We didn’t win. But it was a major honor to make it to the finals!
If I were giving an acceptance speech, I’d thank all of the people who believed in this little book and who helped me reach the stage.
I’m also blessed to have people in my queer family who text me things like “The KGB considers you a valuable asset, and even the TSA thinks your dick is the bomb!”
Lori Hettler of The Next Best Book Blog interviewed me as part of the Where Writers Write series. Click on the link to check it out!
Only 3 more days until I fly to New York with the rest of the CCLaP crew, for a whirlwind tour that will culminate with me finding out whether Have You Seen Me has won a Lambda Literary Award!
Today I’m talking to Jason Behrends, who interviewed me for the indie music and lit Orange Alert podcast, during which he asks the important question: What does it mean if the character you identify with the most is Garbage Cat?
The author with Boo, the original Garbage Cat.
I met up with author Ben Tanzer at Cafecito for an incredibly fun, high-energy podcast about… oh, everything. And we weren’t even drinking that strong Cuban coffee! Go listen.
I once hosted a tour stop for fellow CCLaP author Jason Fisk, during which I asked him:
You were the rebellious son of an evangelical preacher, a kid who grew up crashing cars and mouthing off and was seriously threatened with military school several times. Now you’re a middle school teacher - and sometimes, you seem kind of stunned by this turn your life has taken. Can you talk a little about your relationship to being an outlaw, and how that’s changed?
Today, he fires that same question back at me, and my response is not what you’d think. Go check it out!
It’s Day 2 of the Have You Seen Me virtual tour, and today we’re visiting the PoMo Freakshow!
Sassafras Lowrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator. Ze is the editor of Kicked Out, an anthology of the stories of current and former homeless queer youth. I talked with hir about Vyv’s journey and my own history in writing the book.
SL: Can you talk a little bit about your writing process for the book?
KSN: I worked on Have You Seen Me, off and on, for about ten years. Every year or so I’d pull it out, try to stitch it into a cohesive story, make a huge mess, get frustrated, and put all my rewrites away again. A couple of years ago, the story finally “clicked.”
People have started asking me how you get a book published, and I tell them I don’t know – in my case, it was REALLY random. During one of my revision periods, I got a cold-call e-mail from Jason Pettus, the editor/owner/publisher of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, asking every self-described writer who had ever “liked” CCLaP’s Facebook page whether they were working on anything novella-length and transgressive. Have You Seen Me fit the description, and I liked the publishing program he was running, so I sent him a draft.
What followed was eight months of the most intense rewriting and editing process I’ve ever been through. We literally took the book apart and put it back together again multiple times, but I think all the blood and sweat we put into the process really shows in the finished product.
One thing I worried about throughout the process was the politics of representing Vyv’s experience when I hadn’t lived it myself, whether I had any right to tell her story. I really didn’t want to be another Margaret B. Jones or JT Leroy, flattening the experiences of queer street kids and twisting them to suit self-aggrandizing purposes while telling myself I was only “trying to help.” I’d love to come to you today with a really good answer to that question, but I don’t have one yet. I hope I did a good job.
This week I’ll be touring various blogs and websites, talking about Have You Seen Me!
Today I’m visiting local performance artist Rebecca Kling, and we’ll be talking about art, queerness, being a role model, and much more.
RK: Do you like “Have You Seen Me?” being classified as an LGBT book? Why or why not?
KSN: On one level, I think it’s completely accurate to describe Have You Seen Me as an LGBT book – it’s about the experiences of two queer teenagers who are very much marked as “queer” in their community, and about the narrator’s fumbling search for self-definition and self-acceptance as a queer man, and as a sexual being.
But I also get the sense that you may be asking about the cultural dynamic in which this same story, if it starred two straight teenagers, would be considered a “universal” coming-of-age story. Rather than trying to remove the “other-ness” that’s projected onto stories by and about LGBT people, I think that “default” or “unmarked” state that’s attached to cisgender heterosexuality needs to go away.
This is a bad ass interview, uh, if I do say so myself. Click here to read the whole thing.
The tour will be continuing until May 30th, after which we’ll all be flying to New York City for a whirlwind weekend of performances and readings, culminating in the awards ceremony for the 42nd annual Lambda Literary Awards (gulp!)
I can’t shake the image of Chris and Vyv dancing around in Vyv’s bedroom, shrieking “We’re going to New York! We’re going to New York!”
Also, I just want to put it out there that we are selling the reprint rights to Have You Seen Me, should a publisher be interested. Contact me.
I literally opened my e-mail and yelled, “OH MY GOD!”
Best birthday present ever!
P.S. If you don’t have your copy yet, the link is http://www.cclapcenter.com/haveyouseenme !
