Finding and Refinding Stories

How do you balance your work as a psychoanalyst with writing, and do the two ever inform each other?

I’ve always found that the two professions—or maybe vocations—go well together. Both require calling deeply upon one’s intellectual and emotional capacities, especially empathy (for patients and, in the case of fiction writing, for characters; as well as for oneself as the writer). Both are also a project of narrativizing. In writing and psychoanalysis, we’re trying to find (and refind) our stories. 

In analysis, a story is co-constructed between analyst and patient, and it changes over time. In writing, it’s largely a solo effort and the story becomes fixed once the text goes to print—or does it? In both cases, the story can always be re-interpreted over the years. After an analysis terminates, the relationship continues, mostly for the patient, who has internalized the analyst and takes the conversation with them, but also for the analyst. There are scenes from my patients and their lives that remain with me. Years later, I can still see the interiors of their childhood homes as I imagined them. This is maybe similar to what happens after reading a novel. When it’s done, I won’t remember every character or the whole plot, but something always lodges inside and lingers, waiting to unfold again. 

My desire to make sense of people—why we do what we do and how we do it—has driven me to both vocations. I balance the two by splitting my time. I generally don’t write on the days I see patients and I don’t see patients on the days I write. I think of these two parts of myself as occupying different self-states, or modes of being, and these two modes tend not to interfere with each other.

You’re well known for your blog and book Vanishing New York, as well as Feral City, both written under the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss. You’ve also written poetry. What is it like to work between these different genres, and even identities? Are people ever surprised to learn you are both Jeremiah and Griffin?

It’s a lot like those different self-states I described. I think often in terms of parts and the multiplicity of self. We are, none of us, singular, unified beings. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said, and we contradict ourselves. This is true and yet most of us live in cultures that reject the idea of multiplicity of self. We tend to box ourselves, and each other, into fixed roles and identities. When someone changes, or expresses a part that doesn’t seem to fit the general idea of who they are, the people around them can become resistant to that shift. I find there’s a lot of rigidity around how attached we get to our own and other’s identities. We want people to stay the same, mostly, to remain legible and relatable to us. And to be consistent. To not drift away from what we know.

For me, I guess I need multiple genres and names to express what I need to express. A pen name can be liberating. If I could pull it off, I’d have multiple pseudonyms. I think there’s probably something trans/queer in all of this, the way that trans/queerness, even when it seems to hew to the binary, nonetheless moves in fields of multiplicity. 

What inspired you to write Some Strange Music Draws Me In? 

The novel was inspired by a real-life experience I had when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, living in my small working-class town, when a trans woman appeared and I became seized by a wish to know her. I saw her just once, outside the post office, much the way I recount the scene in the novel. And I did go looking for her on my bike. But, unlike Mel in the book, I never found her. So I ask the classic “what if” question. What if a kid like me had found that woman and what if she was the coolest thing in that town? Where might that take a young queer kid? What worlds might open? The book was a way for me to explore a story that I never got to live. 

Do you feel that there is a gap in the publishing world when it comes to queer and trans stories that your book helps fill? What has the response been from readers? 

There is definitely a gap, especially when it comes to fiction by trans writers and, even more so, work by transmasculine writers. I think often about the cisgender gaze and what it desires (and demands) from trans creators. We are expected to limit ourselves mostly to writing memoirs, and those memoirs are expected to be transition stories, and those transition stories are expected to proceed as follows: I was miserable, I transitioned, and now I’m happy. My novel resists that. It completely skips the transition story and Max, post-transition, is not a happy person. Who is happy? It’s an unrealistic pressure to expect trans people (or anyone) to be happy, especially when the predominant idea of happiness is based on capitalist notions of normativity. Human life is more complicated and so trans people’s stories are complicated. But we haven’t really been permitted that complexity as of yet. I’ve been told that my novel handles gender with a lot of complexity, and I imagine that can be challenging, but readers have responded very well to the book. People who read it seem to feel passionately about it—and many say it made them cry, which is just the best. 

What was the impact of Bryn Mawr on your writing and life?

I was an independent writing major at Bryn Mawr with a concentration in poetry. I had been identifying as a writer from a young age but it wasn’t until college that I had access to writing workshops and the culture and community around them.

My professors and peers at Bryn Mawr helped to build my confidence as a writer. I got so much encouragement, acknowledgement, and nurturing—with an emphasis on that famous “cussed individualism” I’d read about in the brochure. That could only have happened for me, at that time in my life, at a women’s college. 

Trans men like myself, along with our trans sisters and nonbinary siblings, have brought the concept of the women’s college into question in recent years, reshaping and expanding these spaces to be more inclusive. I don’t know how I would navigate it all if I were a young trans man today, but I’m grateful I had the privilege to be a Mawrter.  

My Bryn Mawr education was a major step in my process of upward class migration. I was a scholarship/work-study kid, and what is now called a “first-generation” student, but that wasn’t something we talked much about when I was there. When you grow up in the myth of meritocracy, it can be a real shock to land in a place where one’s fellow students have their family names on the buildings. I’m glad to see that Bryn Mawr now has a mentor program for first-generation and limited-income students. I imagine that is incredibly helpful.   

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? 

My advice is to study the craft and practice, practice, practice. You don’t know how to write when you’re starting out and that’s okay. You have to learn it and that learning can be arduous. At least, it was for me. I thought I knew how to write when I was young, but I was wrong. I knew how to be passionate and determined, and how to be fairly free on the page, but I didn’t know craft. Read everything and dissect it. Make writer friends and nurture them—they will help you when it’s time to publish. So much of this business is about social networks. 

Unless you’re one of the very few extraordinarily fortunate ones, you will be rejected. A lot. You’ll never know why you’re being rejected because no one will tell you and the vagaries of publishing are a mystery to everyone involved (agents, editors, publishers--no one knows what works or why). Don’t keep going unless you feel like you have no choice. If you can avoid writing and feel okay in life, then don’t write. But if you have no choice, then keep hammering at it, keep pushing, and keep learning. Finally, publishing a book will not heal the wounds of your childhood. So, if you are lucky enough to get a book published one day, don’t be surprised when it comes with grief and disappointment—along with the joy.