This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Torrey Peters: You know, I think that publishing asks you to either write stories or write novels, and that's not always like the length that stories want to be or that works want to be. And I'm very happy that I was able to write a series of pieces that are the lengths that they want to be. And that the overall project, which was to write four stories and four genres taking on different aspects of gendered experience, that I was given the space to actually have them be the shape and the form and the variety that they are. For me, it like kind of creates a kaleidoscopic experience. I think that's how I would describe it. And I could say that the four genres that, you know, people ask me, what are these genres?
And I would say that, you know, the first one effect is a speculative fiction about a gender contagion. The second one is Teen Romance about, it's kind of about pre-transition with two roommates at boarding school. Third one is Americana Tall Tale about a logger who goes to a dance where some of the loggers are expected to dance as women, and the whole thing's written in logger slang. And the fourth one is a horror. All four together, I think create a picture of, of an anxieties and thoughts of gender in this moment.
Sam Brule: So now I wanted to shift it over to your writing and how you write. Um, I wanted to ask, what is your personal process for writing?
TP: Well, I think it really depends where in my life I am. You know, the writing Detransition Baby was much harder because I, I just didn't have any money. So you know I wrote that in much more like bangs and fits then. And some of my earlier work was similar, whereas now I- I did some screenwriting from about 2022 to 2024, which, you know, gave me a steady income. And then Detransition Baby gave me steady income so that I, I'm able to sort of write on my own time and be a professional writer. But I wouldn't say that that's always been the case in my life. So in the past I was really just getting up in the morning or staying up late to try and do it. But, but these days I'm trying to develop a discipline around it. And unfortunately all the annoying things that other writers say work tend to work. You know, if you get up in the morning and you have a routine, and you do that kind of stuff it does seem to be more productive.
SB: And is there anything that you're currently working on that you can talk about?
TP: No, but it's not that I can't talk about it, or that, I'm prohibited in some way from talking about it. It's that, I think that the brain that you use to write a story or write a novel. And really, I want to write a novel again. I want to write a, a long novel is, is what I want to do, uh, next. But one of the issues is that the part of your brain that you use after you've written a book, is a little bit of sort of a sales brain, and not a sales brain in that you're like, you know, doing the hard sale, but that you wanna be liked, you want people to like your book. So you go around and you talk to all these people, and you try and be charming, and you try and be likable, and make jokes and be ingratiating and you get in the habit of that. And it's not something you could just like turn on and off. But I think being ingratiating and wanting too much to be liked when you write is like death to a story. You know? You have to say the hard things. You have to say the things that lean into stuff that's like a little uncomfortable, that maybe isn't so polite or feels taboo or dangerous, you know? That's stuff that makes a book come alive. It, that's the work of an artist not a salesperson.