Mad Eden: A Guest Post by Morgan Thomas

A tender and surreal story of a healthcare worker navigating life, love and politics in the swamps of Florida. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Morgan Thomas on writing Mad Eden. 

From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.

When I began writing Mad Eden, I was working at a queer community health project. I managed a blog, planned events, connected people to healthcare—it was a lowkey job. In 2023, that changed. As state after state passed laws banning gender-affirming care, my work went from quiet community engagement to political activism seemingly overnight. The essence of the work hadn’t changed, but the external perception of it was transformed, and with this transformation came real consequences. A lawmaker mentioned our program while advocating for a ban on gender-affirming care. There were legal briefs to parse, injunctions to track, and a steadily increasing tide of anti-trans vitriol directed at programs like ours. In meetings, we now had to talk about FOIA requests, encrypted messaging, and whether we should eliminate certain words from our social media channels. I began working with a consultant who was an expert on the dark web. At night, I lay awake, second-guessing every decision I’d made, terrified one of them would lead to danger for my colleagues or our community. I wrote into my anxiety, playing out one worst case scenario. Those pages became Mad Eden.

The transformation of my work wasn’t the only change of 2023. That same year, I was diagnosed with autism—a label which felt both illuminating and disorienting. Again, my essence remained unchanged but the way I perceived myself (and the way others perceived me) transformed. Sudden transformations like these are often the province of fairy tales—frog to prince, straw to gold—and early on, I imagined the book as a kind of fairy tale. I tried to set it in the forests of Oregon, which had always struck me as magical, rather than in Florida, where I’ve lived for most of my life. But the landscape of the novel refused me, morphing again and again. Herds of elk became groups of alligators, moles turned into armadillos. When I found myself describing an alpine lake as “fetid” and “soupy,” I gave up and let Florida’s swamp in. That word, “swamp,” has been used metaphorically in America for centuries, shorthand for political corruption, but it was the literal swamp that seeped into my manuscript—all mangroves and mosquitos. While researching the novel, I discovered that the words “witch” and “fairy” (swamp dwellers in old tales) are speculated to have been used at various points to describe neurodivergent and queer people. This helped me embrace the setting and understand why Ro feels most at home with an alligator in the backyard.

In Mad Eden, I tried to immerse the reader in moments when one’s world becomes abruptly unrecognizable—care work transformed into crime, home into hostile landscape, self into stranger. In fairy tales, transformations often lead to love, but in life they can be lonely. I hope Mad Eden might offer solace to other people experiencing this sort of upheaval, a reminder that, however sweeping the change, some essence—the lush generosity of swamp plants, the radical possibilities of queer care—remains.