[spacer height=”0.1px”]Arteidolia
September 2025
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You’ve titled your upcoming poetry chapbook, BOY APPARITION, a travelogue of atemporal genders. Very intriguing. Could you expand on this further?
This collection is all about the liminality of being a transmasculine butch—how one can be emphatically not a woman but still have no interest in passing as a cis man, how one’s experience of gender can make linear time irrelevant, how transmasculine erasure can make us feel like a boy yet also an apparition, formless and negated and all-transforming. Atemporal gender is the belief that linear time, with its focus on an idealized future for which all must be sacrificed, runs entirely counter to the desire and community inherent in transness, and this collection speaks to that lived experience.
You wrote that you see your writing as a “vehicle for insurgent queer worldmaking.” What would you most like readers to experience? What would you like them to take away after reading your poetry?
Most of all, I want readers to get in touch with their experiences that might be considered illegible to control, order, and linear time—what Discordians call eristic creation, and the BashBack tendency calls the ability to “live beyond measure and love and desire in ways most devastating,” and most people probably just call being gay. I believe that anarchy starts with the forms of care, negation, and desire that we experience solely because they’re beautiful to us, not due to Movement Goals or survival anxieties or heteropatriarchal duty. And poetry gives us plausible deniability for those desires, a chance to engage with art for art’s sake, a safe space to explore what we might be repressing. I hope that my work embodies the ideal of BashBack aligned organizing in that it creates small glimmers of insurgent care, and thus makes broader anarchy feel more possible.
Yes, your poetry does do just that. I’m interested in hearing more about how BashBack has fueled your writing.
Without going into too much detail, I organize with mutual aid networks, affinity groups, and peer support spaces that align with the current, second wave of BashBack—and the community of that has empowered me to write and perform in so many ways. I love how BashBack spaces emphasize desire and vulnerability above all; there’s no toxic masculinity or pressure to Pass as masc via self-repression. Instead, everyone is encouraged to practice anarchy by embracing their queer desires and building communities around that. I do my best writing when I feel surrounded by the most anarchic kind of care, the kind that isn’t reliant on nonprofits or state power but instead comes from the queer synergy we feel for one another. Under anarchy, I’d just be a trans artist and builder of community. In this day and age, one that’s rapidly careening toward fascism, I align my art and activism with the BashBack tendency, because I believe in atemporal desire, because I believe in conflictuality and prefiguration, because our queer communities are precious and need to be uplifted.
I can really feel the pulse of your commitment. Your words are strong & powerful & need to be heard. After checking out your website, I can see that you are deeply active in a wide array of projects from community organizing to anarchist journalism, from hosting a podcast to having your poetry published, from commissioned writing to creating cool zines. Can you fill us in more about all that you’re up to?
I’m the author of VOIDGAZING (2026, Whittle Micropress), and my writing has appeared in Querencia Press, Akpata, J Journal, Witches Magazine, Fifth Estate, ANMLY, OurLives Wisconsin, Library Of Eris, Oyster River Pages, and Seattle Journal of Social Justice, among many others. I also contributes columns to Asymptote, the Anarchist Review of Books, Open Sorcery, and more—and self-publish zines on itch.io. I authors the advice column DEBATE ME BRO and host the podcast THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES, and most importantly, i do grassroots theater and organizing work in the great lakes region. most of my organizing is centered around trans liberation, reproductive justice, Palestine solidarity, and of course youth liberation. broadly, i’m drawn to creating social spaces, mutual aid networks, and generally spaces that allow for care and negation in queer community.
Your book is to be released by Vinegar Press on October 31. Can you tell us about them, and if you have any advice to writers who are looking to get their poetry published.
Vinegar Press is a small independent publishing house, and my book is part of their first chapbook run—a dynamic that’s been incredibly cool. Because they only have a few authors so far, they’re able to dedicate time and resources to each one and build interpersonal relationships that feel genuinely warm and supportive; I love working with micropresses because of this communal feeling. As for getting your poetry published, I’d of course suggest casting a wide net—use chillsubs.com, submit to open calls you see online, self-publish zines, all that—but beyond that, try to build community wherever you can. If you get published somewhere and have a good experience, suggest it to your friends. Submit to your favorite venues more than once. Get to know editors. Share fellow emerging writers’ posts online. Collaborate with people. Join critique groups and workshops. Radicalize your poetry friends. Get your anarchist friends into poetry. Go to open mic and zine events in your city if they exist, start one if they don’t. The ethos of DIY and queercore isn’t just for music; it’s also for indie lit, and the poetry scene is participatory and open-ended and haphazard in the sweetest way. It is what we make of it. So make something weird and trans and beautiful.
Press kit for BOY APPARITION →
