Sassafras Lowrey

A week ago the news broke that I had been selected as a winner of the Lambda Literary 2013 Emerging Writer Award. I am first and foremost a queer writer. It is important to me that my work be linked to queerness, that I write the queer worlds I know and love without concern for their palatability to straight audiences, it’s part of why for me recognition from an LGBT literary body means more than just about other recognition could.   Last week after the news broke I think I repeated the word “shock” or “I’m in shock” over and over again. It’s not very cute for someone who just received the biggest writing award they could get at this point in their career to be utterly without words – but that’s where I was, and, reality?  I’m still there.  Every morning since I got the news I’ve woken up and felt the need to pinch myself, I can’t believe this is happening, I can’t believe they liked my stories, that they believe I represent the future of queer literature.

For me this award represents so much, it’s an intense manifestation of so so so much:  how hard I have worked, how lucky I’ve been, how generous the community both readers and authors who I consider my colleagues and mentors, the reach of my three books – especially Kicked Out and Roving Pack.  I am primarily a self-taught and  community created writer. I got my start as a punk zinester, and I don’t have any formal writing training. I just know how to write stories. Roving Pack came out from my own imprint, Roving Pack is a book that publishers were nervous about, it’s a book that they didn’t want, but the community did, and rallied together to support me in releasing it.  Not a week has gone by since its release last fall that I haven’t gotten a letter or tweet or facebook message from a queer reader telling me what Roving Pack has meant to them, how they keep re-reading it because finally they see themselves, their friends/lovers/community/worlds represented on the page. We’ve come a long way that me and that little novel.  I can’t believe that part of our story together is this kind of recognition from Lambda Literary.

It definitely hasn’t fully sunk in that I got this award, that it’s really happening. I think it probably won’t sink in until I walk across the stage at the Lammy’s on June 3^rd to receive it.  I’m pretty sure I’ll be in tears.  Truly, I never thought I would get an award like this, that this kind of award would be given to someone who looks like me, writes like me, and comes from the literary background of typewriters, copy machines and no MFA’s.

There is a lot wrapped up for me in having been chosen as winner of Berzon Emerging Writer Award, but ultimately, it is far bigger than myself, bigger than the books I have written, or will write (I have a whole separate post I should write about how inspiring this has been as I work on my next novel). I hope to use this moment as an opportunity and platform as another outlet to continue to encourage others to tell their stories – especially those of us who have struggled to find a place in a traditional academic writing setting, those who have been silenced, those of us who have been told that we are not good writers, that our stories are messy, wrong, dirty, too complicated. Everyone has a story to tell, and the telling of those stories is essential in the creation of social change.

I see a lot of posts online in communities, on Facebook and in writers magazines talking about how people struggle to make time to write – about how someday they will have a life configured into xyz way that will enable them to adopt some perfect writing practice where they will – write for 6 hours a day, or do morning writes, or any number of other configurations that they have decided/been told is the right way to write, the most productive way to write, the way to write  that will  yield magical results- like a manuscript or a book deal. I think there are some people that need this kind of writing practice, but realistically most of us will never have a life that looks that way.

Above the desk in my home office (which as an aside is lovely and set up to be an idealistic writing environment, but not somewhere I’ve actually done a whole lot of writing) is this picture. It’s one of the most inspiring messages to me as a writer- I don’t know who the artist is (if you do, please tell me so I can credit them) and I found it years ago but keep there hanging above my desk so I see it when I unplug my charging iPad, or grab a spiral full of notes for a new project, or pack boxes of my books for an event I see it.

I know that because on facebook and twitter I only talk about my writing some people don’t realize that writing isn’t my only job. I believe it’s important to be real and transparent about what my life looks like. I have a day job, it’s a very high stress, high-pressure nonprofit management position it’s an important job, I’ve worked very hard to have it- but it does not define me. Intentionally I don’t talk about it a lot online because it isn’t my career, writing is. ::points to the image at the left:: I work two jobs.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of privileging whatever it is that we do that pays our bills, to say this job is what I am – but in relief the vast majority of us work two jobs. We do the job that pays the bills, and we do the job that feeds our soul. I’m am author even though I’m lucky if my royalty checks cover a dinner out. Being a writer is my job even though it isn’t what pays my mortgage. I remember seeing this drawing right around the time that Kicked Out released, and it shook me up. The first time I saw it, I realized that at events or out in the world I was discrediting myself, and my work by talking about the job that paid my bills instead of saying what I actually am in the world, an author.  Try it- the next time your introducing yourself to someone at a bar or a show or whatever, and the inevitable question of “what do you do?” comes up, try answering with: I’m a painter, or I’m a performance artist, or I’m a writer, or whatever it is that you actually are.

Try leading with that front and center and see how it feels.  It’s hard and will take some adjustment not to default to answering with whatever it is that paid for you to buy cat food this morning. I know when I first started saying I was an author it was before Kicked Out, had released and I would blush and get all embarrassed like I was an imposter, but slowly over time the more times I said it, easier it became, and most importantly, the more that I believed it.
It sounds silly and woo-woo but I really believe that belief in this being who you are is critical. I’m not saying that’s all of it, we can sit and believe in ourselves and never actually write a word and that isn’t going to translate into being a widely read author, also there’s no denying that the publishing industry is fickle. It’s a huge amount of dumb luck that got me to where I am today, BUT I think belief plays a role too. When I believed that I was an author, I started to give myself permission to see that as work. Writing became a priority, it became valued and put in the time to send stories to calls for submission, to write query letters to publishers, to blog, or simply just to write the stories that came to me. The more I wrote the better writer I became, the more I stopped sounding like how other people wanted me to write, or how I thought my writing should sound – the more I wrote, the more I was able to  develop my own voice and find my niche.

Very few of us will ever be fortunate enough to have the ability to create the perfect writers life where we spend hours a day pouring over our craft in an ideal setting with no other responsibilities. I like having health insurance, food in the fridge, and knowing how I’ll pay next months bills. As such, I have accepted that a day job will probably be a very real part of my life for the foreseeable future.  It’s a choice, I know people that make different ones, but it’s one that I’ve found peace with.  Just because writing isn’t what gives me financial stability, doesn’t mean being an author isn’t my carrer, it simply means I work two jobs.

Unlike my day job with a set schedule that’s given to me, I have had to find a way to take initiative and create my own writing work schedule. It’s been trial and error, first attempts looked like attempting things I’d read on blogs or in “how-to” writing books, and while I would keep the schedule for a little while it never really stuck.  It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to try something less structured that I was able to come up with a work schedule that for lack of a better word, worked!

I get a LOT of questions from people asking about my process: when I write, for how long, what programs do I use when I’m writing, or to organize projects etc.  To some extent I hesitate to talk too much about my own practice, not because it’s secret, but because the last thing I want to do is contribute to anyone thinking there is a “right” way to make the time for writing. That said, my own schedule differs from a lot of what I see being discussed in the literary world, and there is something to be said for offering multiple perspectives.

I work a slightly odd schedule (12-8 most days) and so I have my mornings to myself- sometimes I spend that time writing, more often it’s spent at the park with my dogs which relaxes me, calms me and makes me a better writer. The vast majority of my writing is done in transit, to and from my day job.  In fact, most of this blog was written on the subway on my way home last night.  Roving Pack was mostly written on my iphone in transit on the subway, and while on tour with Kicked Out.  Last summer I splurged and got an iPad, which for me has been a fantastic investment because of where/when I write (and because I adjust quickly to touch screen typing). Definitely in nonprofits taking a lunch break is not the norm, and I’m not always successful but I do try to get out of the office for a few minutes, usually to my favorite secret hideout the bubble teashop and knock out some text.

I identify as someone who dates my art, and think of writing not only as my career, but also in some ways consider my books to be lovers that I am in relationships with. I value what I love, and I make time for my relationships.  I take my books on little lunch dates, and it makes a tremendous difference in my productivity. Even if I only spent 15 or 20 minutes writing it changes my whole day – I’m able to focus better on everything, and it keeps the creative juices flowing and ready for my commute home where one of the ways I’m able to unwind from my day is to sink into my work. It’s grounding for me to remember who I am, and the work that I know I’m supposed to be doing in the world.  Of course, it’s imperfect, just last week I was writing a particularly sweet and brutal scene in my new novel Lost Boiand I was at my subway stop, and then again working through a tricky character moment and I had to go back to the day job and run a meeting. In both those instances I wanted to stay with my work, and couldn’t. I quickly thumbed some notes in my phone to remind myself where I was taking the story, and went about my day.  Was it frustrating?  Absolutely, but for me, it was also significantly better than not having spent the previous 15 minutes writing in the first place.

I don’t have all the answers. Ultimately everyone works differently and you have to figure out a writing plan that works for you and fits into your life. Try different things, mix it up, try something you’re sure won’t work – you might surprise yourself. Ultimately,  the one thing I do know, is that no one is going to give you the time to write, you have to take however and whenever you can. You have stories that deserve to be in the world, and only you can write them.

I’m so honored that to be included on the 2013  inaugural Trans 100 !  The list was released as part of a kickoff event in Chicago on March 31^st as part of the International Transgender Day of Visibility, but just went live online this morning! Over 500 trans people were nominated for inclusion and committees worked to compile the 100 list.

I’m beyond thrilled to be included on the list, to have my  writing, and the work it’s done in the world is being seen as worthy of inclusion. On a personal level too, there is a feeling of amazement and gratitude that my gender f*cked self has a place here on this list. I  remember when I quit shooting testosterone, when I embraced femme as a gender identity, I was intensely worried that I would no longer be seen as being valid, or real within trans community, even though that has always been core to how I see myself……. I’m very grateful to see that hasn’t been the case.

There are incredible activists, organizers, artists and community members included on the Trans 100 list and I’m so excited to be included along with them!

check out the full list here at Buzz Feed   

While everyone is thinking about marriage- lets put some resources towards the queer kids whose basic needs aren’t yet being met. a win in the Supreme Court isn’t going to help them, but you can.

Here’s a list of homeless queer youth serving agencies. Make a donation, give a queer kid a chance to live and grow http://www.kickedoutanthology.com/resources

It’s been a few weeks since I posted a more personal sort of blog. It’s been a busy few weeks, which has been the reasoning behind that silence, and I’ve of course been “micro blogging” everything via my facebook/twitter but lets be real, that just isn’t the same, at least not for me. Sometimes I’m asked why I choose to be so public with the intimate details of my life, and for me it’s about knowing that I’m able to understand myself best when I see myself, or aspects of myself represented in mediated artifacts – it’s best for me with books, but even seeing bits of my life in blogs, films etc.  makes me have a greater understanding of myself, and since the life I live is nonnormative in several different ways, I feel like it’s useful to add my voice to the mix, to offer a different perspective.  I’m thinking a lot about poly right now- what it really means to me in terms of the ways I choose to organize my life, how that has shifted over time, and how much I’ve grown, how much my whole little family has grown, and evolved and gained greater understanding, appreciation, and ultimately deeper love. It’s been a really exciting few weeks in my personal life where I feel like a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past couple of years has really come into being, and I’ve really been able to see the payoff of so much work that I have been doing.

I’ve talked before on the blog about the idea of what I call whale legs.  In our house, we call edgeplaying with boundaries “Whale Legs.”  Let me explain–whales have little vestigial leg bones hidden in their tales that are left over from a time when they roamed the earth instead of swimming through the sea. Sometimes there are boundaries I’ve held unexamined for 10 + years, holdouts from a place and time where I was a very different person, and sometimes as scary as I imagine it must have been for the little whale to realize that it no longer needed its legs, it’s equally powerful for the whale to realize it can glide through the water no longer inhibited by unnecessary boundaries uh…. Appendages

In the past couple of years, done the work. It feels incredibly good to be able to look around and really be able to say that YES, I stood up to the plate and did the really challenging, triggering, and just plain HARD work to get to where we are now.  I certainly was not alone in doing all that work, but I was consistently the one that pushed myself to be doing it. Sometimes, I look around and can barely recognize the memory of who I once was, and how many decisions I let be about fear. Fear of getting hurt, fear of letting others in, fear of being let down, fear of just how freaky and how queer I would feel at home in – and yet, how to the untrained eye how non-freaky/kinky that would come to look.

Last week my Daddy was away traveling– more specifically, ze was in Holland visiting hir girlfriend. It’s the second trip that ze has taken to see her in their almost two years being together, and she will be here for the third time late this summer (more on that later). We’ve been poly since the beginning of our almost 9 year relationship, yet I never believed that something like this could ever be ok– travel used to be n my HARD limits, until I saw how happy she makes hir, and I wanted to give hir the chance to go and visit her. I won’t lie and say its easy, but this years trip was so much less emotionally difficult. It didn’t hurt that even though it was hir second trip ze didn’t hold back on making the time as magical as possible for me- there were little animals and finger puppet monsters hidden through our home, videos recorded for every night ze was away and of course staying in regular email/text communication. I was also really lucky to get leather family visit from my Uncle who came down to NYC for the majority of my Daddy’s trip.

I missed Kestryl of course, but I also felt at ease, and at peace in my trust that ze would come home, and that the home we share is what ze still wants. Being able to have that kind of unquestioned trust is HUGE for me, and something I never thought I would be able to have.  In the last two years I’ve spent a lot of time (and work) questioning what boundaries existed because they actually felt good/important to me, and what were about fear, and trying to keep a situation “safe” aka not letting someone have the opportunity to hurt me.  OUCH. It was embarrassing to realize that I did have boundaries that fell into that latter category, and then having the ability to (with lots of support) push through those boundaries, and make the decision to live differently.

Here’s a little secret— I hate new relationship energy- unlike most people I don’t find it invigorating or inspiring. I don’t really date for a variety of reasons – my lack of interest in sex being one. I’m far more personally interested in building queer/leather family and fostering those relationships in my life. By the same token, I thin the longer that Kestryl and hir girlfriend are together, the more comfortable I feel with their relationship. When ze got home, I suggested that when she comes to visit for two weeks at the end of summer, that instead of her getting a hotel/air b&b that she should STAY with us—talk about a huge amount of growth over time!  So in September she’s going to be here for two weeks and stay in our office, and we will all three take the dogs and go stay at a cottage upstate for Labor Day weekend and then come back and all be in the house together, and while I’m sure aspects of it will be challenging, but I feel completely confident in the decision I made to volunteer opening our house to her, I feel like it’s a HUGE step, but also an important one. They will have been together over 2 years by that point, and I can honestly say that I don’t feel threatened by her. The relationship that Kestryl and hir girlfriend have couldn’t be more different than the one I that Kestryl and I share but I can honestly say that I see how good she is for hir.

Different relationships, different roles, different. Getting a solid grasp on that has been the core to all this work for me. Different not better, not more important, just different was something that I had a theoretical understanding of, but struggled to implement emotionally, and mostly that had NOTHING to do with my relationship, nothing to do with us being poly, or Kestryl’s relationship to hir girlfriend, and everything to do with my own self-judgments and an internalized little-phobia, and my coming to terms with my own sexuality and what feels good and authentic at this point in my life.

About a year ago I wrote here on my blog about feeling like I was coming out as being D/s and leather oriented as apposed to sexually oriented. I talked about how while I have been/can be very good at sex; I’m not at all interested in having it.  I’ve had a lot of sex in my life, with a lot of people and I feel really good about those experiences – actually I think that I really needed to have them in order to get to a place where I could have this kind of deeper understanding of myself, my desires and what (at least for now) makes sense to me. A lot of the sex that I’ve had over the years was in so many ways about getting as close as I could to what I wanted – the safety and intensity that I find in D/s. At the risk of TMI I was most attracted to the most intense sex I could come up with to keep me in my body, to keep me present. I did lots of fisting, lots of hard sex that would end in tight holding and coming down— it was being held that was the part that felt the best. It was that kind of trust that I was chasing, just like I was chasing the kind of intensity I find in D/s through so much of the sex that I had prior 9 years ago when Kestryl and I got together.

I am, amongst other things someone who writes dirty stories, if I could (within that genre) I’d write only kink without sex, but sex sells and I know it. It’s funny to have that kind of writing having a more forefront place in my life while simoltantiously having sex be so far removed from my actual life and desires.  My daddy and I haven’t had sex in a year, and come June it will be a year since I’ve had sex with ANYONE.  I’ve never felt happier. I’ve never felt less dysphonic, and at truce with my body. I don’t believe that is coincidence.  When I was able to open up to myself about what I really wanted, really having needed it was like a weight lifted off me. I hesitate to discuss this openly because I’m also out as a survivor, and I worry that the two things will be conflated with one another, when I believe they are actually separate—this isn’t up for debate.

Central to all this work I’ve done around boundaries, and poly, and desire has been a deep and authentic exploration and claiming of what I want and need. Early on in this process that looked like a lot of internal fighting, wishing that I could want something different – jealousy not of Kestryl having a girlfriend, but jealousy of hir ability to have and thrive within a diversity of relationships. For me being little isn’t a fetish, it isn’t something I do partway, it’s truly who I am and I am most happy, most at peace, most fulfilled within a 24/7 D/s Daddy/boy relationship. When I try to “date” when I try to have a “adult relationship” I find myself feeling fractured (for lack of a better word) as though I’m acting, pretending to be a grownup, not being my true self. I also am deeply poly, I believe that it isn’t possible for one person to meet all of our needs – I just don’t have the kinds of needs that are met through romantic relationships. The additional relationships that are the most important, the most fulfilling for me are with the family that I build (Queer and Leather), with my writing (I have a whole blog in the works about dating my books), and with my dogs. Owning, and taking pride in who I am and how I live in the world has been a long process, and I still have minutes, or even hours where I slip into an old pattern, where I’ll wish that I could be “a fancy grownup femme who goes on dates and has romantic relationships” but that isn’t me, and it isn’t what I really want, it is in those moments what I think I should want, which is VERY different than actually wanting it. In reality? Femme might be my gender, but I’m a boy, a boy whose so fulfilled, challenged, and secure. Through being poly I get to live the kind of queer life I’ve always dreamed of. We create the rules for our life, building the kind of relationship(s) that are fulfilling and engaging for us, knowing that for each of us, that will take a different form.

This blog post became much longer than I had intended, and doesn’t really have a clear purpose, other than to be a documentation of growth, and to put out into the world another voice talking about nononrmative relationships and relationship structures, but maybe that’s reason enough to have written it. I feel it’s important as someone who lives an open and transparent life to talk about these things because just a couple of weeks ago in queer/leather space I made a statement about not being interested in sex, and the response I received was “I’m so sorry!” #Ouch.  Until I don’t find myself in situations where I am defending both the validity, longevity (9 years this June!) of a primary partnership that is not sexually active, and of poly, I’m left believing that at least part of the solution must be more of us telling our stories, talking about our lives in blogs and in books, in paintings, and on stages.  I believe that it is our responsibility to continue to make visible the diversity of our queer lives, loves, and families.