Welcome to Litsy!

I am quite sick right now, so not really up to writing a real review, but this was sad and hot and musical and smart. Hazel Jane Plante is such a gift!! Cat Fitzpatrick said in her recent acceptance speech for the Lambda lit award for trans fiction that trans people are writing a disproportionate amount of today's great fiction and I agree!!
#QueerBooks #LGBTQBooks #LGBTQ #TransBooks #CanLit

"Sometimes you can tell something is special, that you're really just a vessel for this special thing to come into existence. I didn't feel smart enough to write the lines that were coming to me. It was almost like I was picking up a faint radio signal from a parallel universe." #QueerBooks #TransBooks

"Perhaps ... you'll ponder whether or not this world deserves trans women. Perhaps you'll decide it doesn't and wonder how to change that." ?

#TransBooks #QueerBooks

"If I understood myself, I'd be a different person."

#QueerBooks #TransBooks

In her poetry collection The Small Way, Onjana Yawnghwe wrote about about her spouse‘s transition. It‘s nice to see that her former spouse, Hazel Jane Plante, dedicated the tagged novel to her.

A fictional memoir of Tracy St Cyr, a trans punk rock star, written in two parts: 1993, pretransition; & 2019, after a traumatic romantic breakup & the dissolution of her band. Both parts are set in an unnamed foreign city, in second person addressed to a loved one back home. I like the way this gives access to her inner thoughts & character growth over time. It‘s a sex-positive (lots of sex!) portrayal of the healing power of creativity. #LGBTQ

It would be like a librarian who‘s trying to write a novel. How could you feel like you had something to say if you were always aware of how many books had already been published? I mean, what kind of narcissist would be able to sit down and write a novel thinking, Oh yes, millions of other novels have been published, but wait until you read the humdinger I‘m going to write?! I feel sorry for any person who thinks that way.

I transitioned because being an invisible girl became intolerable.

Real life often defies genre. It‘s more like those strange plays Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. I think they were called late romances. Kathleen loved those plays but I didn‘t get them. In one of them, a character‘s wife dies and comes back to life 10 or 20 years later. What the what?! I couldn‘t give myself over to the mystery. It was too unsettling. But sometimes that‘s how life can feel.

We exchanged goodbye and good luck texts adorned with heart emojis in neutral hues. (Purple from him. Blue from me.)

The end of your letter made me happier and sadder than I can say. I‘m sitting in this ratty chair, letting good and bad emotions wash over me as I listen to the whoosh tink, whoosh tink, whoosh tink of the dryer. My heart feels like it‘s on a tumble cycle.