I wanted to create a publication that misbehaved in a literary climate wiped so clean of its most vile. This all began because of how trans and queer writers are treated, how they are forever asked to produce an intelligible self: explaining, defending, crossing the t and dotting the i. An editor I once worked with told me we had to "find the hope" in my experience and my writing went cold. I thought, we need space for our guttural work. I don't think our stories always need hope, I prefer when we stay with the turmoil, unredeemed, until it shows us something new. Also, a word like sissy can both humiliate and light a fuse, similar to how shame is such a vital material to use; it has texture, temperature. Hence the decision to put hole on the first cover: a threshold, portal, sieve, tear. A statement that the politic was going to be bold from the jump. Whoever was gutsy enough to poke hole and pick up the issue could read on. When working with the contributors, I was thinking about these dynamics and editing as power, however tenderly exercised, so I tried to let contributors stay particular; excused from explaining themselves or representing everyone, so that they could keep lacerating at the little moderators or police we all carry in our minds while writing/making. I think this work deserves to be printed and circulated.

I didn't want to recreate a magazine with a normal structure. I wanted it to be an object, to be read privately like contraband or to be something that could be unfolded and pinned up on a wall. With the structure, a text changes depending on where you find it, and where it finds you, with how much space it takes, whether you're alone with it or it's suddenly (by design) spread open and spilling out everywhere. That transformation of the material product feels really political to me. It also feels really trans. It gave us the freedom to arrange contributors in a way that overlapped and felt additive. When two writers who'd never imagined themselves in conversation are forced to share a crease, something unplanned happens: I want readers to cruise the page, distracted by whatever flickers across it. Order totally matters, but it shouldn't be a leash. Woof.

As for density, my collaborator Caitlin McLoughlin and I are always thinking about how much a page can hold before it suffocates... A thought that always follows: does it restrict a certain accessibility or expand the possibilities? I think we always land on the idea that: a publication that asks something of the body is more interesting. You are unfolding, turning, and rearranging yourself as the object refuses the passivity of consumption. You can't get comfortable with it, that's kinda the point.

It was important that Spring Grove's residents, the neighbours of Camden Art Centre, weren't raw material for someone else's artwork. Asking people for their experiences is not the same as letting those experiences govern what gets made. It was through workshops with the artists Youngsook Choi and Eva Freeman that residents got to talk of vulnerability, strength, memory and institutional care; and the objects we made together were what became a part of the performance and installation, It Matters What Happens Next. In that sense, we were operating with and from the shared objects.

Care too easily reproduces the hierarchy it claims to dissolve with the 'giver' above and the 'recipient' below. Real care has to risk being changed, to reach into how decisions get made and what you'd relinquish. I don't think of it, really, as a theme. I don't know how it can be...? I learnt that at the Queensland AIDS Council, whilst visiting elderly queer and trans people in aged care who were ill and estranged from their families. I went to give care and kept leaving more put back together by them. We have so much work to do, I think, in letting our ancestors change us.

Ashleigh is a long-time collaborator and I adore her. We always begin with one another asking how an idea might live in a body between dancers and their materials. SUB takes the underground as a frontier for survival after climate catastrophe, and we both took that premise very seriously, thinking beyond dystopia and treating it instead as an invitation to reconsider what we carry and what we might grow in subterranean ruins. It's also feminist as fuck: what festers in the feelings of subservience?

For me, dramaturgy is about questioning rather than resolving, and so the work between Ashleigh and I is never finished. How do you make an imagined future physically present? How do you face collapse without the familiar apocalypse, where everything ends and nothing new can begin? In rehearsal we asked what the movement communicated, and whether its ambiguity was generative or needed attention. We also left the studio for residencies in old mines and caves, then reached for the peaks of mountains to get the alternative; in both of which you can find life persisting, in contradictory ways, completely unpurified and in close proximity with the devastating marks of human pollutants. That taught us to let the body push back and expose its limits.

I begin by removing the idea that writing requires talent, a plan, or thoughts that are finished and perfect. We start by reading then move into prompts open enough to lead somewhere unexpected: a memory, object, list, questions. I'm fondest of sideways prompts that don't ask you to write, so you have to write around the request which can offer a different vantage. I adapt the room rather than the exercises. The seasoned writers take a prompt somewhere formally strange and the person who has never called themselves a writer finds something they've been wanting to say; or the reverse can happen, so everyone is constantly learning from each other. I feel like both are really important. Also, not only writers join. People with many different disciplines enjoy coming because it offers them a new way of being creative. Sharing at the end of each session is an invitation and is never corrected. I'd rather help people discover what writing can do for them than teach them to write properly. Hence compost: the embarrassing, difficult, unfinished scraps aren't discarded waste, but given the time and attention, they become something else.

What drew me specifically to those artists was the different ways they each make the body impossible, exposing it as something manufactured by surveillance, fantasy, and disgust. They all implicate the audience and no one is able to watch/experience from a safe distance. Blood, voice, pixel... each stages the same suspicion to me, that a body is made rather than found, but where the work lands, in an ear, on a screen, in a space, changes who is made to feel complicit.

My tears are never random and I allow them visibility in my writing; why not? Criticism is, for me, not something that can happen from a safe distance. Does that even exist when experiencing art? I feel like you have to get hot, close, and let the work move through you, which is a risk I think most contemporary writing avoids in favour of polite, bloodless indifference.

I'm not chasing an audience in my writing either. What I'm focused on is a reading so exact (or original) that the artist pauses, re-reads me, as if a mystic were whispering in their ear, and wonders: How the fuck did she know that? My only answer is that I'm always really listening; that and I remember really well. I double, triple over things in my head. I examine people and how they language things. Also, no critic is working from a place of nothing. There's always an entry point, a beginning, and so: I listen, observe, look for details others might miss, create meanings and (because I'm often lucky enough to have the ability to do so) I reach out to the artist and have a dialogue with them about the ways in which we are both seeing. I also say what I feel most of the time, which is a double-edged sword I live and die on.

In that specific instance, the edits flattened the nuance the argument hinged upon at the level of the line. To me, everything lives and dies there. They'd commissioned particularity and then tried forcing my voice under water for readers, advertisers, and donors who want something placid and digestible: proving they wanted the cachet of trans visibility with none of the danger of trans voices. What reached the page, published without my final review, was a politer, thinner version of what I'd written. Nobody told me, I found out on my own. That is bullshit behaviour, and it seems to me that most writers I know are too tentative to hold editors accountable for it. I refuse to belong to a writing community that would rather alter my words, publish them unannounced and leave me to discover the changes alone, than one that takes longer, reads slower, pushes deadlines back until things are right, and collaborates responsibly. I feel like all of that seems really basic to me... right? How unnerving that I still feel the need to sense check, to ask if that's too much.

I've been thinking about how defensive trans and queer writing has always had to be, armoured in advance against the hostile reader. I feel really proud to be a part of the lineage, I'm truly so grateful for it, but it does feel sometimes overwhelming to be your own advocate while also seeding a work for people who will either destroy or expand upon it. I'm always straddling the line between that, wanting to publish my most experimental work and then understanding that perhaps that work still doesn't have a place in literature or publishing right now. Not to go back, but that's why SISSY ANARCHY feels so important to me.

I think it's about noticing whether the editor wants me to sharpen my execution or to jump ship and turn the piece into a labour of education for the untrained reader. Even speaking toward these questions, I'm getting so frustrated with having to describe these feelings that are not dissimilar to how most, if not all, marginalised bodies have always operated: creating the most expansive work on earth from the force of our subjugation, precisely because we have been forced to invent the conditions of our own liberation, from the ground up.

To be specific: if an editor wants clarification, I feel like that respects the conditions of the work. That looks like sharpening a sentence, helping make the argument strike with precision, leaving the complexity intact. Only a handful of editors know how to make a piece more dangerous, and I feel like I don't have the luxury to wait for one; I'm genuinely worried most of the time about the conditions of my work, my life, my experience, and how I am able to make. The fire and fury you have is yours to continue stoking before you hit send on a draft. I also think sending the most radical thing prepares you for when the editorial reflex to pull you back comes up: you know (roughly) where you're willing to negotiate. The opposite is when an editor wants to smooth you out for a cis reader, which I just refuse to do anymore. It makes you feel so grateful to the few editors who bring trust and intelligence, cause shh, secret's out: no one fucking reads anymore and it shows. El oh el.

I think it's a misconception to think that what is happening globally doesn't reach regional spaces. Personally, I think regional responses to these crises feel more nuanced and immediate. In these contexts, crooked speaks to the raw, unmediated relationship with a landscape that defies suburban neatness. It is the gnarled trunk of the gum tree, the winding dirt track that bypasses the highway, the off-grid survival of those who live far from the sanitised metros. It hints at criminality, too: crooked like corrupt, dangerous, operating deliberately outside the laws of a state that wasn’t built to protect and defend trans and queer survival. In the process of making CROOKED, it felt so important to turn away from where SISSY ANARCHY had reached, featured at the Venice Biennale, toward where this work doesn't at all exist. To answer the question: contributors in the first issue have, just as thoughtfully as anyone in a big city, contributed works that are forcefully resistant to the rise of fascism and with it the subjugation of trans and queer people. It's fucking amazing, honestly. I'm blown away by the power and resonance of everyone involved.

I didn't, and that was purposeful. A 'then versus now' writing wouldn't be totally true about how memory and the body keep time. I think of memory as something happening to the body now, which may be why we remember at all. When a thought demands a physical response, like if you cringe at something you once did, blushing in the face or feeling your spine twist, aren't you still inside it? Memory isn't relieved from an archive, I think it's re-enacted, live, in the flesh.

The central idea is Nachträglichkeit, Freud's deferred action, belatedness, afterwardness: the later event reaches back and rewrites the meaning of everything before it. That informs the idea that we're always arriving at our body backwards, which totally confuses the idea of movement, time, and linearity. I love that. In the essay, I became aware of certain information about the construction of my cells, and so what I understood of myself changed at the level of the cellular. I used ideas of the diary to fold into the essay, how diaries are similar in the sense that earlier versions of a self make up their own language that later knowledge interrupts. The reader is tasked with sorting through the timelines, tracing the delicate seams with me. That's how it felt and so I hope it reads that way too. Queer time rarely keeps a line, it's more like a palimpsest...

I feel like the findings establish very little other than an entry point. Everything that grows around it feels more interesting to me like: what it says about my body, my childhood, about sex itself... It's a study of interpretation: the doctor's measurements, notations, clinician's careful, avoidant, sterile phrasings beside my own. I let the clinical language be cold and hope that my register, my response, can animate it. I think diagnosis is a genre that has certain conventions and an audience, and I wanted readers to feel that in a way where nothing is resolved. I'm just trying to study it, to find a vocabulary that suits, while attending to the questions that repeat and coalesce and accrete with no answers. I hate to sound so simple, but maybe it deserves something straightforward: the body provides no easy resolution, and we are all moving toward disabilities that very few people and writers are interested in acknowledging. I just can't imagine not grappling with this all right now... are we not all thinking about death at the moment? Are we still trying to avoid that? My recent medical experiences have demanded this reckoning and it's something I'll never put down now.

Writing by hand keeps sentences close to the body. It's slower and messier. When I type it, it's less stubborn because you can't help but edit as you go. You need to retain the written words and their phrasings because they want to be read.

In that part of the essay, the full phrasing is this: "There are versions of trans-essentialist sentences very close to my elbow, to the pen’s tip hovering over the diary this morning, which I contemplate reaching for. The sentence being something along the lines of: the body knew best… I’m not sure it did. I think, for now, I have to consider that the body knew a way; its way, though that wasn’t for the best or worst of me. There is only the way the body has, as bodies do, to keep becoming the entity it has not yet been."

The idea of 'best' is being challenged here because the word itself invents and proposes a benevolent intelligence that knew all along and was merely waiting for the right moment to tell me. That's just not what it feels like has happened for me, it's not what I have felt. It dismisses decades of unknowing, which has repercussions I can't easily wave away, and flatters an accident of timing. It's also most interesting to think about how my body slipped past a surveillance that so many bodies don't. I think I prefer the quality of that statement amongst the other sentences: the body knew a way, its way, neither for the best nor the worst of me. That leaves so much space for a third figure, the one neither word reaches.

I think what's at risk is the idea that the self is a thing you can keep. We live in a society leaking with beliefs that aren't our own. If I didn't have to name myself, to make claims constantly to be in a world so set against me, I'd be less defensive, more porous, freer to be my own thing. That can sound passive, but it isn't. If the world wants to know me by naming me, so be it. No name ever fully fits, and in that gap is where I do as I please. I've been in that space over the last few years writing this book, slipping in and out of shapes identifiable and not, trying to hold onto my life as I work through the serious consequences of my deteriorating health from surgery; and with it, my mentality has been unforgiving. There have been many iterations of the book that have been both physically and emotionally demanding. I inventoried my whole life for the first draft and have since moved from that thinking into suicidality and back again to a horizon that feels more brutal, if you can even imagine. I've been trying to hold onto something legible, but my mind is too intelligent to be so fixed, and so I shape-shift and morph and stretch-out and bottle up; all of which is reflected in the prose I've written. The world will take of me what it wants. In the book, I find a way of mediating that space; at what proximity am I able to be in and of the world as something named, marked, and torn whilst also being something unnamable, indistinguishable, mine own? What and where is this glamorous and bloody and gruelling thing inside of me that defies observation, why does it refuse obsolescence? I've been trying to figure out what that is; how it is. It's been really challenging... What remains?

Necrosis and claws

Love Spells

Donlon on Broadway Market