Hello, dear friends,
Welcome to my first monthly newsletter! In this space, I plan to share a little about my writing process and what I’ve been reading. But I’m new to this, so it will surely evolve with me. For now, I’ll keep it simple: read on to hear about my novella-in-progress, the books, poems, essays, and stories I’ve been reading, my recent publications, and an explanation of this newsletter’s title.
In this issue
The Imaginary Novelist Writes
After spending most of the last eighteen months working on a novel full of compromises and bad choices and cynical characters, I’ve turned to a new project that can only be described as earnest. My narrator? Earnest. The prose? Earnest. All my characters, who are trans and in love with each other/the world/God? Earnest. It’s maybe a novella, maybe the start of a novel, maybe nothing at all, but I’m having a great time. If my last project was populated by characters who were so self-protective and self-absorbed that they couldn’t even see each other, this new project is populated by characters who are doing their damnedest to care for each other.
It’s also been making me think about choreography. Right now, I’ve opened the book like this:
It was all arranged very carefully: Michael would move out of Beck’s apartment on Saturday; Beck would make himself absent, so he and Michael didn’t fight; and then Mia would move into Michael’s old room on Sunday.
My characters want to avoid each other; in this sentence, I don’t let them. They are crammed up close together in the prose, even if in the narrative they will be, for a few chapters, distant. I’m trying to be more thoughtful about things like this, more intentional. To move with more grace in my fiction. To dance.
The Imaginary Novelist Reads
I always seem to read the most at this time of year. Here’s what I’ve been enjoying lately:
Books
Sympathetic Little Monster, by Cameron Awkward-Rich: a dear friend gave me this collection as I was recovering from top surgery, and it left me awestruck with the precision of language, the inventiveness of form, and the refusal to be bound.
Summer Sons, by Lee Mandelo: another great recommendation from a friend! It’s described on the back as ‘queer southern gothic,’ and it delivers; if it was a movie, it would be too scary for me, but in a novel it worked perfectly.
april, buttersoft, by nat raum: a micro collection about (as reviewer Romy Rhoads Ewing put it) ‘the ennui of stagnant rage.’ I loved the handful of poems in here for their precision and surprising turns of phrase—it’s free, so you have no excuse not to read it!
Poems
“Elegy,” by Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, in Blackbird: This poem crushed me. “I know where sorrow, like a knife, lodges in my mother’s body. I know where it opens into a room where she sits in the stillness of her father's absence.”
“Duplex (Gray-blue Staircase)” by Theo Jasper, in New Ohio Review: I love duplexes and this one deals with memory in a really interesting way. Content warning for discussion of suicidality and violence.
Prose
“Good Women,” by Tayler Raven Hanxi Bunge, in Porter House Review: I thought I knew and liked what this story was doing, and then, it begins to do something even more interesting altogether, and I absolutely loved it.
“Write Until You Pray,” by Angela Townsend, in Broad Ripple Review: I’m a sucker for a good god essay, and this one delivers some killer lines: “God knows when I am writing about God. I realize later, if at all.” Plus, here’s an interview with Townsend about the piece.
The Imaginary Novelist Publishes
Since this is my first of these newsletters, and since I didn’t publish all that much in 2025, I thought I’d share the three pieces I did publish last year:
“‘There are major moves in the market,’” in beestung. I wrote this piece on TDOR in 2024, and it was my first published piece of last year. Think: trans ennui on a train. This piece was nominated for a Pushcart prize! If you are a nonbinary writer, I can’t recommend working with beestung highly enough.
“The morning after we cried watching Brokeback Mountain,” in fifth wheel press. I wrote this story in April of 2024, in a cottage in Asheville, NC; unlike the narrator, I was alone on my trip. This piece was also nominated for a Pushcart!
“Nothing Mere,” in the engine)idling (if you click through the link, go to page 130). This is a long poem about God and sex and madness, and it was the first poem I ever read at an open mic.
…And, bonus, I published a book last year! I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg was my debut chapbook, out with fifth wheel press, all about my undergraduate woes (mostly the bipolar).
The Imaginary Novelist Explains the Name
When I started the prior iteration of this newsletter, it was billed as being about ‘agnostic spirituality,’ and I drew a great deal of inspiration from this quote out of Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language:
Always act as if god did not exist because if god does exist, he is at best a bad novelist who merits neither respect nor obedience. It is never too late to try to change the course of the story. And it may well be that the imaginary novelist has not yet made his decision. It may well be that the ending of the story is in the hands of his character, and that that character is me.
I’m not quite as attached to the message behind this quote as I once was, in large part because, over the last two years, I’ve sort of reencountered God in my life by joining an Episcopal church. (Sidenote: is rejoining a Christian church embarrassing, or a little badass? Haven’t figured it out yet.) So no, I no longer think of God as a ‘bad novelist,’ but I am pretty married to the name, and now I’m the Imaginary Novelist (because I will never publish a novel, ha, ha).
Thanks for reading this far! I’m excited to see where this newsletter takes me; feel free to share with a friend, reply if you’d like, and let me know what you think!