Tales from the Trunk
Tales from the Trunk
Tales from the Trunk features interviews with and abandoned stories from science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors.
- 32 minutes 59 secondsBook Tour 43: Sarah Pinsker – Haunt Sweet Home
Show notes coming soon.
If you have a few extra dollars, both Sarah and I would appreciate any donations you can make towards relief efforts in the areas of Appalachia affected by hurricane Helene. We highlighted the following organizations:
18 October 2024, 6:00 am - 30 minutes 57 secondsBook Tour 42: T. Kingfisher – A Sorceress Comes To Call
We’re back, folks! And as promised, I’m joined this time around by none other than T. Kingfisher herself, who joins me to talk about her newest novel, A Sorceress Comes to Call, available right this very moment from fine booksellers everywhere.
Things mentioned in this episode:
The Hamster Princess series, by Ursula Vernon
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness, by Florence Hartley
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher
Behold: Humanity!, by Ralts Bloodthorne
Humans are space orcs (this may not be the original, but it’s what I could surface)
Ursula’s bluesky, tumblr, and website
Join us again in October, when I’ll be talking to Sarah Pinsker!
20 September 2024, 6:00 am - 1 minute 38 secondsAn Announcement
Hello, dear listeners!
I wanted to give you all an update about the show. To whit: I’m taking a bit of a break. The last five seasons have been incredible, and season six has been and will continue to be.
Tales from the Trunk is in no way ending. We will be back on September 20th, when I’ll be talking to T. Kingfisher.
In the mean time, here are some of the things that I have been enjoying from the wider media landscape:
- A podcast: Friends at the Table – their eighth season, Palisade, is coming to a close right now, and it has been a Ride.
- A book: Bury Your Gays, by Chuck Tingle – you already know how much I loved Camp Damascus, and it should come as no surprise that the good doctor’s follow-up is every bit as incredible.
- A TV show: Hunter × Hunter (2011) – Just a fantastic shōnen anime.
- And a musical twofer:
- Chappel Roan – come on. I’m queer. She writes good pop hooks. Suggested tracks: “Pink Pony Club” and “My Kink is Karma”
- Porter Robinson – if you like bouncy but also emotional EDM, give him a go. Suggested tracks: “Knock Yourself Out XD” and “Shelter”
Thanks again for your support over the years, and I look forward to returning in two months with even more amazing interviews with incredible guests.
20 July 2024, 2:25 am - 29 minutes 7 secondsBook Tour 41: Aliette de Bodard – Navigational Entanglements
This time around, it’s my delight to welcome to the show Aliette de Bodard! Aliette joins me to talk about her new novella, Navigational Entanglements, available July 30th, 2024, from TorDotCom Books!
Things we mention in this episode:
Heaven’s Official Blessing, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
“The Tutelary, the Assassin, and the Healer,” by Aliette de Bodard in I Want That Twink Obliterated
Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman
The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera
Chronicles of Elantra, by Michelle Sagara
5 July 2024, 6:00 am - 26 minutes 56 secondsEpisode 62: "Visibility" and Pride in Place 2020
Hello, and welcome to Tales from the Trunk.
Listeners, it’s June, and ya boi is tired. I was going to try to scramble to get an interview scheduled, but then I remembered the name of a Shavuot workshop that a dear friend of the show attended last year: “What if we Rested?”
Life has been nonstop for me for more than half a year now, so what if I rested? What if we all rested? Goodness knows that if you’re not a white cishet allo abled person, you need it.
But also, I wanted to do something. So I’m bringing you something old and something—well, another old thing, actually, but one that hasn’t appeared here before. First, here is an essay that I wrote for Trans Day of Visibility a few years ago, and after that, a short collection of essays that first aired here in June of 2020. I hope you enjoy them.
Visibility
honestly i’ve been sitting on this for a grip and just not quite knowing how to fit the words together, but i’m tired, y’all. so, visibility. of trans people, specifically.
it’s me. i’m trans people.
it took me a long time to understand that about myself, and i didn’t come to it on my own. i needed help. i needed to see that “trans” was a word that could describe me.
when i was little, i knew that i was weird. that i didn’t fit. that i didn’t act like the other little boys. that there were parts of me that i had to learn to hide to keep myself safe. that i couldn’t talk about with anyone because i didn’t have the language to capture it.
when i was in ninth grade, one of our history teachers came out as trans. we had an assembly where an administrator told us all that our teacher was a man now, that his pronouns were he/him, probably that misgendering him wouldn’t be tolerated. but he didn’t look like me.
i had a distant friend in high school who came out as trans. he didn’t look like me, either.
years before she came out as trans, my closest friend at school told me that she was bisexual. she was the first bi person i knew i knew. we would go to goth clubs and she would make out with people while i danced or stood against the wall and nodded my head along. even before we were really friends, i was drawn to her, wanted to be her friend more than anything. we went through a lot of hard times together, but she didn’t look like me.
she pierced my ears after high school. four holes i carry to this day, a little part of her with me all the time even though we haven’t seen each other in a decade.
in college, my friend asked that we use neopronouns for them, then they/them. the neopronouns were hard. we were young. i knew so many queer people in college, so many trans people. none of them looked like me.
that same friend came out to me and my spouse as genderqueer sometime before our wedding. i think that was the first time i’d heard the word. but i didn’t know it was something that could belong to me. not yet.
i “came out” to a friend one summer night while i was in college. we were driving to get snacks after a day of endless quaker committee meetings. i said that i’d only ever fallen for women before, but that i was open to the possibility that wouldn’t always be the case. i was in my first actual relationship then. years later, my ex came out as nonbinary. i didn’t think about that coming-out conversation again for a long time.
i came out as bi to my cat while i was driving her to the vet for dental surgery. she was upset because she was in the car, but i knew that she was someone i could trust with my “secret.” it wasn’t for another few weeks that i came out to my spouse and a few of my friends. i used to think of outness as a binary, even though it’s always been a spectrum. i’m out to some of my coworkers, mostly other queers, but not others. it’s not worth the discomfort. or it’s choosing the lesser of two levels of discomfort.
one time, my boss at the time said “everyone here is straight” in a meeting. he wore a rainbow strap on his apple watch in june. he’d like you to know that he’s an ally. i felt deeply uncomfortable about not saying anything, but also deeply uncomfortable about the idea of saying something. after i left that job, a former coworker confided in me that this boss pulled some classic cishet white dude stuff with them. i felt grateful that i hadn’t outed myself in that meeting long ago.
i found a copy of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer at a bookstore the same summer that i left that job and bought it on the spot. i just thought it was neat. i knew that i needed it.
i read that book in a single sitting. i’ve re-read it more times than i can count since then.
Maia didn’t look like me, but i still saw myself in eir experiences in a way that i hadn’t experienced before. e was queer. queer as in weird. queer as in didn’t get social expectations for eir assigned gender. queer as in, well, queer.
a month or two later, i got a tattoo of a jackalope on my arm, but if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s a bunny wearing a pair of antlers that are tied on under their chin. when i designed the tattoo, i explained that that was about live-action roleplaying. maybe i believed it? but that’s not what it was really about, was it?
i had a gender crisis in 2020 at the start of the lockdown. if i’m being honest, i’d been having a gender crisis for years, quietly, tucked in the pages of journals hidden away where i didn’t have to look at them. but suddenly, it was just two adult humans and two cats all alone in a house, doing their grocery shopping at first light, uncomfortable with the idea of other people in a new way.
there was a lot of gender going around then.
i came out as genderqueer to my cat while i was driving her to another appointment. maybe you’re sensing a theme. she knows my secrets, but she’ll never talk.
i came out to my partner. it was easier, in some ways, and harder in others. “i’m attracted to more than one gender” is much more straightforward than “i’m genderqueer, but my pronouns are he/him, but my experience of gender is ????” i talked to my few close nonbinary friends about it. that really helped, because we had a shared vocabulary of “gender? what the fuck?”
i came out to my therapist.
he just didn’t get it. he was an older cishet white man. in one of our last sessions, he said that we should talk more about my gender. with my spouse’s help, i broke up with him and found a new therapist before i had to go through that ordeal. my new therapist is queer. she asked me what pronouns to use for me in our first session and told me to tell her if that changed. i started using he/they, then they/he, then just they/them pronouns within a couple months. not everywhere at first, but most places.
bigots started challenging Gender Queer earlier this year, or maybe at the end of last year. who knows when? time is fake. they call it pornographic. they call it smut.
i call it lifechanging.
it wasn’t until i was in my 30s that i started to see queer people who looked like me. it wasn’t until i read a memoir by a person whose early life experiences mirrored my own that i really learned language to talk about myself.
i like where i am in my life. yes, i’m anxious, and we’re all still out here with this pandemic and a global rise in fascism, but i know a lot more about myself, understand a lot more about myself at 35 than i did at 30, at 25, at 20. but that doesn’t stop me from wondering what my life might have looked like if i’d seen people like me when i was growing up.
i can’t change my past, but i can be visible for today’s kids. maybe some weird little boy will see me in the grocery store and gain some understanding that he didn’t have before. maybe a nonbinary teen will feel safer just existing knowing that they’re not alone. that’s what we mean when we talk about “trans visibility.” that’s why it’s important. because trans visibility produces trans adults, but trans invisibility produces miserable people, miserable kids. or dead ones.
trans visibility, queer visibility, is lifesaving.
21 June 2024, 6:00 am - 53 minutes 18 secondsBook Tour 40: Jay Wolf – The Shepard in Shadow
We’re kicking off Pride this year with none other than my good friend Jay Wolf! Jay reads a snippet about their best worst boys, Egan and Petrel before we get to talking about their newest book as M. Daniel McDowell, The Shepherd in Shadow, which releases June 28th!
Things we mention in this episode:
The Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake
Inkfort Press Self-Publishing Derby
Bringer of the Scourge, by M. Daniel McDowell
The Colour of Magic and Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett
7 June 2024, 6:00 am - 52 minutes 22 secondsEpisode 61: Meg Elison – Hemet
This time around, I’m thrilled to welcome to the show Meg Elison! Meg reads to us from the start of their trunked novel, Hemet, which leads us into a wonderful conversation about a whole host of topics, including her own artist’s statement on spooky stuff.
17 May 2024, 6:00 am - 41 minutes 15 secondsBook Tour 39: Victor Manibo – Escape Velocity
This time around, it’s my delight to welcome back to the show Victor Manibo! After a bit of catching up, we get into Victor’s new book, Escape Velocity, which releases later this month from Erewhon Books!
Things we mention in this episode:
The Sleepless, by Victor Manibo
Victor’s first episode
“The Cask of Amontillado,” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher (show)
Gravity (2013)
Funeral and Neon Bible, by Arcade Fire
COWBOY CARTER and RENAISSANCE, by Beyoncé
Shōgun (TV series) based on the novel by James Clavell
Our Share of Nights, by Mariana Enriquez
Victor’s website, twitter, insta, tiktok, fb, and substack
Stick around next time when my guest will be Meg Elison!
3 May 2024, 6:00 am - 2 hours 13 minutesEpisode 60: Ivy Fox – Strapped
In addition to the regular strong language, this episode carries content warnings for: reclaimed gay slurs; a non-graphic depiction and discussion of non-consensual sex; depictions of consensual violence; and discussions of attempted suicide, medical trauma, experiences of psyche wards, descriptions of psychosis, forcible medication, restraint, experiences of homelessness, alcoholism, and body horror. The non-consensual sex and the consensual violence are both depicted in the reading, which is 24 minutes long, and there is some further discussion of the events from the reading following it. Perhaps even more so than usual, listener discretion is advised.
This time around, it is my complete gremlin pleasure to welcome to the show Ivy Fox! Together, we perform the entirety of her play, Strapped, which leads us into a wide-ranging conversation that touches on collaborative art, anime girls, furry music, mental health, and so much more. Seriously, this episode is over two hours long. We just kept talking!
Things we mention this episode:
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samine Nosrat
“Trust the Process,” by Hilary B. Bisenieks in Stone Soup
Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault
Warrior Cats series, by Erin Hunter
All Our Yesterdays, by Hilary B. Bisenieks
Conflict is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman
Voidreckon, by Mittsies
Techdog 1-7, by Patricia Taxxon
I WANT TO LOVE AGAIN, by doefriends
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
Ivyfoxart [at] gmail [dot] com, Ivy’s cohost and ko-fi
19 April 2024, 6:00 am - 1 hour 7 minutesBook Tour 38: John Wiswell – Someone You Can Build a Nest In
This time around it is my absolute delight to welcome John Wiswell back to the show to talk about his debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which just released this very week! We talk about John’s favorite bits both in and no longer in the book, along with conversation about language, games, and a surprise musical performance!
Things mentioned in this episode:
“D.I.Y.” by John Wiswell
“Open House on Haunted Hill” and its Japanese cover
Hunter x Hunter (2011)
Starred review in The Library Journal
“This is Not a Wardrobe Door,” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
The Arcadia Project trilogy, by Mishell Baker
Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
Holly, by Stephen King
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Friends at the Table Balatro stream
Twilight Mirage and Spring in Hieron soundtracks
John’s twitter, bluesky, insta, patreon, and substack
Escape Velocity, by Victor Manibo
5 April 2024, 6:00 am - 1 hour 21 minutesEpisode 59: Laura Blackwell – "Poor Prisoners"
This time around, it’s my pleasure to welcome longtime friend of the show Laura Blackwell! Laura reads to us from her very very trunked story, “Poor Prisoners,” which leads us into a wide-ranging discussion of things we wish we’d learned sooner, writers whose work we admire, and kindness to our past selves.
Things we mention in this episode:
All Our Yesterdays, by Hilary B. Bisenieks
The Iliad and Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley
Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles Homers
The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Translation State and the Imperial Radch trilogy, by Ann Leckie
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, by Shubnum Khan
Archival Quality, by Ivy Noelle Weir and Steenz
Just Like Home, by Sarah Gailey
The Death of Jane Lawrence, Last to Leave the Room, Yellow Jessamine, and The Luminous Dead, by Caitlin Starling
She Walks in Shadows, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
Beneath the Rising, And What Can We Offer You Tonight, The Annual Migration of Clouds, and The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed
System Collapse, by Martha Wells
Edenville, by Sam Rebelein
Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
Death Note manga, netflix, and anime
Laura’s website, bluesky, twitter, insta, mastodon
Join me next month when I’ll be talking to John Wiswell and Ivy Fox
15 March 2024, 6:00 am - More Episodes? Get the App