It's Been a Year

On Titles and 2025

Hi all,

I’m so ready to be in 2026 I’ve been misdating ahead for weeks now. LFG!

Below you will find some Mega Milk back story, followed by 2025 highlights and best reads. But first, three promo things:

• I’m offering a low-cost session of my craft seminar “What Is This Thing Called ‘Weird’?” on Sunday, January 11 from 1-3 pm EST. (This is a pre-order push—the “low cost” is pre-ordering Mega Milk.)

• As part of a new Book Club feature, Tinkertown Provisions is offering FREE SHIPPING on its delicious award-winning hot sauces to anyone who has pre-ordered Mega Milk ! (I recommend GOO, which I was proud to endorse.) Send a copy of your receipt to tinkertownprovisions@gmail.com and they’ll reverse your shipping fees. Offer ends at midnight January 12. Thanks, Tinkertown!

• NYC folks, please come to my Mega Milk book launch! It will be on January 14 at Books Are Magic Montague featuring the mega-talented Sabrina Imbler as interlocuter.

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Keenly attentive Mega Milk watchers may have noticed that the book has two different subtitles floating around. One subtitle is Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows. This subtitle has been used in marketing materials and has never been on the cover. The other subtitle is simply Essays. Let me explain.

The original title in full, used for the book proposal, was Mega Milk: About My Name (and Family, and Fluidity, and Whiteness, and Cows). When the book became less centrally about names, we adjusted to Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows—a subtitle that felt useful if not fully accurate. I don’t really discuss fluidity all that much, but I like how it nods to milk’s various forms and flows while conveying something about the essay as a fluid form. And I worried about naming whiteness as a central topic because, while it does come up periodically, it’s central only to one (longass) essay: I didn’t want to give the impression that the book imagines itself contributing critical work in whiteness studies or something, which it does not do; but it did seem important to flag to readers that the book does engage with the relationship between milk, white supremacy, and dietary racism (i.e., let it be known: this is not a pro-dairy book). Other topics I could just as easily have justified including in the subtitle: writing, reading, sex, small dairy, big dairy, “America,” “wholesomeness,” etc.

As time went on, my misgivings about this subtitle grew. It seemed unwieldy and more about marketing than the book itself. The much simpler Essays, by contrast—how light, how clean, how right. It’s a book of essays about milk, written by a person named Megan Milks. Combined with Xander Marro’s spectacular cover art, what further “about-ness” could a potential reader need? So I made the case for Essays.

The marketing team at Feminist Press felt that a more descriptive subtitle would give the sales team more to work with. Which makes sense. I trust their judgment. We kept the longer subtitle at galley stage for marketing purposes, and it’s now part of the book’s metadata. It’s how it’s listed online at Goodreads and Bookshop, etc. It’s also, incidentally, how I list it on my CV—turns out it is more usefully descriptive than Essays. But according to me, the official subtitle is Essays. (Does this even count as a subtitle? IDFK)

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The title, meanwhile, was always Mega Milk, though I tried repeatedly to give it other names. Among the discarded alternate titles:

• The Letdown: Essays on Milk - This title comes from one of the core essays but is too strongly associated with lactation to work for the whole book.

• The Squeeze: Essays on Milk - This title comes from the final essay but test subjects declared “the squeeze” too vague.

• Milk in the Vein - discarded due to its associations with heroin use

• My Milk Book - Tbh, this is how I think about the book to myself. But its meter calls up Kelis’s “Milkshake,” not a negative per se but distracting.

• The Living Fluid - referring to early descriptions of milk teeming with bacteria but “too dry,” sources said.

Again and again, Mega Milk won out.

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My friends Gabe and Cynthia have separately reminded me that there was a brief period in our Chicago book club when they and our mutual friend Ginny took to calling me “Mega Milk.” To both, I have claimed that I had forgotten this when I was titling the book project but now I wonder if I had. I don’t mention it in the book though I wish I had thought to give it space. Anyway, I forget how this “Mega Milk” came into play. We were a bunch of word nerds who talked about names a lot and if I were trying to recreate the conversation, I would guess that one of us observed that of all of our names, “Megan Milks” would be the most fitting for a limerick. No, no, even better would be “Mega Milk.” Oh, that’s your new nickname. No!

Because I did not like being called this nickname, my friends respectfully stopped . . . and instead (I have now learned) took to composing limericks featuring a character named Mega Milk, my supposed alter ego (?!?!), behind my back! (!!!)

In a recent email convo, Gabe dug up said limericks from 2008. Apparently she had emailed Cynthia “braggadocious” as a word of the day, and Cynthia had remarked that “Braggadocian” sounded like a nice word to end a limerick on. Gabe explains:

Based on our conversation, it sounds like we had a limerick tradition going about your alter ego Mega Milk. So, I replied:

Mega Milk brewed up a potion
Said to contain a whole ocean

Then Cynthia finished it:

It was salty and white
but just didn’t taste right,
proving all of those claims braggadocian.

And then she sent me an even grosser alternate ending line: “though it did make an excellent lotion.”

Then Ginny purified (skimmed?) it:

Mega Milk brewed up a potion
and proclaimed “It contains the whole ocean!”
We quietly dispersed
When her potion did burst
and her claims were revealed Braggadocian.[1]

Honestly, brilliant wordplay if you are HILARIOUS NERDS like these friends are. I have so many questions about this “limerick tradition.” And while I support the ongoing life of this character, who is distinctly not me (we’re no longer even the same gender!), let me be clear: Do not call me by this name.

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Other things named Mega Milk (last three NSFW):

• This T-shirt (one of many)

• This “girthy” plug

• This Japanese manga

• This HuCow erotica bundle

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The year is ending. Some highlights:

• Beachy summer days spent despair-reading for my Very Upsetting Literature class—sunny vibes notwithstanding, the traumatophilic reading load hit just right during what was never a not-upsetting year.

• This fall, I took a class of Lang students to the Fales Archives and witnessed them lose their minds over the slipdresses and Mary Janes of Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile). The sweat stains! The scuffed patent leather!

• My return to the desktop computer, which has opened up my writing and editing work to new vistas.

• Coffee and a Bookstore with MK Thekkumkattil, whose new book The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future without Hospitals is forthcoming in July from Feminist Press.

• Coffee and a Bookstore with Jessica Alexander whose new book Agnes, We’re Not Murderers! is forthcoming in June from Clash Books.

• Weapons with Carley and Malka

• Fucktoys with Amber Dawn

• Sinners with Liz and Wade; the Sinners soundtrack

• Beyoncé and Color Theory with Carrie

• Can I Be Frank? with Shuli

• Best TV shows: Task, The Residence, The Sex Lives of College Girls S1&2 (I avoided this for a long time because of the title but if you don’t know, it’s an actually great comedy created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble with some good queer content), The Lowdown, Heated Rivalry

• A heated book club discussion of The Dry Season—in the dry heat of winter, we’re lucky we didn’t go up in flames! hahaha

• New writing groups!

Some of the best books I’ve read this year (not all from 2025):

• Michelle Tea, Little F - her latest, an effing delight! Bullied, parentally neglected gay teen runs away, gets in trouble, finds love, wrangles with ethics, demands more. I loved scampering across Arizona and Texas with young Spencer and Velvet.

• Michelle Tea, Black Wave - Liza and I reread this novel from 2016 because we often reference it in our book/writing talks but our memories of it were fuzzy. On second read I was even more blown away. A sobriety narrative, a breakup story, a work of apocalyptic autofiction, one of the masterpieces of 21st century queer literature.

• Lara Mimosa Montes, The Time of the Novel - A mesmeric novella about the strange and marvelous powers of narration. The plot is becoming-narrator. Narration as a way of being in the world. “I could think of no higher calling than to pass through the imagination, and eventually through the minds and hands of so many strangers like a rabbit without a body. Were those created for the sole purpose of literature and lived on inside the book not cared for and considered in ways that I, as a person, was not?”

• Jeanne Thornton, A/S/L - Brilliant Jeanne’s brilliant next novel. We meet three characters who connected online in 1998, have never met, and have lost touch. We re-meet them 18 years later. Surprise! They’re all trans. But this isn’t the point. They are friends who have lost each other—and they need to complete their quest. Perfectly captures one corner of late 90s internet culture and does magic and neurodivergent trans characters and alternating point of view and feelings so impeccably well.

• Brooke Palmieri, Bargain Witch - “All reading is bibliomancy!” “Reading is initiatory, writing is incantatory!” And “history is the ultimate bargain.” Terrific, eminently quotable collection of erudite essays on occult history and finding magic in the everyday. Funny, brainy, inspiring, and entirely itself.

• Torrey Peters, Stag Dance - Four long stories, each one a banger and a feat.

• Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam - from my review for 4Columns:

Here, Lin steps into the interiority of her partner, H. Lan Thao Lam, ostensibly to narrate, as Lam, Lam’s life. That for much of the book the central subject is not in fact Lam themself but rather Lana Lin might seem paradoxical were it not obvious that Lin is also inhabiting Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). In the source text, Stein adopts the perspective of her partner Alice, whose gaze is trained devotedly back onto Stein. Zipped into the bones of this tricksy classic, Lin’s ingenious and absorbingly tender book meditates on dyadic identity while honoring the miracle and the mundaneness of bonded life.

• Lydi Conklin, Songs of No Provenance - from my review for 4Columns:

Joan Vole loves to pee. The protagonist of Lydi Conklin’s debut novel, Songs of No Provenance, gets off on it, whether it’s pissing on some rando she’s hooking up with in a bar or peeing outside, by herself, in nature. There’s something about holding it in, cultivating the fullness, the “sexy weight,” and then letting it go in a hot gush. Yes, she’s aware that there are others like her—urophiles, “golden shower enthusiasts”—but she’s too into private abjection for community to appeal. For her, this zeal for pissing is vile and degrading; it’s also holy, “an offering to whatever awes me.”

• Vivian Blaxell, Worthy of the Event - Thank you, Littlepuss, for bringing us Vivian!

• Saskia Nislow, Root Rot - I blurbed and Q&Aed at Saskia’s launch for this novella, a spellbinding surrealist creep.

• Sara Jaffe, Hurricane Envy - Sara’s long-awaited second book, a story collection, after her phenomenal Dryland. Come out to Hive Mind on M 3/9 to see me and Sara read together!

• Brandon Shimoda, The Afterlife Is Letting Go - I read and then reread for class and cannot recommend this essay collection highly enough. My students got a lot out of it both content- and craft-wise.

• Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

• Rivers Solomon, Model Home

• Danielle Geller, Dog Flowers

• Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer

• Richard McGuire, Here

• Myriam Gurba, Creep

• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

• Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story

• Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Thanks for reading.

<3

Megan

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[1] Thanks to Gabe Sopocy, Cynthia Barounis, and Ginny Barrett for permission to share.