Claire Oshetsky's Reviews > Manywhere: Stories

Recently I returned to Morgan Thomas's collection Manywhere to rediscover how Thomas presents nonbinary and alternative genders in these stories, because most of my working time, right now, is focused on a novel I'm calling a "trans picaresque." And I have questions.

More than any other writer I've read, Thomas has figured out how to write gender nuance and alternate identities into a prose style that never feels forced, and never feels anything other than the best English-language writing. I learn a lot from these stories.

Granted, it's not as hard to do this in English as it is in a deeply gendered grammar like, say, Italian. But believe me, there is a lot to think about whenever you're writing a character with anything other than a cis/het identity. Here are some of the questions that come up for me as I write: What do I call this character's identity, in the text itself? How does the word/s I choose to signal a trans identity affect the reader? How do avoid making assumptions, by the very words I choose, about the reader's awareness of transness? How can I be accurate, and not anachronistic, when language regarding trans identity is evolving so rapidly?

And, more questions: What would my CHARACTERS call their own identities? How aware are they of these identities, themselves? How likely would my characters be to call themselves an alternative pronoun if their story is set in the 1950's or the 1890's? How accepting or denying are my characters of other trans people, other queer people in my story? How much do my characters want to reveal of themselves to the people in their lives?

And also: (especially if I as an author am writing in 1st person): if my characters are reluctant to reveal themselves to the people in their lives, then why would they want to reveal their identity to any random reader who picks up the book and begins to read it? Wouldn't some characters want to hide their identities, sometimes, from whomever might read this thing? Shouldn't the writing itself reflect these hesitancies and questions that my characters have, instead of blatantly spilling the beans in some obvious way on the page, for example if I were to write something in the story like "I'm trans and it's a secret?"

I'm a nonbinary writer and I go by they-them pronouns but I've yet to write a they-them character in my published fiction. If I ask myself why, then the reason has something to do with my feeling that assigning "they" to a character feels like I am personally making assumptions about my character's gender. Granted. These characters are my creation. But I'm not their god. I think of them as complex individuals with complicated minds, genders, and sexualities of their own.

About 1/3 of the characters I wrote into my novels Chouette and Poor Deer are trans, gay, or both. BUT these characters are all also living in situations where they might prefer, or be forced to go along with their assigned genders and sexualities. Maybe they're still working it out for themselves, or maybe they aren't ready to disclose their identities to the world, or maybe it would be dangerous for them to do so. If I called my characters "they," it would feel like I was outing them on the page.

Anyway. It could be what I've written above is complete nonsense to anyone but me. But: thinking about gender and language is kind of what I'm about, as a writer, in many ways. So now I've shared with you some of the maybe-strange thoughts that preoccupy me, sometimes, when I sit down to write.

Getting back to Manywhere, I strongly recommend it. You should read it. Morgan Thomas has thought deeply about the semantics of gender, and how to write truthfully to the characters, wherever they may be on the journey toward self-actualization. But that isn't the only reason to read these stories. Read them because they are also great, unique, exhilarating stories.

Here is my NYT review of this collection, published January 2022:

Thomas writes in a musical, incantatory style that approaches poetry. Their stories aren’t linear, but a series of memoiristic recollections that fit together like beads on a string. Thomas takes extraordinary care with syntax to let queer characters fully express themselves on the page. It’s almost as if Thomas needed to create a new language to tell these stories; ours is still too binary.

In “Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man,” Thomas avoids misgendering the historical figure Frank Woodhull, a Canadian immigrant to the United States who was born Mary Johnson. Woodhull had lived as a man in America for 15 years until 1908, when officials at Ellis Island declared Woodhull to be a woman. What gender did Woodhull identify with? We don’t know and never will. Thomas circumvents the need for a gendered or even gender-neutral pronoun by addressing Woodhull in the second person throughout: “I suspected even then you weren’t a woman or a man. You were a lightning man with a knock like thunder.”

In “Bump,” a transgender woman outwardly expresses her yearning for a family by wearing a synthetic baby bump, and pretending she is pregnant. So fierce is her longing that when the bump breaks, it feels like a miscarriage — not only to the narrator but also to the reader. It’s a gorgeous meditation on the pointlessness of biological reductionism when it comes to human wants and desires.

These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about gender.