What does it mean to write a queer story, particularly if that story is not about coming out of the closet? If you write a queer story, does that mean, necessarily, that you are writing predominantly for a queer audience or can you write stories for mainstream audiences where characters “just happen to be gay”? Do you have to always treat a character’s “otherness” (their queerness, their brownness, their intersectionality) on the page? This last question I once posed to the writer, Alexander Weinstein, known for his book Children of the New World, which imagines the dark reality of a world increasingly reliant on technology. We were talking about my struggles writing environmental poetry, and the pressure I felt as a queer woman of color to always have to somehow include my positionality on the page. I asked Alexander: What would it mean for his futuristic, science-fiction stories if every time he sat down to write, he, a white man, had to somehow establish his relationship to his own male whiteness on the page? Would he still be able to tell the stories he wanted/needed to tell? More complex still: how can I be seen as a queer writer of color if I don’t always treat the markers of my identity as a subject of my writing? And what if the more subtle markers of my identity are not as easily visible by publishers who tend to gravitate towards stories that are only recognizable by them – stories which usually involve self-loathing, hiding, and shame, themes which I have no interest in exploring? In many ways, I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to answer these questions both in my writing, in my scholarship, and in my conversations with other writers. In my current project, I am telling a story that is, primarily, about grief, loss, and the tragedy of human impact on our environment, while at the same time attempting to write a character who looks more like myself onto the page. PROJECT: SARAH AND THE MANTIS, A NOVEL Synopsis: After her father’s sudden death, Sarah’s world descends into silence – there is the silence of her once laughter-filled house, the silence from the kids on the playground, and the silence of the black tar that has appeared in her father’s once flourishing garden, warning her that there was more to her father’s death than it originally seemed. When a praying mantis appears at Sarah’s bedroom window, Sarah is certain the mantis has been sent by her father to bring her answers. On a whim, she follows the mantis into the night, on a journey that has her crossing out of this world and into another, one where the destruction of this planet and the consequences of our actions are hyper visible, and one where the mystery behind her father’s death is somehow intertwined. Commentary - Sarah and the Mantis is a coming-of-age novel with a dash of philosophy, magical realism, and adventure thrown in. The main character is the closest I’ve come to writing a character like myself onto the page – like me, Sarah grieves her father; she’s Filipino (half to my 3/4ths) and lives in a town that is predominantly white; she’s also queer, though at age 11, her queerness is still invisible even to herself. It’s been a struggle to write Sarah in a way where her identity is visible to readers as I’ve had to fight against the problems of default whiteness, particularly against the backdrop of a story that carries many of the tropes of a fantasy adventure, a genre that’s been dominated by white narratives. This is not new for writers who don’t identify with the norm – Ursula K. LeGuin had to teach herself to “write as a woman” and poet Ocean Vuong, once said that “If you are an Asian-American writer, artist, poet, or painter, prepare to be unfathomable, inconceivable.” I feel unfathomable and inconceivable on the page, and this novel is a struggle into making myself tangible while dealing with my current concerns and fears about the state of our natural world.

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