Trans people have always been here, and always will be. This Trans Day of Visibility, Room Magazine affirms our continued solidarity with trans kin, and call on our readers to continue their support for the rights of trans people.
Today, Jillian Christmas interviews Tash McAdam, author of No One Left But You (Soho Teen, 2023) to discuss community care, power relations, and the future.
JILLIAN:
We have known each other for some time, and I love that for us! I have observed since I’ve known you that you have these really core community care principles and they’re really a gift to witness. And, you move through that community care practice, praxis with such brilliant collective creativity. And so I want you to tell me a little bit about who helped you to shape those rich principles that you live and write by?
TASH:
I was raised by very principled parents, so I think that I had a strong sense of justice and equity from very early childhood. But as an individual, I think that finding queer community was the first time I really understood what I needed from the people around me. So while incredibly grateful to have a stable, supportive upbringing, I definitely was lonely. I think most queer people are, until we find a place we fit. My first queer community was just one other person, and they moved to my town in grade 10, so I was sixteen before I had any queer connections. We were in school together for three years, and during that time, I had a deeper friendship than any I’ve ever known, because we resonated so deeply on so many new levels. That was my first real experience with queerness as connection, and through that connection, we made each other brave enough for further exploration, travelling to places we could meet other queer people, and that really helped us both understand and become who we are. In writing, I want to be community for those who are still struggling to find their places, to show them ways of being that will allow them to flourish.
JILLIAN
I’ve heard you say that ‘fiction is nutrition for your brain’. Can you tell me more about that?
TASH:
My brain is a hectic place generating ideas all of the time. Every thought I have has 12,000 other thoughts behind it and with this harsh world a lot of the connections are negative and lead to anxiety and depression. I often run out of things I want to think about. So I need input, and for me, everything I am feels structured around story. I’ll go for a hike with my wife, and I’m thinking instead of looking at things, I’m telling myself a story about being there. We’ll get to the view, and I’ll look at it for a minute or two, and unless there’s something moving or happening or changing, I will lose interest. Whereas my wife will want to look at a view for a long time and take it in. But I feel that I have seen it and described it in words in my head, so now I know what it looks like, and I’ve moved on. Fiction is the thing that I most want to think about, always. I’m sure I’d enjoy nonfiction more if the world wasn’t so cruel.
JILLIAN
Does it make sense to say that you have a deeply somatic esthetic? There’s such a depth of somatic texture living in the DNA of your writing, the rhythm of back and forth, before and after, in No One Left But You it kind of moves through the body in vibrating and then soothing ways. And I wanted to ask about regulation and coregulation. Do you think about them when creating environments for your stories to exist in? And does that happen on, another level, another part of the process from this more cerebral languaging of the plot and structure, versus the feeling part of the writing, is it a different part of your process, articulating the language of the senses and the sensory environment.
TASH
Well, I am hypersensitive in that I have ADD and I often get overstimulated, I have a sensory processing disorder. Things are very extreme a lot of the time. I therefore spend a lot of time internally analyzing what I see, hear, touch, etc., and that translates really well to writing, especially for teenage protagonists and extra especially teenage emo musician protagonists. No One Left But You was really a chance for me to be my most playful self, that I’ve been told in the past is too much. In Max I had the perfect perspective to bring out what I love about language, and also to write some hyperbolic prose. That poetry is genuine! I harvested some of my teenage work and went from there.
As far as the rhythm and pace of my work, I am writing from a place of trying to minimize harm to my audience. When you are part of a marginalized community, you are always braced for the next bad thing. I don’t want people to be braced for anything except a plot twist with me. I don’t want to stick my fingers in open wounds, I want my words to be a bandage.
JILLIAN
Okay, so do you have to create different containers for both of those aspects of the writing, or does it kind of come all at once for you?
TASH
I think it’s just the character. I really settle into a character’s pattern of being, I am trying to inhabit them, think like them. I’m what they call a discovery writer, where I find out what’s going to happen and who my characters are as I write. So my first drafts are often very bare bones. It’s very much like ‘things happening’, and then later I add all the sensory detail, the feelings, the meat, as it were, to the bones of the plot structure. I have historically been told that I then overdo it at that level, and so have to edit back to end up in a good place, but with NOLBY I didn’t really have to edit those things back. I could give Max dramatic metaphors I can come up with, and it works. Some lines I’ve been saving for years found a home in this book.
JILLIAN
What else goes into writing complex and convincing queer and youth characters, and how do you make them feel so tangible like that? It feels like they can just stroll past us on the street. Do you have a starting point for character-building?
TASH
Being a discovery writer, I often don’t really know who someone is until we get into the story and I see how they’re reacting to things. For example, I’m working on pulling out a murder mystery right now, and I once again, don’t know who the murderer is, which is classic me. I have three top suspects and I’ll find out along the way. Apparently, that’s how my brain is because I’ve never written the full plot in advance. I have to remember not to get ahead of myself because I’ll lose interest and be bored. That’s why when people tell me to write a memoir I’m like “boring! I already know what happens.”
JILLIAN
(Laughs) Your brain is like, ‘No spoilers’.
TASH
Exactly.
TASH
The characters tend to develop themselves, and often surprisingly, but I think, because I spend quite a lot of my time with youth. I help run a project where a bunch of trans folk go to Victoria and make art together, and I work with the teen section. I’m also a high school teacher so I’ve been teaching kids at that age group. Lots of people hate working with teens but I love it. We get each other.
JILLIAN
Okay, next, what I’d like to ask speaks to a part of the youth work that you do. Can you tell me a little bit about how you perceive the power and value and the risks also of ‘visibility’?
TASH
The Power is undeniable. When we see a reflection of ourselves in the world, we see these things about our own beings. I viscerally remember the first time I saw a butch-presenting masc person who was not AMAB. I just stopped walking. I think I was nine or 10, and had never conceived that was possible. I grew up without a TV and then, when we did [have one], we were in small-town Wales, like we had three channels. I think seeing that masc set me on a whole new path of thought about myself. I think that was the same year that I went to the library and asked the librarian for books about girls who wanted to be boys, and they came back with a fantasy novel about a girl who dresses up as her own twin brother to go to knight school. It’s amazing, and a big favourite, but definitely was not about me, or what I was looking for. Years later, I found a book with a trans character. I remember that too. I was 17, and it was I am J which is written by Cris Beam, a trans-masc person’s mother, and it is as gentle as a book could be that was written at that time, I suppose, and it was like a resonant book for me, it taught me a lot about myself. I was able to understand new things about myself. And I’m grateful for that book. I wish it had been written by a trans person, but that was impossible.
JILLIAN
My other question that ties into this, is how has literature helped you expand your understanding of self? Is there more you want to say about that?
TASH
For me, literature is the thing that has expanded my understanding of self. There are other things, of course, but for me, literature has been my oldest friend. You know, I’ve been a deep reader my entire life. My dad recently wrote a letter to my psychiatrist about my ADD, where he was like, ‘Oh, they were always reading’… And then put a list of my favorite books, charming.
JILLIAN
What about the risks of visibility?
TASH
Well, the risks are real. Another dad-related story. When he came to Vancouver for the first time and we walked around Commercial Drive, he said to me that night, “I see why you are comfortable here. You’ve found your community.” And I was like, you get it now, you have lived your whole life in this one place. They’ve traveled extensively, but not to anywhere that’s modern and queer. They go to places and look at old things. My dad’s really into castles. My mom likes birds, they’re not going to Brighton to engage with the queer scene. So for him here to see the vibrancy, the queerness, the open happiness, the bright flags everywhere in the windows, the neurodivergence, the tattoos, the hair…that’s impactful for him. Of course Vancouver has a lot of work to do. Canada has a lot of work to do in a lot of areas, but on the streets of Vancouver, I feel accepted. But the risks are also real. Back home I’ve had things thrown at me from cars. I’ve had people attack me. I’ve had people verbalize hatred towards me. I’ve been harassed in the bathroom. It’s dangerous and it’s not about transness, it’s about oppression. My best friend, when I was seven, had a boy’s haircut, but she was a girl. She just didn’t want long hair. Everyone thought she was a boy. She got kicked out of girl’s toilets all of the time. She’s a cis woman, and they were policing this child’s gender expression based on a haircut. The next step from there is checking people’s genitals, right? Who does that protect? It’s awful, because anytime anything starts getting policed like that, it’s bad for everyone. And the fact that we’re going down these paths again is horrifying.
JILLIAN
Truly. Do you have advice for other queer, trans writers, humans, on how to hold some boundaries in their writing, in their community, in their lives that help support their safety?
TASH
Community is safety. It keeps us safe in various ways when we can’t do it ourselves. Throughout human history, community is progress, safety, happiness. If you don’t have community, it’s hard to get by, even if you have every advantage in the world, which most marginalized folk don’t. When you’re feeling lonely, and you don’t have community, I think that you have to try and find some. If you can find something that you care about or want to do, and then go and meet other people who care about and want to do that. So you can make those connections, because that’s what being here and being human is all about.
JILLIAN
So rather than boundary, building connection, hm, yeah, they come hand in hand.
TASH
Maybe the connection is you holding hands with someone, and that holding hands makes the boundaries. This is our space.
JILLIAN
I love that.
Will you talk to me about magic and how it shows up in your life, your writing, and maybe even in your dreams of the future?
TASH
Well, I love the moon, she’s my homegirl. I’ve always been someone who moves in moontime. I have phases that I feel deeply connected to the moon by even without the hormonal link. I’ve always been into runes, like tossing rocks! I have a few runic tattoos, which I’ve also used as the basis for a magic system in a fantasy horror novel, which really expanded my connection and understanding to runes.
JILLIAN
And in your writing process, do you have other ways that magic comes into your writing process?
TASH
Creativity is magic! The way that we make connections to things and make something new from nothing. You know, they say energy can’t be created only transformed, but art is created for its own sake. To be able to express yourself in a way that other people align with, to share your emotions and experiences. Art is something we make out of nothing, and if you ask me creativity is pure magic.
JILLIAN
I love that. And what about the future? Do you see magic in the path toward the future?
TASH
We need magic now more than ever, and I think we have to make our own. I think that’s the challenge. The fire inside us is the magic, the desire to make art and make connections, make community. It’s hard but you have to reach out and hold each other. When you feel hurt and you’re pulling in and curling away from things, that’s the time you have to be bravest and reach out, ask for your community to hold you and lend you its magic.
JILLIAN
I want to ask about the last five years, which for so many people, have been full of incredible turmoil. I mean, the world has been all kinds of scary shapes and sizes. What has been the greatest joy that you’ve been able to carve out of the last five years?
TASH
I think I have two things I’d like to highlight, and both of them are about community, connection and art! Every Sunday I host a ‘crafternoon’, where local creatives come and drink tea and do their thing. It’s always so fun to see what people are bringing, and learning a new craft is one of my favourite things
The other thing that’s gotten me through the last five years is the youth project I work with. The Gender Generations Project is a cross-generational organization dedicated to fostering connections between trans people of different ages. I work with the high school stream, and we recently produced a mural that’s currently on display at Fairfield Gonzales Community Center in Victoria. It was a huge project, designed by a thirteen year old, sketched out by a group of mixed-age youth artists, and painted by almost seventy people ages five to seventy-five.
JILLIAN
Wow! Beautiful.
What do you dream for the trans writers and readers of tomorrow? And I’ll even expand that to ask, what do you dream of for all the queerdos of tomorrow?
TASH
I dream for everyone. Not just the queerdos but the weirdos, and even the normies although they have made a right mess of things. I dream for everyone that there’s variety and choice and options and joy to find in their work. I dream that no writer will be told that there’s no market for work from a perspective that people may struggle to relate to. I dream that no reader will go to the library and ask for a book about their identity and be given a book about someone else’s.
JILLIAN
Mm. That does lead into my curiosity around new and as yet unseen genres, your latest book sort of broke into a new genre of trans-led murder mystery. What does it feel like to be creating space and really, new containers for story. Have you found or discovered any peers in the genre as yet?
TASH
There are lots of people doing amazing work and failing to find representation, find publishers. Every step of the way is more challenging when your identity is a subject of political debate. People don’t want to deal with pushback. Especially when a book blends issues and includes other topics that are the subject of debate, which of course is the only realistic way to write the world.
There is some lovely middle-grade work for young people, and there’s some speculative fiction for teens, but contemporary work where we get to be protagonists, let alone heroes, is thin on the ground.
I’ve written two trans-led murder mysteries, but one of them is part of my accessible line. I think it’s easier for people to sell speculative fiction with trans characters, because if we are in a world where magic exists or the future is different, then, we can exist. People think of us as mythical creatures. They’re more able to accept us in a world that isn’t their own, but then that’s not helping them connect to reality. The realities of being trans now are something that need to be understood. My father-in-law’s girlfriend, who is a 74 year old, cis white woman who wears wine earrings, read NOLBY and wanted to talk to me about it at length, and really proved to me that that book can reach people who wouldn’t normally be reached by queer content that it is accessible, as an entry point.
JILLIAN
That’s beautiful, and important. And speaking of reaching a variety of audiences, you mentioned a little bit about your accessible writing, and I know that you create with the intention of broadening access for a number of different audience readers and communities. Do you want to speak a little bit about how that came to be, or how you move through that work?
TASH
On the genre front, my dream is to write a trans-led book in every classic genre. In my accessible line I have a Hatchet-type survival tale, an aliens attack, a space adventure, and then I have another trans murder mystery, so I’m making a dent. They’re accessible in a way that I think is really powerful. I read so many books from that line before I even considered that I would be able to work with them, because the books are bite-sized, fast-paced, full narratives! Perfect. I love a beautiful piece of descriptive work, but for a brain like mine that chews on story, I can read 20 in a day if I’ve got access to them and nothing else to do. When they asked me to write for them, I was overjoyed and also had a really good idea and understanding of what it was.
It’s a difficult way to write because you have to simplify and minimize everything. You want it to be as easily understood as possible. You’re not trying to use metaphor or dramatic simile, there’s even rules about, like points of view, and how many characters you’re allowed to have and how long their names are allowed to be, and things like that, to make it so that people who, struggle to access English language work are able to read fun stories. For people who are learning English, if they’re not kids they don’t want to read kids books, but teen books are accessible for everyone. They deal with adult matters through a teenage lens.
JILLIAN
And, what have you been reading lately?
TASH
I’m on the verge of finishing Last Winter by Carrie Mac, which is absolutely buck wild. It’s a dual perspective told from the point-of-view of a mute eight-year-old and her bipolar mother, so the most unreliable narration. The voices are a masterclass. It’s set in a small-town in rural Canada that experiences an avalanche. It’s intense, and powerful. I feel changed by it as a story.
JILLIAN
Wow, thank you for introducing us to it and also for letting me pick your brain on my couch on a Sunday morning.
TASH
Thanks for the cuppa and the chat!
