Trapped!

Jun. 23rd, 2012 10:09 pm
ellenkushner: (Bessie McNicol)
I am pleased beyond measure to have had a story of mine* included in Brit Mandelo's wonderful new anthology BEYOND BINARY: GENDERQUEER AND SEXUALLY FLUID SPECULATIVE FICTION (from Steve Berman's ground-breaking Lethe Press).

But I confess I was stumped, right on page 1 of her Introduction, by the term Cisgendered.

I called Brit up to get her to tell me, and she, a Gender Studies grad student, patiently explained, and I thought I understood . . .  sorta. 

But I didn't really - and I wasn't really comfortable, either, with the idea of yet another category I had to try to squeeeeze my bad
interstitial self into - until my dear friend Pat O'Connor (who teaches at Oberlin) said:

"It means you feel like a woman trapped in a woman's body."

- Yes!!! I hollered (in the restaurant, frightening the other patrons). - So true!!!



*The story is "'A Wild and a Wicked Youth'" - which is about the childhood of Richard St Vier, one of the Swordspoint protags - but unlike a few of my other Riverside short stories, I think stands unquestionably on its own without reference to the novels . . . despite the disparaging words of the Locus reviewer, who loved nearly everything else in Beyond Binary.  Which really gave me a mauvais quart d'heure:  Nobody likes to hear that a work of theirs didn't "land" properly.  It is very discouraging and demoralizing.  And it does happen, as often as not.  I hope it makes you laugh to know that I got myself out of the funk by reminding myself that that self-same awful story that someone had disparaged in print had also been selected for two "Best of the Year" collections [Jonathan Strahan's Vol. 4 from Nightshade, and David Hartwell's upcoming e-book from Tor]!

I say this not to boast, but to remind us all that These Things Happen.  And there's (almost) always a way out.

This is my first post directly to DreamWidth, with a cross-posting set up to LiveJournal (thanks to my wonderful new assistant, Katharine Duckett - wonderful, that is, if it works....!).
ellenkushner: (2French Swordspoint (EK only))
Yes, this is the one with my new story, "The Duke of Riverside," in it!  

My thanks to editor Ellen Datlow for putting up with my story's length, tardiness and subsequent revisions.  It's a pleasure and an honor to be in such esteemed company, and I can't wait to get home to get my author copy and read all the rest.  

If you're in the Boston area, a bunch of us are doing a reading/signing at Porter Square Books on July 14th

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