My story, “Sexual Tension,” has just been published in the June issue of Guernica. It’s an important story for me because it’s the one that started my foray into comedy, even though it’s published later than other comedic stories because of the time and care the Guernica editors Autumn Watts and Adam Dalva took with it. I thought this would be a good time to look back at some of the forces that made the story happen, in hopes that my experience might give others’ insight into their writing process.
After publishing my memoir Fairest in the summer of 2020, I found myself struggling to figure out what I wanted to work on. My entire profile at that point has been based on my nonfiction, but I felt myself wanting to explore aspects of immigrant trans experience that are more existential than autobiographical, which prompted a turn to fiction. I flailed for a while, working on a bunch of story and early novel drafts over a span of two years, but not quite finding a tone and approach that satisfied me.
I was fortunate enough to be granted a residency at Hambidge in March of 2022, which gave me the opportunity to reconsider my writing life. I was on spring break from teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence called “Dance as Writing,” reading Yvonne Rainer’s memoir Feelings Are Facts and watching Trisha Brown videos while working with students on improvisation and loosening up their writing practice. Though I wasn’t consciously thinking of it at the time, I realize now that I was also trying to teach myself to loosen up, to give myself the chance to try out other ways of writing.
It occurred to me that Rainer and Brown were making dances about dance, which resembled many authors’ recent turns toward autofiction where writers end up playing prominent roles in their own writing. But I found myself drawn to dance as inspiration just because it felt more buoyant and didn’t take itself as seriously as literary fiction, particularly because I was coming from a memoir project that required a deep excavation of some of the toughest parts of my life.
So all these forces were unconsciously in my mind when I found myself among the wonderful artists at Hambidge. My first night there, one of the other artists, Eliza Birkenmeier, was talking about this interview with Sally Rooney where she said, “As long as there’s sexual tension, people will keep reading,” and I had this sudden idea to write a story that explored sexual tensions in a residency environment where people are cut off from Internet and the people they typically have sex with. Thus, the story “Sexual Tension” was born, and from it sprouted a whole set of stories about trans storytellers and artists redefining their narratives while the rest of the world tries to limit them. This story also became the basis for my approach when I began work on my novel-in-progress The Shadow Worker, so it very much feels like that first tap into what has turned out to be a huge creative well.
I associate “Sexual Tension” with the feverishness of a new idea and the headiness of “residency time,” where things feel slow because there’s so much more time than usual, but fast because work goes so much more quickly. It’s one of those stories that essentially came out all in one gush (pun semi-intended). Right now I’m working on stories that aren’t like that, stories that require a lot more tinkering to get right. In the meantime, I’ve learned that there’s immense creative satisfaction in both kinds of stories, the ones that come quick and the others that have to simmer for a long time. The most important thing is maintaining that sense of artistic curiosity at every step along the way.