Summer/Fall 2025 updates

Hi all,

I’ve been quiet over here. I’ve been doing a lot of teaching and mentoring and editing and writing coaching and reading and despairing and some writing and a little bit of intermittently wondering about transitioning to another platform. And now celebrating: MAMDANI!

Summer and early fall highlights:

• In June I went out to Portland for the Summer Intensive of PNCA’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program, where I’m part-time faculty. I love being part of this program and community and co-teaching with Emilly Prado, who is rad and so skillful in the classroom. I learn so much!

  

• I revised my book one final time. Those of you who have galleys, please know that I have since cut the bad poem in the first essay and polished up a lot of things. It is uncomfortable having a lesser version of the book floating around but so these things go. Pre-order Mega Milk: Essays now from the press (use code WELCOME35 for 35% off).

• I taught my four independently-run summer courses and had a great time. This was an experiment and mostly a success, though four was too many to manage at once. Stay tuned for a few new courses coming up soon.

• Thee Jibz Cameron hired me as a side-piece editor for her forthcoming memoir Hell in a Handbag which is phenomenal and available for preorder now! It’s going to be a sensation.

• I have some room in my books for new manuscript consultation and writing coach clients. Sliding scale rates. Email me at megan dot milks at gmail for more info.

• In September, I spent a day at Sarah Lawrence leading a Masterclass on weirdness as an aesthetic strategy and a Craft Talk called “New / Queer / Weird” …

• … related to a new anthology project I’m cooking up with Amber Dawn—more on this soon, we hope!

• And I published a review of Lana Lin’s excellent experimental nonfiction book The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam. (Lin’s book has since been longlisted for a National Book Award.)

*

Now it’s October and I’m writing from a Courtyard Marriott in Indianapolis, a short walk from the convention center where this year’s Heartland Fall Forum is taking place, an annual gathering of independent booksellers in the Midwest.

I’m here promoting Mega Milk. My main task is to participate in something called a Moveable Feast which is happening tomorrow. The booksellers will eat their lunches at tables while authors travel from table to table: We are the feast, moving. I have come armed with Mega Milk coasters and business cards that I ordered via Moo.com. I practice my pitch a few more times, then walk over to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, which the concierge recommended I check out.

The museum is based in the tony home Vonnegut grew up in across from the Walker Theatre—until the Depression hit and his father (a prominent architect who saw his business collapse) had to sell the family home. The museum has a homegrown feel. Among its features are a posterboard exhibit on Vonnegut’s experience as a POW in Dresden during the 1945 Allied bombing of the city (which motivated Slaughterhouse-Five) and a recreation of Vonnegut’s writing desk setup. Vonnegut sat in a low-slung chair at a low table and must have had to fold his body dramatically in order to input words into his electric typewriter.

(The words on the desk read “BEWARE OF ALL ENTERPRISES THAT REQUIRE NEW CLOTHES.”)

I imagine him huddled over and typing manically, knees knocking against the table edge as he yanks out one sheet of paper and rolls another into place. This seems so uncomfortable and I wonder if the discomfort was useful: should I rethink my ergonomic chair? When I was younger I used to type while tilting my head and neck to the right, eyes closed, as if an entranced pianist or (more familiar to me) an exhausted rower strapped into the boat. When I rowed crew, each time I dropped in my oars and pulled, my entire body was so oppressively synced with my teammates that wagging my head in dismay was my only resistance: I can’t believe this is happening, why are we doing this, make it stop. Sometimes it’s like that, writing.

My pressmate Alice Stoehr texts to see if I want to meet up—FP connected us beforehand so we could be buds. Alice’s story collection Again, Harder is due out next spring.

We meet in the hotel lobby and head across the street to a restaurant/bar called the Social Hour. We sit on low lounge furniture and as I lean over to eat my blackened chicken sandwich I enter a parallel pocket in which I am also Kurt Vonnegut leaning over to type at his desk and because he is also Billy Pilgrim cycling through time I am that too, leaning over, leaning back, in sync with the pace of the boat. Alice and I talk shop, extol the brilliance of our editor Jeanne Thornton. Alice is a part-time bookseller in Minneapolis who has self-published four books before this one; she is refreshingly unconcerned with book biz stuff and is simply radiant in the glow of having received Marquee Author treatment at last night’s Opening Ceremony. I’m excited to read this new book, her “debut.”

For the Moveable Feast I am paired with whiskey expert Fred Minnick, who is here promoting his next book, a memoir called Bottom Shelf: How a Forgotten Brand of Bourbon Saved One Man’s Life. Milk + bourbon, an ideal pairing … ? But we make a good team, Team Consumable Liquids, hopping from table to table as booksellers fork up their salmon and couscous. We take turns delivering our pitches for 2.5 minutes each (5 minutes per pair per table) and making funny jokes about our funny pairing, ten times. I could probably recite his pitch from memory. Can I remember mine, now?

Hi! I’m Megan Milks, and I’m here promoting my new book Mega Milk, a collection of essays about – milk. [here I would out the milk coasters] Mega Milk started off a project about names and naming from a trans perspective but I quickly became more interested in my family name, Milks, and then in the thing itself, milk. At first it was sort of joke: what if I, Megan Milks, wrote a book about … milk? Then once I started researching and writing in earnest, it seemed I might never stop.

This book has taken me on quite a journey—I visited dairy farms large and small in Iowa and Upstate New York. I learned to milk cows. I attended an international manure expo and had cryogenically frozen bull semen sent to my Brooklyn apartment. I researched human lactation and infant feeding debates and learned about the milky roots of white supremacy.

But while the book explores all these milk-related subjects, it’s at heart a book about family, about intimacy, about … [?], and about the growing cultural divisions that milk has come to symbolize. It’s also to some extent about writing. As a writer, I lean experimental/weird, and I’ve had a lot of fun approaching the essay as a form. I’m currently booking events for spring … get in touch … TIME

You can fit a surprising number of words into 150 seconds. Maybe I should have described some of the essays instead of the research that went into it. Maybe I should have shared more about the arc of the book: the journey of someone who at the start of the book has been connected to milk and dairy only by name—and by the end has fallen in love with cows, has learned to milk by hand and with vacuum pump, who still doesn’t really drink milk and will never lactate but has had some fun being put to bed by Mommy.

The real arc, of course, is the movement from being a writer who is trying to figure out how to write a collection of interesting essays about milk to becoming a writer who has done so. AND I DID.

*

Now it’s November. How?

Recent reads and other things:

• Fucktoys (film), written and directed by Annapurna Sriram who also stars — It’s like Anora crossed with The Outsiders as directed by John Waters if John Waters were a Millennial queer femme. Wild, stylish, ambitious, fun, nervy, a flawless outstanding debut.

• Victoria Brooks, Silicone God – one of my MFA mentees recommended this novella to me and it ranks among the weirdest queerest books I’ve read, super hot too, while defending the honor of side-pieces everywhere. Sample prose: “Yet after what had happened with the Rotten Girl, I had a feeling that I was so great, so full of silicone, that I too was a God. No. Higher. I just needed to come hard.”

• Zefyr Lisowski, Uncanny Valley Girls – Terrific essays combining memoir and horror film criticism. There are many standouts but my favorite is the one on post-9/11 torture porn in the context of Lisowski’s upbringing not far from Blackwater HQ.

• Myriam Lacroix, How It Works Out – Liza and I read this for our off-book club book club. It tells the story of a relationship—between a fictionalized Myriam and her girlfriend Allison—again and again, funneled through different scenarios and perspectives, creating a kind of multiverse through which we see a writer processing a relationship through art. Sort of like In the Dream House meets Everything Everywhere All at Once. Into it.

• Nicola Dinan, Disappoint Me – bougie British trans fiction that deals with accountability and the challenge of forgiveness, without being a full-blown redemption story. Funny. A great read.

• Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo, Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella (performance) – I learned of this 180-minute, no-intermission performance when Avgi Saketopoulou (Sexuality Beyond Consent) posted about it to IG, describing it as “phenomenally challenging.” Yep, and a perfect example of Saketopoulou’s concept of traumatophilic art. The Bride is an intense exploration of rape culture and sexual assault in which Bianchi drugs herself early on and the company then takes responsibility for her body. I’d love to talk to others who have seen it.

• Grace Byron, Herculine – kind of like Suspiria at a trans femme commune? I love this new wave of trans horror.

• Sara Jaffe, Hurricane Envy – I blurbed this and am so happy to see it making its way in the world! “These stories crackle and hum, bristle and buzz; they charge the air with their characters’ queer wants while asking and showing what stories can do. And the prose! Each finely tuned sentence of this superbly crafted and disarmingly funny book delivers some jolt or delight. An outstanding collection by one of my favorite writers.”

• Lindsay Merbaum, Vampires at Sea – I blurbed this too! “Lindsay Merbaum’s delicious new novella is Carmilla meets True Blood with a dash of Polysecure. Saucy, slavering, over-the-top, queer, Vampires at Sea serves up one hilarity after the next while bearing its tender, succ-succ-succulent heart on its sleeve, right where the pulse beats brightest. Tantalizing. Do you have teeth? You know what to do.”

• Stacy Szymaszek, Essay – and this one! “Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us.”

• Sara Fonseca and Olivia Saenz, eds., The New Lesbian Pulp – More blurb! “New Lesbian Pulp is one of the hottest and daring-est anthologies of sapphic stories I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot). These new and vintage tales deliver all the tension, plenty of torment, and a perfect excess of steam and surprise. Did I say hot? I’ll say it again: This book is hot, dangerously hot! When not in use, it should probably be stored in a cool space with the rest of your queer pulp canon.”

Next up:

• Brooke Palmieri, Bargain Witch

• Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral

• Mariana Enriquez, A Sunny Place for Shady People

• Michelle Tea, Little Faggot

• Evan Kennedy, Stalled Death Train

• Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Fawn

Find me at the Poetry Project on Wednesday 11/12, where I’ll be supporting the release of Kevin Killian’s Padam Padam: Collected Poems, just out from Nightboat, by reading a few of his poems.

And, once more: I have some room in my books for new manuscript consultation and writing coach clients. Email me at megan dot milks at gmail for more info!

Thanks for reading. <3

Megan