The Trans Spelunker

Learning patience and writing from cave dwellers.

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“In the yellowing glow of a miner’s headlamp, the trans body spelunks toward nature’s confirmation of the impossible made manifest, and vows to cultivate the patience of a cave.”

— Cooper Lee Bombardier, Pass with Care: Memoirs

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A friend over coffee tells me that they buried part of their manuscript in the desert. I tell them to wait. I need to write this down. It's not everyday a writer tells you they buried their book underground.

Lately, if someone asks what I’m working on, I end my explanation with a face that asks, Can you save me? Can you save me from this? as morning after morning the stalactite increases in weight, girth, minerals, extending down from the ceiling until it either breaks or, gratefully, full of relief, touches the ground and connects, hiding all evidence of where it began.

Recently I sat and watched my favorite field of camas lilies. It was evening and still light out, and there were still plenty of honey and bumblebees floating from bloom to deep purple bloom, collecting nectar from the sticky pistils and pollen on their fuzzy legs. The bees were not thorough. They seemed to hardly alight on a flower before lifting off again, this despite the fact that the most of the lilies were loaded with bright yellow pollen at the ends of their stamens. Despite their stereotypical depiction as industrious workers, the bees didn’t labor. They didn’t methodically proceed from bloom to bloom; they were decidedly not efficient, their arcing flight taking them in random loops clear across the field. I think they were just pursuing sweetness.

I was reminded of the following passage from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:

To find a honey tree, first catch a bee. Catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen; then it is ready for home. It is simple enough to catch a bee on a flower: hold a cup or glass above the bee, and when it flies up, cap the cup with a piece of cardboard. Carry the bee to a nearby open spot—best an elevated one—release it, and watch where it goes. Keep your eyes on it as long as you can see it, and hie you to that last known place. Wait there until you see another bee; catch it, release it, and watch. Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book leads its writer.

The bee follows the sweetness in approaching each new day. Not the plotted route or the sequence of events, but whatever feels good, whatever pheromones swirl in the air that point us in the direction of the source, be it honey or springwater or grief or the story.

The bees make it look much easier than it is in practice. To move fluidly, faithfully, trusting that sweetness will always be there, that the story will always be there, trusting that telling said story in this inefficient, random, arcing looping way will work out in the end.

For more on this roundabout path, I’d recommend watching this craft talk by Vi Khi Nao, “The Art of Discipline”, which is a more backward approach to the topic of discipline in writing than I’ve heard before. Backward isn’t really the right word—maybe bottom-up. Instead of providing techniques for imposing discipline and schedules from above in a restrictive manner, Nao’s emphasis on living in a way that will encourage you to want to get back to the desk/canvas/medium and create is refreshing.

I think of this most often when I’m teaching workshops and writing classes. Most often I feel that if I don’t leave the class feeling like I need to go sit down and write right away, then probably my students won’t either. But this can easily relax into “inspiration sessions” filled with prompts and examples based on readings and concepts, and sometimes that’s good, but speaking only for myself, it can grow old. I’m not sure that a good teacher does all the hard work for their students—namely, the finding of what it is they want to write about. Prompts don’t emerge out of the blank page like a mirage, and even if they did, the work they’re capable of producing isn’t generally strong enough on its own to carry a whole story beyond a page or two, not to mention the interest of an intelligent, emotionally curious and creative person, be they writer or reader.

I shouldn’t be saying this. I have taught classes in which students responded to lots of prompts, in which students enjoyed doing so, or at least said so. But it’s not what my own best teachers did. They presented to me the political realities of their own lives and demonstrated—through their stories and dialogue and interpretations of the theorists and writers that shaped them—how they came to be. Maybe this is not what other people want out of teachers, and maybe also it’s why I’ve felt a searching need to get more specific about my own critical pedagogy outside the university. (All my best human teachers were in university settings, and I’m not sure anymore that that’s the institutionalized life I want.)

The quote from Cooper’s memoir up top is one I’ve treasured the last few years for how he cites the cave as a trans teacher. A teacher that demonstrates through patience and being present how the impossible can be made manifest. How depth can be created just by remaining moist and dark and waiting.

I like imagining all these humans huddled around the fire feeding it anything that burns—wood, dung, trees—to keep the light on, while just beyond their pyrocorona dwell the cave creatures in a feast of senses. What if we took our lessons from cave creatures and eschew illumination altogether? The blind catfish or the spider or the bat. They can still tell the difference between light and dark; scent and echolocation and touch are also important senses to use when navigating caves, even if Plato didn’t care for them.

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What I’m Reading

My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee. After listening to Chang-rae in conversation with Michael Hahn as part of Pacific University’s Mapmakers conversation series, I was reminded how impactful his novel On Such a Full Sea was to me when I was just starting to figure out what and how I wanted to write (still figuring that out, btw). It was, I think, the first novel I read inhabiting the plural we-narrator that is so popular now in contemporary speculative fiction. “Speculative” I think has come to mean to me that some aspect of perspective is involved, skewed from the traditional first or third person, sometimes from people altogether. (And since it’s AAPI heritage month, I think it’s worth noting here that both On Such a Full Sea and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being are two of the most important trend-setting books for this matter of speculative perspective in the last quarter-century, and they are routinely forgotten, ignored, or looked down on as too “popular” to have had much artistic worth. What bullshit!)

My Year Abroad is nothing at all like On Such a Full Sea, but it was still great, still managed to be a master class in perspective, and I’m still thinking about it. Push past the first ~40 pages like I did, and the rest is very much worth it.

Upcoming

Publishing Trans Stories is back, this time on Zoom so you can join from anywhere, but still under the aegis of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. The last workshop was transformative for me as a teacher, and I’m very excited to step back into this space. Sliding scale, June 5 - July 31 (no class held on 7/10).

smoke and mold just published its eighth issue, devoted entirely to comics. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly suggest doing so! Tony Wei Ling’s essay on Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 and Mara Ramirez’s abstract “whale fall” comic are both standouts, but really the issue as a whole is pushing at the edges of what a comic is, can do, in fascinating ways. And you can read it all, because we keep our issues purposely short, between 4 and 8 contributors, to encourage whole-issue reading.