Queer Life, Queer Love
240
Queer Life, Queer Love
240Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781838110161 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Muswell Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2022 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction When, in March 2020, we received the devastating news of the death of Lucy/Jack Reynolds, publisher Sarah Beal’s trans daughter, we both felt an immense grief. Neither of us had met Lucy-Jack in person, nor did we have any interactions with her, so whilst our grief stemmed from our compassion for Sarah’s loss, it was intensified by the fact that this was another lost queer life. Being queer is hard. Recognition of one’s own personal difference and the journey to self-acceptance can be a painful and bewildering one. And it is more than just identifying as LGBTQ+. To us, queerness is about disrupting the status quo. And while identifying as anything other than cis-heterosexual is automatically disruptive to the cis-heteronormative world that we have to live in, queerness is also about an attitude, and a courage that lets one express their own deviation from the norm. And writing is an action, a call to arms. Putting words on the page, articulating our fears and desires is a form of resistance: a symbolic shredding of the heteronormative script. We received hundreds of submissions from almost every corner of the world and with so many amazingly written queer texts, the final selection process was tough. In the end, we decided on entries not only representative of many races, genders, and sexualities in all their rainbow glories, but also those that we found sublime and extraordinary in regard to literary craft. In this sense, we were interested in not just pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality, but also the boundaries of literature itself. And that’s why we specified in the submission call out that we were interested in both poetry and prose, short stories, narrative nonfiction or indeed a hybrid of these. Although each entry was submitted independently, as we began the selection process a glorious sense of continuity and community began to emerge. Words and sentences created in private, in those liminal spaces where despair and desire meet, are articulated here and expand upon queer difference, queer difficulty, queer curiosity, and solidarity. These works shout, demand and proclaim our capacity to express queer life and queer love. This beautifully daring collection is to honour a young, lost queer life, but also to create more space to encourage and salute the diversity of queer writing, and to celebrate the richness of queer life experience. Golnoosh & Matt