The Work Room Interview: Andrea Lawlor on the Joys of Queer and Trans Writing
Andrea Lawlor talks to Katie McDonough about Lawlor’s Work Room seminar, The Joys of Queer & Trans Writing.
Katie McDonough: In the description of this craft seminar you interrogate your own question, “What makes writing queer and/or trans, anyway?” with a further question: “What are specifically queer and trans modes of writing?” Can you explain what you mean by “modes” here, and address why this is an important lens through which to read, write, and discuss queer and trans writing?
Andrea Lawlor: When I first starting teaching queer and trans creative writing classes, I needed a way to explain to students (and to myself) that I wasn’t teaching a comprehensive or exhaustive LGBT literature survey, but rather leading an investigation into an extremely eclectic selection of texts, in hopes that the investigation would prompt students to make their own work.
Eventually I lit on the word “mode,” itself so nicely elastic, gesturing as it does toward making, fashion, action. My approach is basically this: by identifying some of the particular contributions of queer and trans writing, we can learn more about the conversations we want to join, lineages we might not know were ours—we can find our people. And, I think, we can avoid certain traps, like the inclination to police boundaries of identity or genre. And the modes I’m finding are always changing, and the modes other people would identify might be quite different, so there’s something of the infinite that I like as well. We contain multitudes! As a teacher, my goal is always to help writers find what opens things up rather than what closes things off.
KM: Is there a danger in labeling queer and trans writing as such, rather than as simply writing, or do you see this as beneficial, or even necessary, to the task of creating space for these voices and stories?
AL: Writing should be so lucky as to be labeled queer and/or trans!
KM: There’s another word in the title of the seminar that jumps out at me: “joys.” What about queer and trans writing makes it particularly joyful, and why is that something that you wanted to focus on?
AL: Oh, I think queer and trans writing is so full of joy. Many kinds of joys. We’re people who’ve struggled and fought and sacrificed in the service of desire, self-knowledge, liberation! I mean, what’s more joyful than that? What’s more enviable than that kind of conviction? What’s hotter or more romantic or more revolutionary in spirit? I have to admit that I’m generally a glass-half-full kind of person, so that’s what you get. And of course I wanted to give a little butch nod to Uncle Edmund, whose perfectly titled The Joy of Gay Sex may well have set me on a good course early on.
KM: In an interview with Jonathan Alexander of the Los Angeles Review of Books you said of your debut novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, “I hope that the book would be of interest to trans and non-binary or gender non-conforming readers. I hope it would be of interest to readers who don’t identify in those ways.” Did you create this seminar with the hope of appealing to queer and trans writers as well as cisgender and straight writers, and if so, what do you see as the potential value of conversations that might result from such a gathering?
AL: I designed this class for anyone who feels called to take it, anyone who opts in, anyone who wants to revel in queerness and transness, anyone who’s thinking about sex or bodies, anyone who’s on a journey. That’s who I want to work with! It’s kind of a big pool.