If Torrey Peters Wasn’t a Writer, She Would Build Saunas (and Other Literary Morsels)

Torrey Peters’s novel, Stag Dance, is available now from Random House, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, alternate careers, and more.

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Which of your characters is your favorite?

The Babe in Stag Dance is my favorite character. I used to think it was really annoying when writers would talk about how “a character just spoke to them.” I was sort of from the Nabokov school of writing, where I thought you could push your characters around like pawns—you could make them do anything, so long as that move was possible on the chessboard.

But then the Babe kind of did come to me as a voice, and I really felt him, more than I thought him, even as I was struggling to put him into words. It was a pretty wild experience, and I hope that comes through in the book—there are so many things that he said, that honestly, I wouldn’t have otherwise said. Stuff like, in place of the word “dysphoria” or something like that which I might have used, “no mirror has ever befriended me.”

Where did that come from?

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What was the first book you fell in love with?

Brideshead Revisited. I just related so hard to the relationship between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder—a relationship that they themselves didn’t seem to recognize as queer, and which I didn’t either, but which just felt so compelling to me.

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Name a classic you feel guilty about never having read?

Wuthering Heights. There is just no excuse for it. I shouldn’t even admit it here. But I promise, I will read it this year!

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What’s a book you recommend to other writers?

T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through. That book is just its own thing. Actually everything that T. writes reads as though they had just reinvented writing.

And I think that’s something that it’s nice to be reminded of as a writer. The words on a page can come any which way, and so long as they move you—emotionally, intellectually—there’s no end to the forms they can take.

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If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

I would be a sauna builder. I am obsessed with sauna these days. Such a pleasure! I built my first sauna the past year or two. An off-grid wood-fired sauna in the woods in Vermont. It is some of the most satisfying work I have ever done!

And honestly, building a sauna felt to me a lot like writing. You make a slight choice early on, and then you see it for the rest of the build. I decided to make really big eaves, for instance, and the whole rest of the build I was compensating and accounting for that choice. Which is also often what happens when I make certain choices with a character—it shapes the rest of the book, for good or ill, as I layer more and more on that choice.

But unlike writing—I found the building of a sauna in the woods deeply peaceful and generally forward moving, whereas for me, writing is a much more emotionally chaotic experience and jerky in the sense of progress.

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Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is available via Random House.