Future Feeling
introduced by Jeanne Thornton
INTRODUCED BY Jeanne Thornton author of three books, most recently the novel Summer Fun, published in July by Soho Press.
Ilove Joss Lake’s vision of the future in Future Feeling, a holographic vista of glamorous trans influencers and a secret cabal of benign operator-caretakers overlaying a world of trans angst, restorative desert retreats, witch roommates, and crappy dog-walking gigs. It’s a compelling contribution to the current effort to marry literary fiction and a sense of onlineness, how the internet gets in our souls. This resonates a lot with me as a reader in 2021—following a year in which for many people the social and political world collapsed into a single digital point—and as a trans reader, whose experience of the digital world is sometimes freer than the material one. What I especially love about Future Feeling is that Lake doesn’t cast the internet as a villain or a corrupting agent: It’s the water we swim in. It holds the potential to push us away from one another into private swirls of envy, anger, and resentment, and it also holds the potential to bear us up, to carry us together toward places of solidarity and transformation. I am extremely into this trans guy buddy comedy about being there for your friend who’s trapped in the Shadowlands and can’t get out. So I was stoked to have the chance to ask Lake some questions about this world he’s built.
Future Feeling tells the story of a journey—from a transness dominated by envy and pain to one that is about care and support, as paralleled with the journey from New York City to L.A. by way of an existential desert, which is so great. It was legitimately wholesome, watching the three central trans men start to draw together as a result of that act of rescue. Tell me more about what the idea of trans rescue means for you, and why you put it at the core of this book.
When I started writing the book, I was thinking about this slew of “hysterical male” novels I’d read for a grad school seminar. Initially it felt delicious to focus solely on Penfield and his misadventures and to inhabit a certain type of loud, spirally voice (think Jernigan, Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita). After a while I remembered how uncomfortable I’d felt inside those books and inside the monologues of insecure, unreliable men. What I needed to do was push the form of the book toward a more restorative place.
I happened to be walking along a path on Monhegan Island, which is a tiny and exquisitely beautiful island off the coast of Maine, with two trans friends. As we were resting atop a cliff, I knew I needed to open up the book to include Aiden’s and Blithe’s stories. And it seemed like the only way for Pen to grow or evolve was to think less about himself, or less about himself in such a defeating way. So, to me, mutual trans rescue was the only logical way for the characters to move from one place to another. And mutual trans rescue doesn’t actually mean “saving” someone else but creating space for them to both fall apart and to reconstruct themselves.
I love the interposed narratives—Pen narrating Blithe’s life, Pen reflecting on milestones like name changes in these broad satiric pieces. So much of the book is about how we narrativize our past. I’m curious about where this interest came from.
A lot of the narrative structures were born out of frustration with “official records,” whether legal, cultural, or historical. There’s a trope that trans people must either completely detach from the past or use it to counterbalance their extraordinary “glow-up.” I wanted Pen and Aiden and Blithe to be able to exist in fluid, sometimes helical time, and to have a constant array of portals to help convey and archive their experiences.
I am a sucker for stories about relationships between trans and cis people that dig deeply into the complicated codes of patriarchal damage imposed on everyone. I like that the book ends in a place of optimism about this. I’m interested in what you have to say about that active border between trans and cis people and the ways you see us all navigating it.
What comes up for me around this active border is boundaries: finding ways for cis people to acknowledge trans people’s experiences without either trying to collapse or exotify difference. The more cis people can articulate the way gender norms constrict (and potentially benefit) them, the less pressure there will be on trans people to carry a lot of symbolic weight around gender, “authenticity,” and transgression. At the heart of the book is the question of
relating: What is close but not too close? How do we align ourselves with others without erasing difference? I think a lot about the active boundary between white and BIPOC trans folks and how to help maintain it with integrity and an awareness of white supremacy.
So much of the book is about characters moving through rituals, from Pen’s initiation to the hypermasculine sauna to an outright ritual combat between father and son and Blithe’s journey through China to heal colonial wounds. I feel real hope from this vision and how the book presents ritual as a way to help us unlearn our destructiveness. This is not what I was expecting from a book about the future, either that deep optimism or that sense of magic. Tell me more about this—what is ritual about for you? Do you think there’s a ritual path to trans liberation?
I used to think freedom was this wideopen space. I had an image in my head of an actual open field where I would imagine running. And yet the more I think about freedom—and magic and the future—the more it arises in the discrete and bounded form of a ritual. Not surprisingly I’ve always been obsessed with stories of fantastical transformations: the axolotl from Julio and Cortázar’s Blow-Up, the overnight gender change in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the universe of Studio Ghibli. But as unsexy as it may be at times, the only way that I know to create actual magic, change, and freedom is through small and routine acts—creating an altar, injecting testosterone, showing up for people— and having these practices whether or not they seem to be producing immediate results. Part of my need to create ritual also comes from growing up and feeling like many traditions and celebrations and spaces that were supposed to be ritual spaces had become social performances and had lost their meaning.
I do think both trans and general liberation have to be daily practices, which doesn’t mean that you’re pressuring yourself to radically liberate yourself every day. It means you hold this aspirational vision of trans liberation.
And while of course there are times when you engage in big actions and big decisions and big events, there’s a lot of unlearning that has to happen. I have grand ideas about how and when I’m going to unlearn negative patterns, but it only happens in moment-to-moment time: How am I revealing myself to this person, how am I becoming less small, how am I listening to what someone else is trying to say, how am I assigning meaning when I mess up and end up right back in a habitual hole? I think we often get stuck when we think that liberation looks like a big event, when the event is actually the culmination of a thousand acts or “rituals.”
What is hopeful to me about ritual is that you don’t have to have everything figured out. You take one step, and then another, and that is a digestible place for people to enter into liberation. It’s similar to writing a book: You make space for the writing, you try to reach your daily goals, and somewhere inside of that structure, the aliveness happens.
I’ve been reading Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021) by Matthew Salesses, and it has been helping me think about the ways different cultures and traditions or schools of thought influence craft and narrative. Your novel grapples with these issues so gracefully. Were these things you thought about when writing Ghost Forest, and did your background as a visual artist influence the way you thought about them?
For a long time I really wanted to find my voice as a painter. I grew up learning Western oil painting and briefly studied Chinese ink painting, and for years I wanted to combine the different techniques into a style that would reflect who I was. I loved that oil painting worked in layers, and I loved that ink painting was so controlled and spacious. I never figured it out as a painter. But I think everything I learned in that process came with me into my writing.
Because I didn’t go to school for writing and kind of came into it by accident during art school, I didn’t have the vocabulary or frameworks to think about craft decisions consciously. They happened on an intuitive level. Of course, during edits, when I had to actually verbalize my intentions to my editor, I started to see how my upbringing and worldview affected the structure of the book. I wanted to include the voices of the mother and grandmother, for example, instead of having the narrator speak for them because I grew up with this idea that the family is more important than the individual.
Another quality is that when conversing in Cantonese, we are constantly listening between the lines. It’s a more indirect language than English. Growing up, there were so many times when I asked my mother a simple question and she would reply with something like, “Jade that hasn’t been carved isn’t jade. It’s just rock.” Which was honestly kind of annoying to me when I was younger, but I love it now. It’s the tendency to leave a lot unsaid and also to have a mutual understanding that most things in life aren’t easily explained.
I’m also reading Craft in the Real World now, and I love the part about the significance of oneness and Buddhist philosophy in Chinese narrative that “nothing is separate or individual from anything else.” This idea of interconnectedness is so ingrained in me, because of how I was raised, and I can see how that informs the way I wrote this book too.
I was really struck by the structure of your novel, which is organized around these beautiful jewel-like sections surrounded by a lot of space—can you talk a bit about how you came to this structure?
I was doing my MFA at the School of Visual Arts the first time I wrote a vignette in this style. I thought, “What am I going to do with this?” So I recorded the text as voice-over and turned it into a video art project. I really liked the feeling of writing these short, self-contained pieces that had a kind of circular quality, so I wrote more. Because I was turning them into videos, I was aware of the sound and rhythm of the words and the pauses between sentences. And because of my background as a painter, I wanted the vignettes to look beautiful on the page. I liked how they looked when each one got its own page, even though nobody else was looking at them because I was turning them into sound.
When I had about twenty pages, I showed them to the writer Holly Tavel, who taught an intro to fiction class I took back in college. She’s the one who encouraged me to expand those twenty pages into a book.
And what was the journey from those first twenty pages to now?
In the beginning I expanded the manuscript into a 15,000word novella centering on the father-daughter story line and submitted it to small presses. After it got rejected from more than twenty places, I thought maybe it would never get published. So I started a new project about three generations of women in a family. Shortly after, I was accepted into the Margins Fellowship at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop [AAWW], which gave me confidence to try again, and I decided to combine the two projects into one. Around this time I noticed that most novels written in fragments that were getting published had a faster quality, usually with shorter paragraphs and asterisks running between, so I tried to reformat my book in this way and tripled the length of the manuscript, hoping this would help my chances of publishing the book.
As part of my fellowship, I got to take a writing workshop at AAWW, and lucky for me, my editor, Nicole Counts, was in this class. She’s been my champion ever since.
Hurrah! And how did the book change in the editing process?
The first decision I made after we sold the book was to revert the format back to having each vignette on its own page with lots of space around it, because I knew my editor had my back, and I knew this was my one chance to publish the book the way I originally wanted: with a slow and spacious quality. I realized that when I had reshaped the book in a way that I thought would help get it published, I’d lost qualities in my voice that were important to me.
After I cut it down and rearranged it back into the sequence I started with in 2014, the bulk of the editing process involved my editor pushing me to write new vignettes. At first this was really hard because I thought that we were just going to refine what I had already written, not write so many new vignettes. I’m so grateful to my editor for challenging me, because it was during this time that I wrote many of the more lighthearted chapters. Once I surrendered to the idea, it was in the editing stage that I really connected to a sense of play.