Emily St. James’s New Novel Woodworking Is a Testament to the Power of Intergenerational Trans Stories

I also think you can’t talk about trans literature without talking about Nevada by Imogen Binnie. That, to me, is a foundational text, and one of the great American novels. It’s impossible to imagine Abigail’s voice in this book without the protagonist of that book. I love Gretchen Felker-Martin and Alison Rumfitt’s work; they obviously write in the horror genre, but it did feel to me like they both have a darker worldview that helped influence Abigail especially. Detransition, Baby is an obvious comparison point, because it’s doing a similar thing with two voices and approaching the experience of being trans from very different perspectives. The passages in that book about Ames’s time as a closeted trans woman living in the Midwest were very formative in terms of how I thought about approaching writing the Midwest, a place that Torrey Peters went to school in and I grew up in, and is very hard to describe. It’s this weird, cloistered environment.

What do you wish people understood better about trans life in rural areas?

I think the first, biggest point is that rural trans life exists, and that there are people who are going through these things every day. I grew up in South Dakota, and I’ve talked to some trans people from Sioux Falls, which is the large city there, and their experience of the world is simultaneously so similar to mine and so different from mine. They’re sort of moving through it and [feeling] a level of If I get spotted, my life could be very shitty—not in the sense of, like, they’re in imminent physical danger, but someone might be very shitty to them. People there are also not as used to trans people, so they are not as likely to pick someone out of a lineup as being trans if they’re not, like, dressed like a drag queen, because that’s sort of what their conception of trans is. But it just felt important to me to prove that trans people exist in that space, and talk about the ways that the generational aspect of this story is influenced by that area.

I do sometimes feel like there’s this perception among cis people that trans people were invented in 2015 in, like, a lab at Vassar, when nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve existed as long as there have been human beings, and you can go all the way back to the earliest writing about people to find us in it, or even to the Bible. It did sort of feel to me like this was a different way to show that than writing a book about trans soldiers in the Civil War, which maybe I’ll do someday. It was also important to me to talk about the found family, or the chosen family, that is so important to queer literature. It felt like an interesting approach, to be like, “There are two other queer people here in town. They are my chosen family by default”—and how similar is that to sometimes just having to put up with your family of origin because they’re family?