Sweet Brackish Salt

Sweet Brackish Salt is a quest novel told from the perspective of a feminized gender non-conforming seafarer who works through various myths, encounters and kinds of water – sweet, brackish and salt – to arrive at a more robust and nuanced self-understanding.

Setting out in the off-season for the Great Lakes (Sweet), the narrator initially tries on various forms of idealized self-sufficiency and heroism typical of masculinist sea stories. Such projects soon founder, however, in the Chesapea...