An interview with Meredith Talusan, author of the story Crosscurrents (BLR Issue 43)
BLR: You have been a journalist and memoirist: the first trans staff writer at BuzzFeed, winner of a GLAAD and Al Neuharth Award for investigative journalism, author of an acclaimed memoir, Fairest. How did you come to write fiction? What does fiction do that journalism and memoir can’t? Especially in a climate where trans lives have, in many instances, become politicized?
Meredith Talusan: I think of my fiction as an extension of my impetus to write Fairest as a memoir that tries to capture my experience, and therefore an intersectional trans experience, on my own terms, after a substantial career as a journalist centering trans people, yes, but doing so in a world dominated by cisgender society and perspectives. Fiction allows me to further portray realities from perspectives outside the majority, not just at the level of my lived experience but in terms of a broad range of possible trans, BIPOC, immigrant, and disabled experiences.
BLR: In your story “Crosscurrents,” a whitepassing trans woman begins a relationship with a Black man. As she gets to know him, she can’t help but think of statistics: “He’s Black like nearly all the men who’ve killed trans women in America, most of whom were their victim’s lovers.” She follows with the thought, “Most of those women were Black too.” How did your past work as a journalist inform the trajectory of this story?
MT: I, in reality, have done extensive investigative work on violence against trans BIPOC people, especially trans women of color. “Crosscurrents” came out of the realization that even as I was doing the important work of highlighting the lives of trans people who’ve died, our society still does so little to support and account for trans folks who are very much alive, including the enormous psychic and emotional toll it takes to be a trans journalist covering trans violence. I also wanted to speak to the difficult truth that living in a deeply racist and transphobic society makes all of us racist and transphobic, even when we’re trans and BIPOC ourselves. While very little of “Crosscurrents” is factually true, I wanted to express the more deep-seated truths and paradoxes that come with being exposed to so many of the terrible realities of being a trans woman of color in the U.S., not just externally as a journalist but through the deepest inner workings of a trans woman’s psyche.
BLR: Your story stands out for its acuity—the precision with which you excavate moments, states of being. For example, your main character, Margaret, is at a bar and wonders “why a part of you still wants to be just straight and cis and white, when what you really want is to puke out your desire to be normal for good.” How do your stories originate—with an idea, character, or something else? Do you know where you want to land, or are you surprised by where the narrative takes you?
MT: Thank you. Over the years as I was working primarily in nonfiction, I’ve made mental notes about situations, characters, or even just notions that I felt could somehow form the basis for stories. When I sit down to write, those mental notes tend to coalesce at an unconscious level and often connect to each other in ways I almost never anticipate, and lead to other situations that fall outside the boundaries of anything even close to what I’ve experienced. I’ve learned that my unconscious mind leads me to places my conscious can never plan, so I usually just let it loose and what it comes up with always surprises me.
BLR: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your process in writing this story?
MT: This story comes directly out of working with a former student of mine, Tyler Spicer, in Antioch’s low-residency program (where I no longer teach, alas, but students can work with me at Sarah Lawrence). I suggested that a second-person story they wrote might work better if it’s in first-person, and they astutely asked me what makes one point-of-view more effective than another. It occurred to me then that I’d never written a second-person story so I couldn’t answer their question with much authority, so I decided to write one to figure out my opinions about second-person POV. For me, the second-person has this wonderful way of simultaneously creating distance and intimacy, of portraying characters who want to feel removed from their day-to-day reality, yet that very act of distancing brings the reader so much closer to the deep recess of a character’s inner struggles. I love it so much when these types of technical choices lead to fundamental differences in how we perceive stories and characters.
Order a copy of Meredith Talusan’s Fairest through BLR‘s Bookshop.
Issue 30 Foreword
by Ronna Wineberg
Welcome to the thirtieth issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. In 2000, when we sat in Bellevue Hospital, creating this literary journal, the world seemed like a stable place. The third millennium had begun. Life felt relatively peaceful; violence and war occurred in countries far from us. We assumed this stability would extend for decades. The first batch of BLR submissions explored illness, death, the practice of medicine, and families, and were set mostly in the United States.
The world is fluid, though, and just as our first issue was going to press, the attacks of 9/11 took place. We now live in an era in which terrorism has, unfortunately, become part of our daily vocabulary. The Internet and the ease of travel of people and ideas have made us—for better or for worse—citizens of one global community. Medicine, too, has been transformed; we can sit at the computer and search for cures, or choose 5-star hospitals and the best doctors based on the ratings of strangers. The themes of the stories, poems, and essays that come to the BLR reflect the concerns of our changing world.
One of the pleasures of reading BLR submissions is that we learn what subjects demand a writer’s attention. Writing, after all, is a way to capture moments in time, ones that will never be duplicated again, events that actually happened or that occurred only in the writer’s imagination. Literature can provide comfort or clarity, entertain us, educate us, offer dissonance, or startle our emotions awake. A good piece of writing opens up new worlds to the reader.
In this issue of the BLR, the writers explore a range of emotions and also the concerns that exist in different parts of our global community. “The Foreign Cinema,” by Lauren Alwan, won the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction. This charming story invites the reader to travel from Istanbul to Los Angeles. The protagonist, who has been having an affair with her bookstore employer, learns about America and heartbreak from the movies, especially from her favorite film, Casablanca. “Are You Having Suicidal Thoughts?” by John Noonan—one of the Honorable Mention stories—captures the despair of depression with honesty and poignancy. The second Honorable Mention, “First Child, Second Place” by Marylin Warner, is set in rural Kansas. The eleven-year-old narrator, Della Lee Weems, relates the events that changed her family’s life, and she inserts wisdom into her tale: “A teacher once told my class that it is the capacity to hate that robs us of our innocence.”
Esther K. Willison’s “Askew,” the winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, is a devastatingly beautiful essay about a daughter’s transformation from a vibrant child into a troubled adult who commits suicide. “A Member of the Family” by Morgan Smith won the Honorable Mention. The author, a retired lawyer turned photographer, leads us inside a mental asylum in the Mexican desert near Juarez, where patients are treated in ways that may be more humane than in the United States.
“The Problem with Anatomical Thinking” by Meridian Johnson won the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry and is written with exquisite economy, reminding the reader of the corpse’s place in nature and the cycle of life. The Honorable Mention, “The Interview” by Kathryn Starbuck, playfully and insightfully reframes the author’s inner thoughts into an interview she is conducting with herself.
Susanna Nguy is the winner of the Daniel Liebowitz Prize for Student Writing, which is awarded annually to an NYU medical student. Her story, “The Lump,” imagines the perspective of a patient with mental illness who must simultaneously cope with a new physical illness.
We’re grateful to this year’s contest judges: Paul Harding for fiction, Mark Vonnegut for nonfiction, and Ada Limón for poetry. Our deepest thanks to the Goldenberg, Buckvar, Vilcek and Oratz/Knapp families for sponsoring the BLR Literary Prizes, which discover and showcase great literature.
Other work included in this issue of the BLR also explores a spectrum of emotions and our global community. “The Vegetable Seller,” a striking story by Sonni Aun, takes us to Seoul, Korea where an accident in a local market has dramatic repercussions that stretch from the past to the present. In “Nothing Shaking” by Michael Caleb Tasker, a man attempts to reconcile with his estranged father, and their relationship creates unexpected tensions in the son’s marriage. “Canine Cardiology,” a nonfiction piece by Deborah Thompson, describes the experience of a woman who has lost her life partner to cancer and now must take care of her beloved, ailing dog.
The poetry selections give us fresh perspectives on both ordinary and extraordinary experiences. The poet Owen McLeod in “Adelia” writes: “People have tricks for falling asleep,” and he guides the reader on an insomniac’s journey toward sleep. “Ground Zero” by Gaetan Sgro unflinchingly explores terror in Sierra Leone, and “Reprieve” by Jeffrey Harrison describes the time during a remission of cancer: “Still, it seemed a miracle almost, this reprieve…” In “The Fall,” Molly Peacock navigates an injury in surprisingly wonderful ways: “My fall itself fell, rising up, both cliff and pit…”
We hope the pages of this issue capture the current moments in our history and also introduce new worlds. We’re grateful to you, our readers, for joining us on this journey and sharing our joy in the written word.