A Bit about Name Dropping

and Summer Classes, Disclosure and Deniability Across Genres, etc.

Hi all,

I’m running a few classes this summer:

• an In-Person (Mostly) Prose Workshop in my home in Brooklyn, starting next week – just 2 spots left, apply now!

• What Is This Thing Called ‘Weird’? on weird literary traditions and strategies, which I’m offering in two forms:

  • a two-hour Craft Seminar on Sunday 6/7

  • a six-week Workshop, beginning in July

• Reading New Queer and Trans Lit as Writers, an intimate book-club-type class involving intensive discussions and writing prompts

I love teaching these classes, which unfailingly bring new interesting people and writing into my life. Participants tend to really enjoy each other and each other’s work. Both of my workshops last summer evolved into ongoing writing groups. Full descriptions and registration info for this summer’s offerings are available on my website, gorgeously illustrated by Han Schneider.

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Last night I dreamt I was mostly bald except for a Friar Tuck fringe around my crown. This was upsetting but the worst part was the angry red pustules erupting from the pale skin of my head: I couldn’t stop scratching and bursting them. In my dream I was first horrified, then accepting and grateful for hats.

An incredibly transparent anxiety dream about hair loss. I know. Many people who are balding or bald are wildly, breathtakingly hot, and I can think of plenty of people with full heads of hair who are not. While I don’t think, should my hairline recession continue as I have every reason to believe it will, I will be in the former category, I have other assets. My wise mind knows that ongoing hair loss will not prevent me from living a full and vibrant life. And I’m entitled to my nightmares.

In “No More Cows,” the first essay of Mega Milk, I write briefly of a conversation I had early into my transition with Jordy (Rosenberg) about hair loss. While analyzing a family photo that highlights my vividly thinning hair, I mention the “botanical shampoo recommended by Jordy that I don’t realize is making it worse.”

I did not imagine that Jordy would ever read this essay. Well, he did and he emailed me, saying he felt terrible. Sorry, Jordy! I wasn’t trying to do that. The issue was not the shampoo, of course, but the testosterone and this was no big surprise. (And yet I was surprised.) No, that shampoo didn’t work for me, though I liked the brisk smell and the volume it gave me—I may have been using it too much, I don’t know. As Jordy noted in our email exchange, the formula seems to have changed in recent years and it’s possible I received the new, less-effective version. At some point I was also coating my hairline in Rogaine twice-daily but I discontinued that too, because of the chemical smell and the stickiness, the expense and the dependence. I’ve also tried saw palmetto oil and learned I detest applying any kind of serum to my scalp. Finasteride in pill form messed with my mood. Now I take minoxidil twice a day which has slowed but not stopped the recession.

I’m coming up on my ten-year tranniversary, or it’s just passed—I didn’t record the date I started consistently taking T, and my trajectory is messy since I started and stopped it before that. These kinds of markers don’t seem that meaningful to me until they arrive. Ten years! Will you look at that. I’m also coming up on my ten-year anniversary of living in New York City. A lot has changed, but these two things have stayed the same. For ten years I’ve resided in Brooklyn, the longest I’ve lived in any place, where every seven to ten days, I have injected some amount of T into my flesh.

I love a casual name-drop though I understand it can be obnoxious. For most of the essays in Mega Milk, wherever I mentioned a friend I asked them in draft stages if they wanted to read it and/or be pseudonymized. In this case, I thought about emailing Jordy to ask if he cared about this mention but it was such a quick drop and I didn’t want to bother him. More operatively I liked the sentence I had written and didn’t want to change it. I liked using Jordy’s name in this sentence because it connected me to him, a writer I admire, whom I wanted people to know I know. This is after all why we drop names, right? To let people know who we know. As someone who is lesser known than Jordy, I hoped this name-drop might give me a boost in status by proximity. Unless my casual name-drop seems obnoxious, which it may well, to some readers, be. This is the risk one takes when name dropping. The other risk is of alienating the name-droppee, which in this case I hope I have not done. And so I have approached Jordy seeking his permission for once again dropping his name, which he has granted.

If you haven’t read Jordy’s outrageously brilliant new novel Night Night Fawn yet, consider reading it this summer with me and whoever else signs up for this class!

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This all relates loosely to a conversation I’ve had over email with Francis Van Ganson, a very talented writer and former student of mine, about moving between fiction and essays.

After reading Mega Milk, Francis wrote (shared with permission):

I am curious about your experience coming from fiction to essay collection in terms of navigating vulnerability and disclosure versus the choice to withhold - it was especially on my mind because of how intensely personal Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body felt to me, especially considering its turn to direct address at the very end.

I’ve always felt that fiction eases vulnerability and disclosure partially because you can hide the deeply personal within the plausible deniability of fictionality and was curious about your experience with the two forms - especially because there are some essays where you cross into the realm of the speculative or the imagined.

Having written all of this I was also reminded, sort of slantwise, of the James Frankie Thomas quote from Idlewild where one of the characters says “in my wildest dreams, I’m not there at all.” ANYWAY that’s a whole moodle post from me, I just really enjoyed the book and was interested in your thoughts! :)

What a great question! I’m still thinking about it. Here’s my response, slightly revised from my original email.

“Plausible deniability” is such an apt term for what fiction gives us, and my short answer is: yes, fiction does allow for more masking and deniability than nonfiction. In fiction, people in our lives are going to see themselves in characters even if they’re not necessarily written into them, and when they are written into them, will object to the most unpredictable things. I’ve experienced this from the other side, too: when an ex turned me, a non-practicing Irish Catholic, into a WASP in her story about our breakup, I was livid. To be read/written so wrongly was more evidence of how she did not understand me at all! But of course the reason to change these characteristics is to create distance between the person and the character—whether for deniability or so that the character can become their own entity, usually both. Basically you can get in as much trouble for changing identifying characteristics as you can for not. And there are good reasons for doing either.

With nonfiction I feel a greater responsibility to other people. When writing these essays, I shared drafts with most (but not all) people whom I’d interviewed or mentioned. This process served as a kind of check on what I might write, which I at first resented but grew to appreciate because I think the writing is stronger when I’m accounting for multiple perspectives anyway. The trick was to continue honoring my own perspective—to be truthful to my own experience, which is accountability to myself and to the reader. In pingponging between these different interests, I hope I get to “the truth” or something like it. It may be that the pressures of this responsibility compelled me to swing into fiction in a few essays, and oh, the relief! But the trick there is to make sure the reader understands I’m suddenly making stuff up.

Whether fiction or nonfiction, when I have unkindly represented someone in my life, when I have turned them into a character too simply or meanly: I know it and I feel guilt. In fiction the characters typically become their own entities and that guilt is largely assuaged. With nonfiction I try to avoid the guilt by inviting in the hovering presence of the actual people who will likely be reading drafts. But truth can be unkind, so the guilt still comes.

Regarding self-representation across fiction and nonfiction, things are maybe more interesting/complicated. In fiction I am often intensifying feelings and hyperbolizing aspects of myself and ironizing or making fun of those aspects, often the uglier or more obnoxious elements of my own psychology/behavior. With nonfiction I’m more hesitant to do that both because it’s inaccurate to who I am and how I show up in the world and because I don’t want to subject those aspects of myself to judgmental readers who judge.

The other thing to note is that while the essays in Mega Milk are personal, most of them are not exactly plumbing the depths of my psychology: they’re doing different work. Meanwhile a lot of my fiction is engaged in a kind of interrogation of the self. I guess fiction is my medium for doing that work, whereas for other writers, personal nonfiction is.

Thanks to Francis for this conversation and for permission to quote!

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I have been reading a lot! Some highlights:

• Aoife Josie Clements, Persona – ambitious, unsettling debut trans horror novel, lovingly typeset in queasy font

• Mariah Riggs, Extinction Capital of the World – absorbing and well-crafted character-driven stories delving into Hawaiian history, culture, and politics

• T. Kira Madden, Whidbey – oof, painful and difficult, propulsive and extraordinary novel about the aftermaths of childhood sexual abuse

• Avery Curran, Spoiled Milk – outstanding debut queer horror novel set at an English girls boarding school in 1928! I had a fabulous time talking with Avery for her NYC launch at Twisted Spine …

• Layla Martínez, Wormwood – … where I picked up this tightly woven, alternating-POV Spanish haunted house novella which I promptly devoured in two days

• Zena Sharman, Staying Power – a gorgeous and intimate grief memoir that opens up into new possibilities for family and love; looking forward to my conversation with Zena in June

• Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost – maybe a perfect novel? wow

• Jules Wernerbach, Work to Do – I’m in the middle of this novel about workers’ rights at a coop grocery store in Austin and it’s great!

Other updates:

• Speaking of name dropping, I have a short story in the just-out Clowns anthology from Dopamine that is essentially a fictional installment of this Substack. Tricksy! I am a clown.

• Cleo Levin interviewed me for Public Seminar.

• Shuli Branson interviewed me for The Breakup Theory (podcast).

• Amber Ruth Paulen reviewed Mega Milk at MQR.

Upcoming events:

• Tonight (5/28) in Brooklyn – I’ll be at the HORRID reading series, 7 pm at Topos Too, reading with Nathan Giri, Sarah Hinkley, and Kari Ferrell, hosted by Sophie Abromowitz and Simone Norman

• W 6/10 in Providence – Symposium Books with JD Scott

• Th 6/11 in Boston – T4T Series at The Model Cafe

• F 6/12 in Toronto – with Zena Sharman at Another Story Books

• W 6/17 in Brooklyn - “A Kinky Evening with Feminist Press” with MK Thekkumkattil and Sarah Fonseca at Greenlight Books

Again, please check out the classes I’m offering this summer.

Yours,
Megan