For the Long Daylight Hours

Happy solstice, everyone! It’s been such a jam-packed spring for me that I considered starting my traditional Substack summer break early and skipping this June post, but then I started reading Torrey Peters’ new book Stag Dance (which inspires the choice of the axe image above) and knew I couldn’t wait until September to share this one with you all. I’m also very excited to share a link to my latest author interview and Vauhini Vara, which just went live yesterday at Michigan Quarterly Review Online, and plug my friend Kelly Ramsey’s fantastic memoir, Wildfire Days, which came out this past Tuesday.

Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters

“Back in the suburbs, my friends would have called our shower room super gay. All of us soaping up in front of one another. But that’s not how things were at boarding school. The homo thing was to be afraid of looking at one another’s bodies. The hetero thing was to just dangle your dick out while talking to each other, acting like you couldn’t care less about the other dicks pointing back at you…If you wanted to show that you weren’t homo, just get that power-shower up your ass in front of the other dudes. It was this weird posturing. And it was effective. I respected Kyle. He worked out, he listened to hip-hop, and he washed his ass with the equivalent of a pressure-washer like it was no big deal. Weird flex, but still, impressive flex.”

If you weren’t tracking Torrey Peters’ sophomore release because you haven’t yet read her wildly popular debut, Detransition, Baby, don’t worry—you aren’t alone. I sometimes irrationally avoid books that are getting lots of buzz for no other reason than they are getting lots of buzz, and Detransition, Baby fell into this category for me (though I now have a copy on order). Incidentally, Miranda July’s All Fours was that book for me in 2024, which feels worth noting in part because hers is the lead blurb for Stag Dance. However, I don’t see Stag Dance getting as much attention, which baffles me, because it is an astoundingly moving and genius piece of work in my book, unlike anything else I’ve ever read.

First, the form: a novel & stories.” Yes, you read that ampersand correctly. For me, it would feel fair to call it four long stories, or four novellas, or one novella and three long stories. After reading it, I listened to David Naimon’s interview with Torrey Peters on Between the Covers and learned that Peters really wanted to write something quite different from Detransition, Baby, that covered new ground. She ended up putting together these four longform pieces written over many years, two of which she’d previously self-published, and each of which experiments with elements of different genres. In her acknowledgements, she describes them as “the stories I wrote to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition—otherwise known as ongoing trans life—aspects that didn’t seem to accord with slogans, ‘good’ politics, or the currently available language.”

My favorites of the four were the previously unpublished middle two, “The Chaser” and the title story. “The Chaser” is a boarding school story that starts out with vibes akin to Brideshead Revisited meets A Separate Peace but funnier. It’s keenly observed, brilliantly crafted, and speaks to some experiences and dynamics that I’ve never seen explored so incisively in a work of literature. Though the story’s subject is quite different, the story it most reminds me of in terms of its raw power and execution is Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” (That said, I should note a brief content warning: if you are uncomfortable reading about violence to animals—a pig in this case—you will need to avoid this one; though the violence is not gratuitous, it is difficult to read.) As with the first time I read O’Connor’s story, I had to stare at a wall for a solid five minutes after I finished “The Chaser,” just processing it, unable to immediately move on to anything else.

A close second is the title novel(la?), “Stag Dance,” in which Peters takes a truly glorious approach to writing queer and trans identities without transporting contemporary politics or language onto them. Instead, she investigates and makes use of the ways these identities were actually enacted historically (this story is, in fact, based on Peters’ extensive historical research into turn-of-the-century lumberjacking communities in the U.S.) and converts this into a work of fiction that is at turns completely delightful, heartbreaking, and chock full of poetic lumberjack slang. It's essentially an exploration of gender identity and desire in an illegal timber camp in early twentieth century Montana in the style of a literary Western tall tale. It’s also just a kickass story with incredible writing and a page-turning plot. The other two stories are remarkable as well—one is more of a future sci-fi dystopian tale where everyone must choose their gender, and the other is more of a contemporary horror story—and both involve complex questions of betrayal. I can’t find a way to send Torrey Peters a fan letter via her website, so this review will have to suffice in its stead.

These next two books—both nonfiction—are a little outside my usual litfic wheelhouse, but I think they are exactly the kind of nonfiction books that will appeal to a lot of litfic aficionados.

Wildfire Days by Kelly Ramsey

“As they spoke, I realized with a jolt that I hadn’t laid eyes upon a woman for the entire assignment—in thirteen days. Thirteen days of men. Thirteen days of bro jokes and farts and putting each other down. Thirteen days of hard hiking and digging and period-bleeding through my underwear and being crushed under the ass of a patriarchal deity, all with no women to tell about it. So of course these were angels from a promised land of milk and honey.”

I am admittedly biased about this first one, as it was written by a friend and fellow University of Pittsburgh MFA grad Kelly Ramsey, and I was fortunate to read an early draft a few years ago and have since had the pleasure of devouring an advance reader copy this spring. This book is really everything I hope for in a memoir: an engaging prose style and a story that sheds light on some experience or environment I would likely never otherwise access—in this case, the on-the-ground work of wildland firefighting from the perspective of a woman in her mid-thirties on an otherwise all-male (and mostly twenty-something) hotshot crew during 2020 and 2021, two of the worst fire seasons in recent memory on the West Coast. If you have tasted even a whiff of wildfire smoke in the past five years or are curious about what this crucial work is really like, consider adding this one to your summer reading list.

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara

Regular readers of this ‘stack may recall I covered Vauhini Vara’s story collection, This is Salvaged, back in December. You also may have encountered her journalism at places like Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Businessweek, or her viral essay, “Ghosts,” first published in The Believer and later anthologized in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee—or read her debut novel The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This new work of nonfiction came out in April (and includes an edited version of “Ghosts”), but back in mid-December, when I was just poking around on the internet learning more about her work, I stumbled upon a social media post Vauhini had made that week about galleys of this forthcoming book being available for potential review. Since I didn’t have an account on the social media site in question, I messaged her through her website contact form…and she replied! And said yes to doing an interview! It’s my great pleasure and honor to share the link to the conversation we ended up having over Zoom this spring, which is now live at Michigan Quarterly Review Online.

All right, friends. I thank you dearly as always for reading these posts and hope that they’ve been a bright spot of earnestness and enthusiasm in your inbox each month. Take care, and see you back here in September!

Jules