Hi all,
Mega Milk is two months old. Thanks to everyone who has been reading the book and sharing responses with me.
This is the first book I’ve taken on tour. When my 2021 books came out, pre-vaccine, most bookstores were hosting online events only. I once saw a melancholic documentary short made up of a montage of clips of tourists’ smiles fading after they had posed for photographs. When I logged off after my virtual book launch for Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, it was like that: I could feel my smile draining out of my body, replaced by a wobbly sadness. Liz and Wade met me on the roof for a tiny and meaningful celebration. Were there cupcakes, maybe, and rosé? Maybe one cupcake.
For Mega Milk I have been able to do many in-person events that have kept the smile alight. Thank you to everyone who has shown up, and especially to my many conversation partners, fellow readers, and hosts. I’m writing this from the kitchen table of one Jordan Scott, whose cat companions Kevin and Ari have been keeping me company in Providence, and also (later) on Amtrak heading home.
Upcoming events:
Friday 4/10 in Chicago at Women and Children First with Vera Blossom
Saturday 4/18 or Sunday 4/19 (TBD) in Walton, NY with Rebecca Novack
Thursday 5/14 in Decatur, GA with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore at Charis Books (part of Sam Ace’s Meet Me There series)
Wednesday 6/10 in Providence at Symposium Books with Jordan Scott
Thursday 6/11 in Boston at The Model Cafe for the T4T Series
You can also find me here:
Interviewed by Tuck Woodstock and Ozzy Goodman on the Gender Reveal podcast
Interviewed by Eileen G’Sell at The Hopkins Review (forthcoming)
Interviewed by Shuli Branson on The Breakup Theory (forthcoming)
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I was in Los Angeles, I was in Olympia, then Portland, then Seattle. Back home, then in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, back to Brooklyn for an event at Hive Mind Bookstore. On Friday I was in Providence. Next week, DC. Because transparent money talk is important and interesting, I’ll share how I’ve funded this tour. The LA/PNW trip was jointly supported by the ICA-LA and Feminist Press, and made possible also by Sam, who let me crash with her for a few nights in LA; Liza’s mom, who offered up her Olympia condo while she was out of town; and Liza, who set up the Olympia event and drove me from place to place. The AWP conference was funded by my school’s Part-time Faculty Professional Development Fund. The upcoming Chicago trip has been funded by the points I racked up on my travel credit card from booking the other flights which have since been reimbursed. Book tour hack! And some money from NEIU, where I’ll be doing a reading and class visits on the Thursday before the WCF reading.
I’ve had to eat the train fares to Providence, DC, and Boston. And the overnight cat sitter from Meowtel during the West Coast trip, which came to almost $900 (!). That still hurts. And the $700 I lost when I mistakenly reserved a non-refundable (and now non-reimbursable) aparthotel room in Baltimore for not March 5-8 as intended, but February 5-8. Fie! I’ve come to a relatively zen place about money—the money flows in, the money flows out, if I lose $700 it will usually show up in another form, I’m okay, etc., albeit damn I wish I hadn’t done that, I wish I still had that $700.
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At event after event I’ve been floored by all the generous and thought-provoking questions that my interlocutors have posed about my work, some of which invited original thinking that I could not produce off the cuff, such is my limitation. As I said apologetically but accurately upon being asked a deep question on Monday: “I’ll have better thoughts another day.” Here are some of those thoughts.
Please know that I was already working on this Substack when Rebecca Novack started publishing her own tour question Substacks. Just so you know. Great minds. Read Murder Bimbo.
At January’s World Transsexual Forum, Jeanne Thornton asked this: “I must allude to the sexiness of this book! Many of the blurbers talk about it as one of the horniest books ever, so to speak. Some of this is of course implicit in the subject, which is very charged, but I think I’m generally just curious about this—were you setting out to write one of the horniest books ever? Is this generally a literary intention of yours? Or does this simply occur?”
During the Gender Reveal lightning round, Tuck Woodstock asked this: “What is kink?”
And at our ICA-LA double header, Myriam Gurba asked: “I love eco-erotics and definitely classify MEGA MILK as an eco-erotic work. What kind of relationship do you have to eco-erotic storytelling and theory?”
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I’ve been thinking about all of these questions together. To start with Jeanne’s: Sometimes it is my intention to write horny books. Slug is pretty horny. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body: not horny. Though it yearns to become horny. And one can’t forget I have co-edited two volumes of scholarship in asexuality studies, the un-horniest books of all.
I don’t think Mega Milk is particularly horny. There are a number of erotic/kink scenes referenced in the book that are some of my favorite/best scenes I’ve collaborated on, but they’re not very explicitly described. Because so much of the book became a document of my life during the period of time I was writing it, it seemed important to include documentation of this area of my life. I was proud of those scenes and of my contributions to them; I was interested in them as creative practice and I wanted to record them in literature—in the literature describing my life. For a year or so of the early book work, my frankly exhilarating erotic life took up a lot of the creative energy that would otherwise have gone into my writing. By bringing those scenes into my writing, one could argue that I was balancing the scales—while giving myself co-authorial credit for those creations. I understand that writers have many good reasons to separate their sexy work from their more literary work. As for me, I have a Kristy in me (Baby-Sitters Club reference); when I have a great idea, I need the world to know.
Milk is an erotically charged substance. While I do explore milk’s erotics in the book, Mega Milk could certainly be hornier. There’s a whole HuCow world I barely touched upon. In a friend’s library I see a book titled, simply, Cum, and regret not having consulted it in the writing of my book. If not exactly horny, Mega Milk is very kinky, both overtly and less so. It’s overtly kinky when it describes those few kink scenes and gets a tiny bit into lactation kink; and when it crosses boundaries, e.g., in bringing family issues and (non-incestual) sex into the same essays, and in imagining trans-species erotic scenes (“Milking the Bull”). It’s less overtly but maybe more inherently kinky in that it’s experimental in its approaches to intimacy. A kink ethos guides the book.
But what is kink? My off-the-cuff response to Tuck’s question was woefully inadequate but, I think, interesting. I have no idea what made it into the edited version and do not have the courage to check, but I believe I focused on the community and activity aspects of kink. These are elements of kink practice more so than a definition of kink per se—and specifically they are important elements of my own kink life. I have experienced kink as a communal practice where knowledge is exchanged between lovers and play partners, in workshops and books. Sure, this is not so different from how sexual knowledge more generally gets shared; but the kink world has developed a sophisticated pedagogy founded upon consent, intention, skill sharing, and creative experiment. The activity element is something I’ve been thinking more about; I love that kink is active, is intentional, is collaborative. I guess sex more generally can also be this—but kink is this squared?
What is kink? You tell me.
I see it as a space of boundless creativity and exploration that is often interested in playing with edges and boundaries. More than horniness per se, it’s this that I want to bring into my writing.
When Myriam asked about eco-erotics at the ICA-LA, I was surprised—I hadn’t been thinking of Mega Milk through that lens, but I liked the idea. Myriam referenced an article by Melissa K. Nelson that I hadn’t read then but have since spent time with. In “Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures,” Nelson describes eco-erotics as “a type of meta (after, higher)-sexual or trans (over, beyond)-sexual intimate ecological encounter in which we are momentarily and simultaneously taken outside of ourselves by the beauty, or sometimes the horror, of the more-than-human natural world.” Yes! I’m signed up, I’m seated. These intimate encounters between the human and the more-than-human world take place at what Nelson describes as “the contact zone”: “a messy, visceral, eco-erotic boundary-crossing entanglement of difference.” Nelson’s contact zone is where things “get dirty,” she writes—a dirtiness that enables empathy and kinship across difference.
Some essays in Mega Milk could be read through this framing, and I’m grateful to have this language to describe the kind of transspecies kinship I believe I’m enabling in, for example, “Milking the Bull,” which “gets dirty” in ways that some might too eagerly diminish under the rebuking language of “bestiality.” Importantly, Nelson’s conception of eco-erotics is grounded in an Indigenous worldview, tradition, and discourse, so I hesitate to fully claim it for myself. But I’m excited to learn more and I want to get dirty in that contact zone.
Thanks to Jeanne, Tuck, and Myriam for these questions.
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Other updates:
Get ready for New Queer Weird! Amber Dawn and I sold our anthology-in-progress to Feminist Press with a pub date of Fall 2027.
My review of Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn is now up at 4Columns.
I have new fiction forthcoming in Michelle Tea’s Clowns anthology, which is available for pre-order from Dopamine Press. New Yorkers, save the date for the July 20 launch at Littlefield.
I am judging the Waasnode Fiction Prize for Passages North, and have answered some questions here about what I’m looking for. Deadline to submit is April 16, 2026.
And please, if you’re in DC, Chicago, Hudson Valley, Providence, Atlanta, I’d love to see you when I’m in town. (See event dates above.)
Yours,
Megan
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