
name them, and therefore you can't sort of bring a
(17:58):
lot of your pre digestive analysis 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,
has all the things that the strong cis character is
supposed to have. That character has agency, that character is
able to state his desires, able to sort of carry
(18:20):
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 certain way. He's full
of shame, he's sort of stuck in that he knows
(18:43):
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 that like those things that
are supposed to be trans are actually things that the
Cis character goes through, which is kind of my larger
(19:03):
point that like, we're all we're all kind of going
through this stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
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 come
on the fingers of one hand the number of characters
(19:29):
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 (19:43):
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
ontological like are we the same in some like you know,
(20:04):
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
(20:27):
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 in 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
(20:49):
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 or 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
(21:12):
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, why
(21:36):
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 had nothing to
do with one another. I feel the same thing when
I look at so many of the men that are
(21:58):
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 sells your four
inches too short, and you're furious about it, and so
you go and you get like a home construction supplies
(22:22):
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
(22:42):
in the people who have the guts 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 (22:54):
I really love that.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
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 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 good trans voice,
(23:18):
the giver of advice?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Do you think about yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Differently off the back of the stratospheric fame that is
D Transition Baby.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
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
(23:46):
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 Detransition, maybe I had to be
a little bit more buttoned up. But the success of
(24:06):
it has opened up things enough that I can just
point to other people. You 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
(24:27):
a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance,
wearing triangles over their crouches like that's not and that's sort.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Of all I think they're saying it 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.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings that
held fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and
saw that he was potlatching with Mikels 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
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:10):
it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even
as you know somewhere in near mind you must have
the word that you don't lack it at all, only
its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leson's presence,
which made the needy lacking feeling worse, and my stiltness
clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a
saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, And
(26:31):
him being so amused that me struck me as ever,
the more saucy.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
We couldn't resist giving you a taste of the lumberjack
slang that defines the title story of this book, stag Dance.
It's tory 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. To fully
(26:58):
appreciate the complexity of this story, I asked Tori too
set up for the genesis behind stag dance.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
A stag dance is something that men would do when
they were working camps 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 get lonely and they would put on dances where
some of the men would attend the dance as women,
(27:26):
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 dowance was inverted, and then
they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is probably evident
to anybody listening to this podcast, and then they would
go to the dance as women. And I was just like,
(27:49):
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 there's like an upside down triangle
which has resonances with like the Second World War, with
like the reclaimed upside down triangle, and like HIV activism.
(28:09):
And here it was like with lumberjacks doing it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
So so weird that history, and how like if you'd
made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Contrived totally, it would have been like, oh, come on, Tory,
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 certain
(28:39):
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 cacharacter
(29:00):
my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a nickname
given to him by other loggers because he's as tall
and as good with an ax as Paul Bunyan, and
he's as ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a face
like Paul Bunyan's, a big blue ox. And the story
is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to go
(29:21):
to the stag Dance as one of the women, and
like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray
and he ends up in like a rivalry with like
the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things kind
of just go from there.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
How did you find your way into that.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Vo Well, I was I was building a sauna in
the woods.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Good. That was exactly what I thought, So.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
I, like, you know, there were a couple of things
up and like the sort of reception to de Transition
Baby was a little bit overwhelming, and I like, 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 Finnish style sauna, like
(30:29):
what makes for a 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
with the sauna, and also to make firewoods. I began
like learning that's a spruce, that's a maple, that's you know,
(30:51):
learning my trees. So 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,
and how do I feel about my gender? So that
(31:12):
was on my mind, and I was also feeling like
all of this pressure to follow up the 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,
(31:34):
maybe that would free me up. And then I found
this book published in nineteen forty one, and it's a
collection of logger 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
(31:56):
used to sort of like cowboy language and as an
American or like other 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 because it's sort of easy to see
just like the weird patterns of thought that are behind it.
There's cackleberry for an egg, because like a hen cackles
(32:18):
and then it lays an egg and 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 Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but
(32:39):
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. I read it, and I
was like, I see how it's to live this. So
(33:01):
I was like 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 logger 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
(33:23):
to like actually 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
(33:43):
all those pieces together and found that I was just
like having a really good time.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Oh, it's so good to read. And that language has
this kind of baroque play to it. That's a odds
with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism that
the two pull in opposite. 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 they are.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually
give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like
the access 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
(34:31):
like flowardness of everything around it kind of shows what
is difficult to say or what needs to be sort
of said in new ways.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
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 (34:58):
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
(35:20):
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
(35:40):
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 a 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 the book, no
(36:01):
matter their gender, 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.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Pretty boy, and never more sisterly than when ultimately they're
in competition. Yes, that that becomes the micro of acceptance.
Isn't solidarity, it's recognition of rivalry.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
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 Lison. 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
(36:52):
do I know if I'm pretty, the prettier girl is
looking for this guy, and so if I get the guide,
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 relationships
with other trans women, you know, and like the ways
(37:13):
that 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 my sisters, and
they are also the people that can hurt me the most.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
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 (37:46):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
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 And
if you're in or around Sydney, Tory will be at
Sydney Riders Festival this weekend SWF dot org dot au.
(38:18):
Before we get out of here, I wanted to let
you know what else I've been reading this week, and
longtime listeners to the show might know that I am
a bit of a crime fiction junkie. I couldn't resist
picking up the new Dovla mctannan. She's Perth based, Irish born.
She's returned to her detective hero Cormack Riley with this.
It's the fourth Comack Riley book. It's called The Unquiet
Grave and it's terrific. It's available at your local independent
(38:42):
bookstore or library. That's it for this week's show. If
you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and
review us. It helps a lot read. This is a
Schwarz Media production, made possible by the generous support of
our A group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames,
with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalt
(39:02):
and Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by Posey mcacky. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
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