This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair between the 4th and 7th of April, 2023 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

As someone who identifies a culturally female, as in socialized, perceived, and having participated in those areas of society deemed ‘women’s work’ and ‘a girl’s place’, having never quite been girl, I read You Make Yourself Another from the familiar perspective of inside dwelling outsider, the dissociative lens that keeps me arms length critical of every time the woman perceived are made to share space. If there is a thread throughout this collection I read it as silenced. If there is a question to be answered, I read it as will the fury I feel at this silencing go inside or out.

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“I want to tuck my body inside itself so it’s hidden away. [...] I don't want anyone seeing me unravel I’m unravelling I’m unravelling I need this to stop.”

“She doesn’t like when I read out symptom lists at breakfast”

“Hormones can ravage a girl like that [....] Nana Jo used to say I was like a snippy werewolf a few nights a month. Hungry, angry little beast.”

- Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning

Illness and madness permeate so many of these stories. From Amy’s unraveling in Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning to the insatiable Daphne of In Bloom, and yet I am not convinced what we are witness to is all that aberrant. I think a lot about how we’re meant to eat all these traumas. How a person diminished is expected to consume their own suffering in quiet, stay silent; the worst shame saved for those who serve, heal, and absorb the blows of their ‘betters’ foolish enough to show themselves whole. The quick switch to repellant when a body births, changes, or menstruates; the repeated refrain through these last years of, ‘no worry, it’s only the sick and disabled who’ll die’. Where do you think the line lies between illness and dismissal? How many of these stories give voice to people whose only aberration is daring to survive an inhospitable world?

I think, in many ways, this collection was a way to give voice to my own fury and agonies. I have a not very neatly stacked collection of chronic illnesses and diagnoses, and especially when I began writing Maybe It's Better When It's Burning, five years ago, I was trying to process how much of my life had been stolen from me. Not only by sickness and pain, but also by systems completely unequipped to handle them. Some of those disjointed excerpts screaming about pain came from my own teenage journals, in fact. It took until last year for me to finally get a diagnosis for the genetic condition which explains why so much of my body fails to function how it should, and so I've spent probably more of my life than not being dismissed and ignored and misunderstood by the healthcare system. I've walked out of many doctor's appointments in tears. For me, it hasn't so much been a line between illness and dismissal, as a pencil maze, facing constant obstruction and retracing my path until I could find the right way out. And I know so many people who haven't found the exit.

Also, I'm so glad that you didn't find the changes those characters undergo to be entirely aberrant, because in a way, writing these stories was cathartic. There is something very appealing both to me and a lot of my chronically ill friends, in monstrous transformation. What should be a horror becomes a power fantasy, a way to unleash and externalize the pain, the anger. Frankly, I would take fangs and claws over shocks of pain, any day.

Instead of living each day like her last, Emma dies as if she will live to die again.

- Satellite Child

As a person who thinks a lot about death and dying, this strikes me as the thought of a person who does the same. In the year 2023 are there queer people who don’t? Death is so present throughout this collection: the burying of old lives and connections, the killing and cleanup and waking up Tuesday in a world that asks you to do it again. What are you asking? What role was death playing in your own life at the time of this writing? What hope, answer, or guidance are you looking to find?

Death really is everywhere in this book, isn't it? I always say the theme is transformation, but I suppose it's just as much death and rebirth. Tying into my last answer, I was sick through most of my childhood, and because of all the mystery, it was hard not to get fixated on the idea that I was going to die, young and tragic. This was also exacerbated by my conditions manifesting around the time a childhood friend took his own life. And I'll admit, in the darkest moments, the idea was comforting, but mostly it just haunted me, hanging over my head every time I screamed in pain or ran nauseously to the bathroom. In my former job as a mental health support worker, I spoke a lot about chronic illness grief. When you get sick with a lifelong condition, there is a moment where parts of your old life, or fantasies of your future, can become inaccessible to you. And you have to grieve it, that life you can no longer have, or else it will swallow you up. I've found so many new joys, new passions to follow and new things I'm capable of that likely wouldn't have crossed my radar had my life followed its original plan. Maybe the real theme of both the book and my life, all lives, is survival—look what I can, and have survived. Look what I have survived to do, to find, to discover.

She seems like a delight. What’s your excuse?

- Carcass

You Make Yourself Another gives us example after example of the prefab world of misogyny and expectation the perceived woman are born into but I’d like to sit in this one a while. The hard tie of woman to fertility. Our lily white before. Our ostracizing dehumanization after it goes. A crone is wise, yes, but so often unsettling. Docile or wicked with no inbetween. ‘What’s your excuse,’ he asks, ‘to be so without purpose to me?’ Even gay and uninterested, he still seeks her function–believing he has a right to command it–and insists she hand over both reins and repentance for not playing her role. He calls her muse but is she more vassal? We leave Rowan broken. If you had to subtitle that moment what words would you give to her wail?

It's such a complicated one, that story. I think that relationship is more typical of the kind we see between codependent female characters, Needy and Jennifer in Jennifer's Body, or more recently, Shauna and Jackie in Yellowjackets. Where one character, more feminine, more overpowering, sort of subsumes the other, who loves her desperately enough to try and fit that mold the other has made for her, but who maybe doesn't actually like her all that much. How do you grieve someone you loved, but did not like? How do you go on living as one half of a portmanteau?

And with Sinclair, like you said, there becomes this gendered element. Not only does Rowan begin to take on the shape he makes her into (to the point where, perhaps, she does not know what she is without his direction), but she becomes at various points his caretaker, even though, clearly, she can barely take care of herself. The rebellion of her grief becomes almost a surgical procedure, carving away the thing he made her into and finding what's left underneath. I think she says it best herself, stood at the mirror at the start of the story. Who the fuck are you? In the bittersweet of grief, she finally has the chance to learn.

She tapped the back of my knees with her cane and said, a beige note of boredom colouring her voice, keep up, and I traced the word outperform on the inside of my eyelids, screwed up tight and waited for the song to begin again. I took that lesson to heart, too. Be the same as the other girls, but better.

- Movement

The refrain of the other: you’re not enough so be better, be perfect, be more. I think about demographics a lot. About how the other have tipped into the mostly, about how thoroughly they’ve broken us that we turn on each other instead of standing together and remaking the world. Forgive me this moment. I’m drafting these questions on Trans Day of Visibility in a year that makes me cry out for less visibility, not more. A year when we’ve again witnessed where people run to in their fear and it’s not to our corner. TransMad and CripQueer, my people have spent the last three years alone. So many of the protagonists of these stories live in isolation. Is this a deliberate choice or simply a reflection of what feels most real?

I think it's a bit of both. This is all fiction, but as is probably very obvious, I'm spread all across this book, dripping red and unseemly. And so a lot of these stories come from where I find myself at my lowest; in retreat. Depression and sickness are horribly isolating. I'm in too much pain, I'm too exhausted, I'm too erratic and inconsolable to see people, to connect, even though often that's what I'm most desperate for. And I think, without me even really noticing, a lot of the climaxes here come with a kind of reconciliation, of reaching through the void and touching humanity again. When I've been in hospital or unwell for a while, I often feel like I've become detached from the 'Real World', and the pandemic especially sent that into overdrive. Nothing felt real, time slipped around us all like sand and the more I lost contact with the people I loved, the more I felt like I lost myself, my own identity sliding away from me. It's honestly only now, going places and seeing friends and being alive in my body instead of rotting in pajamas for weeks at a time that I've really found myself again. That I want to be seen, and heard, and felt, again, in all my queer, disabled, eccentric glory.

I can’t have a normal conversation about Medea. Rose Byrne in the role left me feral for weeks. Let’s talk instead about life disembodied, of watching oneself watch one’s own feet. In Movement, our nameless dancer talks of the millions who’ve seen her without seeing her. What are your thoughts on performance and the out-of-body living life online has normalized as a part of our day to day.

First of all, I'm very jealous you got to see Rose Byrne in Medea!

Secondly, oh I have a million thoughts on detachment and disassociation. I was a dancer myself as a child, and I used to stand there in my little unflattering leotard with all the stage school girls who at age 12 were already perfectly made up and feminine in a way that felt alien to me. But when I moved, when I danced and caught the rhythm I didn't have to be myself anymore. I was music and machine, infallible and beautiful and panting for breath. Dance is very transportive, and I miss being able to be beyond my body. But of course, that's the sleight of hand of the story, not the real meat.

I have this old, unpublished (and probably badly written) essay hiding somewhere on my laptop called The Abyss is a Mirror: The Inherent Voyeurism of Girlhood, which is about how the media marketed towards and consumed by everyone, but young girls especially, teaches us to surveil ourselves and others to fit the typical eurocentric models of beauty. There's a line in there about the joke in Mean Girls where the Plastics line up in front of the mirror to, as a bonding exercise, point out their own superficial flaws, that, you know, made me aware of things I didn't even know I could be insecure about.

The advent of Instagram and now TikTok is accelerating this alienation between what we do and are, ahem, "supposed" to look like to a really frightening degree. I've read articles about people getting surgery so their faces match how they look in TikTok filters, and all the money spent on crafting a perfect online life that's all artifice, devoid of substance, of, you know life. And it kind of breaks my heart. What's that Fiona Apple line—I resent you presenting your life like a fucking propaganda brochure. Life's too short and we're all too beautiful for this.

“Daphne aches to be covered over, to disappear inside herself.”

- In Bloom

Daphne isn’t the first of your protags to suggest that should she ever admit to needing care or comfort, that care is something she’d have to find in herself. Fold over, disappear inside, tuck my body inside. I have thoughts here about how the self care movement has capitalized on society’s expectation insistence that we heal ourselves but no spoons to voice them. Mel and her little indulgence, a meal cooked without interruption and made just for herself. The isolation again, the friend on the other end who can’t be told to back down. Because we may all suffer the same way but it’s crucial, we’re told, that we do it alone. Who benefits from this silence? Is this something you deliberately wanted to explore? I can’t help but wonder as you finished these stories, where did your thoughts fall? Have you buried your curious and left in place this monument; or are gender, death, and embodiment topics you see yourself continuing to explore?

Again, I think tying back to a previous answer, the real revelation in healing is in community, but we're told constantly that self improvement, self care, all that stuff is actually an individual act, an internal pilgrimage. Just meditate every day! Just work out, eat the right food, use the right face cream. Do it yourself, you go girl! You can be the best version of you. And there's almost a shame in admitting you don't have it all together, especially with social media and that artifice of perfection. I am kind of the lone introvert in a very extroverted friend group, and even though

I'm almost shamelessly an open book about what I can and can't do, it is still hard not to feel guilty missing out. What's wrong with me, why can't I manage what seems so simple to everyone else? Well, there ARE things wrong, I have chronic fatigue, but also there's nothing wrong with not being at every party, meeting all the right people all the time. And my friends, who seem so put together from the outside, well I've seen them cracking, too. None of this is easy for anyone, actually. That's a really freeing mindset.

And truly, I don't think I will ever be able to stop meditating on gender, bodies, death. They're endless concepts, aren't they? A depthless well. I'm always shifting how I feel about identity, about my body and my disability. How my queerness shapes both my gender and how I perform it, and how that might clash with how I am perceived. How sickness and death are as inextricable from me as my bones and sinew. But I do think this was a perfect first act, a great and terrible scream into the dusk. I got out a lot of things that were filling up my throat, and I am very curious what will come out now the path has been cleared.

Lastly, but no less important, we like to pick the brains of other authors about process.

What was your experience of taking this book from text file through to production? Your audience is other writers weighing the cost of submissions and the vulnerability of opening themselves up to a new experience they may not understand and one nosy publisher always looking to better her press. What can we say to help gain some footing? What about your experience with Half Mystic Press will you take forward into future projects? What, if anything, will you leave when you go?

I will say, the Half Mystic team are some of my favourites to work with. I've been lucky enough to have been featured in three issues of their beautiful magazine, so I was well acquaintanced with their values and how kindly (but firmly) they hold people's words. I knew it was a place I could trust with a book this intimate and self-exposing, because they've held those threads for me before (especially my short story, Notes on Divinity, as featured in issue IX: Synesthesia, a piece also about disability and mobility, almost like a trial run for the strangeness You Make Yourself Another would follow up with). Still, one of the things I quickly had to learn was to not be so precious about my word choice and flow. What makes sense to me, my poetic, stream-of-consciousness style rambling, does not always make sense for the story I'm trying to tell. So much of the beautiful sharpness of these stories was uncovered by the editors who helped me to really shape the raw material. In someone else's hands, this might have been a very different book. But that doesn't mean there aren't times to hold firm, and having the guts to stand by your work is just as hard as trimming it. It's a balancing act. I don't think I could be an editor, I'm not sure I have the eye for it, but thank God other people do! I guess I'm saying, be bold, don't be afraid to trust the process, but don't compromise on what's vital to you.

"I'm tired. I'm too young, and I'm too fucking old. I don't like the taste of pomegranate seeds." She presses her forefinger against that marble flesh, where a sternum should be insistently solid beneath soft skin. "Maybe today I chose the dark, because I'm sick of hurting. But tomorrow I'd choose my mum's arms and a bowl of her lamb stew. I choose to not be dicked around by a universe that can't get a grip on me. I want something I can hold on to."

- Satellite Child

Maybe this is where we leave it. Here on these lines that aim–some days successful, some days less so–to turn us out of the path of destruction and send us home to wherever (whomever) makes us feel whole.

Thank you for having me, and digging so deep into this book! I hope it held you tightly, and I hope now you can exhale a little more freely.