Torrey Peters on Scheming

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Torrey Peters about her new book, Stag Dance.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: One of the things I noticed in your stories was that a lot of them had a sense of scheming. There was always someone scheming, or there was a strategy going on between characters.  For instance, in Detransition, Baby, the main character, Reese, who’s a trans woman, was having this psychological game with this man that she was sleeping with when she returned these boots he bought her, and there was all of this scheming and strategy involved, and how they would end up, and the same in your short story Chaser.  First of all, it’s great for fiction. You need that for fiction. But I also wondered if as a trans person with the way that you navigate the world if you are always trying to anticipate how people are going to react, and if that’s part of what strengthened that in you, or maybe I’m wrong about that.

Torrey Peters: I think more about other trans people. That is my writing history. I did, before I transitioned, do a kind of typical path. But then after I transitioned, I got involved in this writing scene in Brooklyn that was by trans people for trans people. We were writing for each other, and that completely changed how I write. Because when you’re writing for other trans people, basically you don’t ever stop to explain yourself, because they already know.  If I was like to say something about hormones, they’d be like, This is the most boring thing in the world. So, you have to tell trans people something that they don’t know, which raises the bar on the writing, which, I kind of think everybody else gets the benefit when you raise that bar. And then also, if you’re not ever stopping to explain, you’re writing 100% story instead of slowing down to do like 70% story, 30% explanation, which nobody wants to read, whether you’re trans or not.  It’s very boring to have a story paused to be something to be explained. So, this goes back to your question in that for me, when I’m having a lot of that scheming, I’m mostly thinking about other trans people, and especially in other trans women.  That tends to be who I’m thinking about first. And so, it’d be weird, like well if someone was like, if you’re thinking about other trans people, why aren’t you writing about like, solidarity? Why aren’t you writing about how you’re all overcoming together? And not only do I find that boring, but I also don’t think it reflects how I actually live. I would say that the sort of relationship structure that’s strongest in Stag Dance, particularly, is sisterhood. And people think about sisterhood with trans women as this positive thing, but I think that sisterhood is also a very, very fraught relationship. It’s your sister who knows where you come from, so you can’t pretend that you’re something different than what you are, which is the whole point of transition. You’re transparent to your sister. Oftentimes, when you’re with a sister, you’re in a family, and there’s scant resources, so only one person gets the resources, so you’re immediately in rivalry. And the whole thing is very intimate, because you’re transparent to each other. You need each other. That’s the person whose approval you need, and that creates a climate for cruelty.  The example that you gave of do I want somebody to see me a certain way? So someone can see me wrong and I can be a little bit offended by it, or, you know, at this point I don’t really care, or they can even be rude to me, and I might be like, Well, you sound like a brute or that was brutish or brutal, but it’s not necessarily cruel, because you don’t know me well enough to be cruel to me. It’s hard for you to hurt me. Someone who’s my sister can hurt me. That’s intimate, and that’s the thing that I think I’m oftentimes pursuing in these things, is that, you know, these characters don’t always know that they’re trans or their situations are different. So, it’s not like they’re politically trans, but they recognize something in each other, and in that recognition, the possibility for cruelty arises.  And that’s something that matters to me in sort of how I think of trans people existing together in the world. And it’s also something that’s I think is extremely interesting to pursue in fiction. I like fiction that has that kind of intimacy and potential for cruelty, much more than something that’s just sort of anonymously rude.

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Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia.