Tag Archives: Arts Based Research

When Life Hands You Lemons, Write a Journal Article: An Exploration into Navigating Trauma as a Academic

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In this post, a researcher studying the experiences of, reactions to, and management of trauma reflects on the ways these topics intertwine in their life and work over time. 

 

It was my turn to visit you. I canceled the day before and said finals were killing me. You said you would see me next time. Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

This phrase rang through my head abruptly at 4:21 a.m. on a breezy, Wednesday morning in April. I can’t sleep. I can’t hold down my food. My thoughts are scattered. I need to sleep. I have a paper – which I haven’t started yet – and a presentation I have to finish by tomorrow. I have to maintain the “front stage” I cultivated over the years. It’s the role I feel like I have to play. Good thing I am comparing Goffman’s “presentation of the self” to other theoretical concepts in this paper – that I haven’t started on. Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I shut everything off? Unfortunately, trauma management and recovery both fail to function in that regard.

They said your death was a freak accident. It was raining. There was ice. You all were in a hurry to go shopping. I would have taken my time. I drive so slow now that everyone passes me. I recently went shopping like we used to. I didn’t buy anything. Only watched the people there. I haven’t done that in years since you dragged me in that fancy Macy’s.

There is no on or off switch for trauma. Just flickering lights. The kind you see at an abandoned warehouse filled with empty crates. I am feeling like an empty crate. I do have the capability to hold heavy cargo, but my trauma memories stop the assembly line of my mind from growing and thriving as full human feelings. For me, it always starts at the end of a semester. The sharp pain in my stomach. The cold, night sweats. The high-pitched screaming. The flashbacks. Seeing your hands reaching out for help in my dreams. For some reason, I was pushing away from you. I can’t count the number of people I pushed away since your death. Your face covered in blood. It’s not every day your best friend passes away, days before you were supposed to visit. It’s not every day you get a phone call with that horrific news, while you are sobbing for hours late at night along a surprisingly calm river outside of a run-down apartment.

I recently went back to that river to reprocess my trauma with the support of a close friend. I stood in the exact same spot for 20 minutes on the dot. I couldn’t cry at first. Frustrated, I went back into the car where my friend was staring at me. Just watching me. Like they had the nerve to stare at me after all that effort I put into processing trauma. All of sudden, the floodgates opened in my eyes and I found myself sobbing in their lap while drowning in their t-shirt with my salty tears. That trigger unexpectedly became the beginning point of my trauma recovery.

We always took the back roads because you knew all the shortcuts. I heard later that your driver was going 80 mph. There are tons of potholes I recall. I almost killed myself and someone else while driving on those back roads. You told me not to scare you again. I apologized. Every day, I wish I would have driven that night.  

Trauma recovery is brutally and painfully messy. There is no one-size-fits-all framework in managing trauma or even studying trauma. Literature on trauma is limited, especially trauma research aside from PTSD treatment and veterans. I remember one week where I spent 15 hours in the library trying to educate myself on trauma management and recovery. I quickly became frustrated with the substantial gaps in the literature, so I attempted to find trauma researchers other disciplines. I only found one university with a doctoral program that had two faculty members who were considered to be trauma researchers. Since we all seem to have some variation of big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ traumas, how is this possible? Trauma has been normalized throughout American media and culture from the trauma of gun violence to the trauma of rape and sexual assault. However, the literature is limited. So how can we grow the body of trauma research and scholarship?

Everyone apparently asked you where I was the night before you died. You told them not to worry and that I was coming home soon.

We start by studying vulnerable populations that have been previously ignored in trauma research, alongside researched populations. For example, we could study the experiences of transgender and non-binary folks. Specifically, what about the issues transwomen and transwomen of color face managing trauma? We could also study other populations who consistently face traumatic events, like racial and ethnic minority populations, sexual minority populations, people of low socioeconomic status, rape survivors, people with chronic illnesses, and people with disabilities. By expanding our array of knowledge on diverse populations outside of traditional trauma narratives, such as veterans and military personnel with PTSD, we can then start to understand how trauma operates on a broader level.

The definition of trauma also must be unrestrained and inclusive, since individuals have a wide range of responses to traumatic experiences. Less noticeable responses do not equate to a given circumstance being less traumatic. We all develop and process trauma in very distinctive ways. Researchers must capture the full fluidity of trauma by understanding trauma survivors through their experiences and daily management.

Strangers kept hugging me at your funeral and told me how great you were. I already knew this.

I am not a trauma expert by any means. But I am a trauma survivor. Much like others before me. I have heard numerous stories of students, faculty, and other academics over the years discuss how their trauma has influenced their research and careers. To my understanding, this desire to fully understand one’s self through emotionally-based research can be both healing and therapeutic throughout the trauma recovery process.

I started writing and opening myself up again. I am now forming intimate and meaningful relationships with those who are supportive in my healing. I began to see my passion for this limited area of literature blossom and flourish. Walls keep crashing down around me as I recover. Somehow, I managed to finish that paper on time, while rocking my presentation. Researching trauma is weirdly comforting for me. I actually decided that night when I broke down, if life hands me lemons, then I will write a journal article. I know I won’t get any sleep tonight. I know today will be hard. But I now know I’m not alone anymore through research and sharing experiences with others.

Creating Homecoming Queens – a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story

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In this post, J. Sumerau reflects on the process of composing and publishing Homecoming Queens, a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story set in the south and based on their experiences as a bi+ poly trans person and researcher collecting stories of other sexual and gender minorities throughout the past couple decades.

Earlier this month, my third novel and second book in the Social Fictions Series of sociological based novels – Homecoming Queens – was officially released. The novel is a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with sexual and gender minorities throughout the southeast I’ve collected over the past couple decades as, first, a curious bi+ trans and poly kid and later, as a researcher focused on sexualities, gender, religion, and health in the lives of sexual, gender, and religious minorities. In this post, I elaborate on the background and creation of the novel after doing so with Cigarettes & Wine, my first research based novel, has been useful both for readers interested in my work and fellow teachers using my stories to teach sexualities, sociology, gender, LGBTQIA studies, and Southern studies in classrooms to date. For more information about the novel or to purchase it, see here.

Background

Like many aspiring novelists I have met in my life, I dreamed of writing the next great American novel around the same time I was finishing college a decade ago. The seeds for Homecoming Queens emerged in early failed attempts to do this back then, and in fact, the scene in the diner between four of the main characters near the end of the book comes from an experience between four people I witnessed – including being in the diner scene of real life I recreated in the novel – over a decade ago. Like many other writers across genres, I have my favorites, and the southern gothic traditions of the likes of Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner have always spoken to me via the use of real world complexities, the ways the past shapes and becomes active in the present, and the fine lines between the darkest and brightest moments of love, pain, and life itself. Homecoming Queens began as an entire handwritten journal in 2007 wherein I sought to translate small town life in Georgia through the eyes of a brilliant, older African American neighbor I had who told me so many stories about the world at the time in what was, in hindsight, a poor attempt at writing like other southern gothic writers – especially Toni Morrison – I worshiped then and now without the skills to do it myself in my own voice at the time. It was a learning experience that got put in the background of so many other failed novel attempts in my life at the time.

Fast forward to the year 2016, and the completion of my first novel, Cigarettes & Wine, and I found myself thirsty for trying to write more novels without any clue if I could do that well or publish the first one. I was celebrating the legalization of my primary life partnership, and began asking about the idea of Homecoming Queens in conversations with my spouse and my best friend. For some reason I still can’t explain though I’m beginning to agree with now, neither of them had any questions or doubts about my ability to write more novels, and both thought I should try it out since I had just resurrected my first novel from an earlier failed attempt in college and was well enough situated in academic and public writing credits to have the time and space to commit some time to fictional endeavors without other parts of my career falling behind. This led to priceless patience on both of their parts as I talked and ran through scenarios and data I had for the next novel relentlessly on late night walks, phone conversations, and over lunches and dinners for a while. I was more than a little fixated and obsessed in hindsight, and I was lucky enough that they were okay with that and supportive of it at the same time.

I was also repeatedly listening to the newest album by one of my favorite – and in my opinion, one of the most talented ever – songwriters. The entire album, Brandy Clark’s Big Day in a Small Town, was about small town adventures and experiences with a mixture of humor and heart. I kept coming back to the song “Homecoming Queen” and the memory of the former homecoming queen friend who moved back to her small town with her two spouses, and things that happened to them, good, bad and in between, in the process. I also kept talking about this one story, and how it related to so many other stories from my own life and the lives of others I had spoken to in the south with my patient supporters. I also thought about what it would look like to illustrate my own primary romantic relationship structure in terms of how it worked, how our rules were set up for each of us to always get what we want together and individually, and how other mono, poly, and fluid (sometimes mono, sometimes poly) unions operated. Finally, I started thinking about both how many things from the past are prevalent in the nation today, and my experiences (on both sides of mentor / mentee relationships over time now) of the different ways trans and other queer kids find community, support, rejection, and / or struggle in the world as they try to be themselves. These were the threads that I would weave together to create the novel.

Data and Methods

I began crafting character profiles and a small town that could be any southern small town, and looking at all these things as homecomings of a sort that happen in between the various connections and disconnections we each experience throughout our lives. I followed the same process I do in many qualitative and quantitative studies and outlined in relation to Cigarettes & Wine in a previous blog post. The data points from real people’s lives and stories – and my own lives and stories to date – became the ingredients for the town, the characters, the conflicts, the tensions, and the narrative arcs of the story itself. Even more than in Cigarettes & Wine – or my independently published novel Essence – I crafted a tale that could be anyone or anywhere in the places I have seen, lived in, and visited in the south over the years, and created a story where, as friends have said about each of my books, I was both everywhere and nowhere in the book at the same time. As I’ve done in other works, maybe it’s the researcher inside me, I once again also only used events and experiences that had happened to a wide variety of people in different ways, at different times, and in different settings to capture an overall set of common – or as we say in scholarship, generic – experiences anyone could potentially relate to, experience, or know of in the lives of other people to demonstrate both possibilities and probabilities in the world.

Results

As I’ve noted with the first two novels in conversations individually, in classrooms or at conferences where I’ve been invited to talk about such things, or otherwise, I do not believe it is ever up to the writer to gauge the results of the composition. I feel the same way – as many people know from other speeches related to my academic, journalistic, public, and other writing – about everything I write. It is up to the audience to decide what the book means in terms of messages, merits, and ideas, and I leave it up to audiences to figure such things out. I know what I sought to do. I sought to, as always, offer a realistic portrait of some of the many ways – good, bad, and everywhere in between – queer life takes place in the south, thrives and continues in the face of support and opposition, and speaks to broader norms and patterns in cultural notions of sexualities, romance, gender, family, history, relationships, and lives. I don’t know or want to decide what others will think of the work, but I feel confident that I accomplished what I wanted to do with the book and early responses to it (both good and bad) have suggested as much.

Instead of trying to ascertain any concrete result or metric, when I think about Homecoming Queens as a now published work available for purchase by anyone, I think about the stories that have and continue to inspire me, that others have kindly shared with me so many times over the past couple decades, that resonate with me in cases of both similarity and difference, and that speak to a much wider, more complex, and more varied Queer existence then I can usually find in academic or mainstream media portraits and publications.

If those last couple of lines sound familiar, it is because they are copied directly from my thoughts on Cigarettes & Wine right as it was published, and you could continue down that set of paragraphs in that blog with Homecoming Queens as well because, for me, the goal is the same. For me, these stories I write – like any other research or art or writing that blurs (or Queers) such distinctions – is about the same thing, revealing the beauty, complexity, pleasure, pain, and wonder of Queer experience in its many forms, places, and continuations for as many of us and as many others as possible in ways people can relate to, think about, and consider as they navigate the complexity and possibility of the world in their own lives and their treatment of others they may encounter.

My Latest Writing Adventure

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In this post, J discusses the creation of a new series of independently published novels exploring Queerness in south, and the attempt to create the stories people in marginalized groups too often only get to wish we could have read about our own lives. 

I have been a devoted reader and fan of Toni Morrison for as long as I can remember. For me, the many ways she has found to capture the raw, passionate realities of the world, the good the bad and everything in between, and the complexities and nuances of racial, gendered, classed, sexual, and regional experiences are beyond comparison.  Her work is both an inspiration and a level I cannot even imagine myself or anyone else actually reaching.  I almost never write anything without thinking about one or another of her works, and I regularly re-read works of hers between my own fictional and non-fictional writing bursts.

After publishing my first novel about Queer coming of age in the south based on a combination of personal experiences and hundreds of informal and formal interviews with Queer people in the south over the past 20 years, I found myself continually thinking about one of the many brilliant things she has said and written in her life: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Without thinking about it consciously, I have been following this advice throughout my career.  As a researcher and teacher, most of my work to date involves incorporating Queer, Bi+, Trans, Non-binary, Poly, and Agnostic experiences and perspectives into existing scientific theory, research, and education as well as directing students to vibrant LGBTQIAP, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Cisgender Women’s literatures, sciences, histories, and arts.  Though I never thought of it in such terms until reading this quote a couple years ago, in all such cases, I have sought to write and teach things missing from my own upbringing and education that, after finding them on my own and with the help of wonderful mentors, I think should be more well known, recognized, and represented in scientific and educational settings and contexts.  While I spent much time with these thoughts a couple years ago, they really came back to me in an even more personal way as I began to craft fiction for the first time since failed attempts in my twenties, and only intensified when I published my first novel.

I kept remembering the younger version of me searching for myself and the other Queer people I knew/found in the south in media, in literature, in music, hell anywhere.  I (much faster than I would have guessed) received a couple emails from other young people who felt the same way, and appreciated finding my novel.  I spoke with other Bi+, Trans, Non-binary, Poly, and otherwise Queer authors about the limited media, literature, and other representative options even now, and with people in these groups who wished for these stories though they themselves were not in the process of writing them as they felt called to other types of work.  I spoke with Lesbian, Gay, Black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim, and Cisgender Women friends and colleagues who experienced similar feelings growing up, who were seeking to create more representations of their lives in science and art, and who wanted such things whether or not they had any intention of creating them.  From the moment I delivered my manuscript to a couple months after its release, I kept having these conversations and thinking about my own feelings back then and now.

And, I kept returning to Morrison’s words: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

I looked at the novels I had completed, edited, and put together.  I kept digging through them as I prepared the novel for release without even thinking about it, and kept doing so after the release wondering what to do (if anything) with them.  Some of them were already in various stages of review and consideration at traditional publishing outlets, but others were unconventional in some way – in length, style, or other facets – and I wasn’t sure what to do with them.  I remembered the many paperbacks and zines I read when I was younger by Lesbian Women and Black people that self-published their work to get it out to others.  I thought about the number of people I’d met of various backgrounds who were self-publishing novels, comics, video series, music, and other things even more easily due to the available platforms today.  I collected every bit of information I could on all the platforms and options, and gathered incredibly useful positive, negative, and everywhere in between advice from colleagues and friends.  After thinking through every possible positive and negative, I decided to create a series of self-published works alongside my more traditional scholarly and fictional publishing.

This series of events led to the announcement on my social media accounts last week that I will be launching my own self-published series of fictional works entitled the Queering Dixie Series.  Each of these novels will explore some aspect of Bi+, Trans, Non-binary, Lesbian, Gay, Intersex, Asexual, Poly, Aromantic, or otherwise Queer experience that I have seen, experienced or learned about from others in the south over the past 20 years.  Each work will focus on different characters and stories, but there will often be overlap between the stories as they all take place within the same fictional world that I created based on my experiences growing up, working, and living in the south throughout my life to date.  While they will all be entirely fictional stories, each one will offer snapshots of real experiences various types of Queer people have had in the south over time, and issues Queer people in the south faced and / or still face in the process.

Like Cigarettes & Wine, these stories and all my other novels seek to shed light on the diversity and complexity of southern Queer experience by exploring the good, the bad, and everything in between as well as the multiple ways people create and sustain Queer lives in a regional context often at the forefront of opposition to Queer existence, rights, and well-being.  In so doing, I hope that I’ll join with so many other artists and scientists to do my small part in increasing the chance that when others go looking for our stories and our lives, they may have a better chance of finding them.

Teaching Science through the Arts

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In this post, J discusses success they have had with the use of arts based research techniques and the teaching of science via artistic representations.  

For as long as I have memory, I’ve always been captivated by music and stories.  While many of my tastes have shifted and changed throughout my life, one constant has been an insatiable desire for collecting and creating music, stories, and musical stories in every way I can and from as wide a variety of sources as I possibly can.  As I’ve written before on the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction music blog, these interests often find voice in my research and teaching.  In my research, for example, I seek to integrate the stories of respondents into scientific and public discourses related to social inequalities, movements, and developments.  Similarly, I often use the stories of others – and my own – as well as countless musical examples to introduce students to the diversity of contemporary experiences, the methods whereby arts capture broader social patterns whether we notice or not at the time, and the ways the arts often provide the only voice for populations marginalized in religious, scientific, and / or political traditions at a given time or place.

While I have long utilized arts – especially stories and music based – to teach and enhance my research, it wasn’t until the last year that I came into contact with a broader pedagogical and methodological tradition and community of scholars engaging in similar works.  Arts based research, as its often called, is a research and teaching tradition that seeks to bring scientific insights to broader audiences and bridge gaps between varied ways of knowing by utilizing artistic mediums to convey scientific findings to audiences of varied sorts.  As Dr. Patricia Leavy notes in Method Meets Art, this type of work seeks to translate data, findings, and complex theoretical debates into more readily and easily accessible conversations for students, colleagues, and broader audiences who would benefit from such knowledge, but may not be as well versed in the technical or official languages of peer reviewed journal articles and texts.  Further, as Dr. Nowakowski and I have noted in previous publications drawing on teaching evaluation studies and experiments by others, the translation of data into stories and other narrative forms often increases student and public engagement with materials and allows potential learners to personalize important findings and theories in ways that make them salient in their lives beyond classrooms.

It was with these approaches in mind that I began utilizing artistic works in my classes as a way for students to apply theories and methods from journal articles to examples they might face in their own lives.  For example, I utilize offerings from the Social Fictions Series to translate social scientific concepts and issues into opportunities for students to engage with and consider the ways such things play out in their own lives.  When discussing class dynamics, for example, I may have students look at American Circumstance and other novels exploring class dynamics in the lives of characters from the same socio-demographic backgrounds as my students.  Similarly, when discussing social justice and things students might do if they are interested in promoting justice in society, I may have them run through one of the plays in ReView or other anthologies of such work to think about planning, strategy, and the reactions of others to such endeavors.  Further, in recent months I’ve begun incorporating poems, songs, and stories colleagues of mine have composed about specific social events and movements as well as publishing my own first research based novel – Cigarettes & Wine – concerning Queer experience in the south.  In all these and more cases, my incorporation of more artistic representations of data, findings, and theories has in each case facilitated even more student engagement, student discussion, and student investment than other methods I’ve attempted over the years, and in many cases, students have returned long after such class meetings to further discuss the works and talk about sharing these works with friends and families who – in many cases – never took much interest in the purely academic materials from the classes.

These experiences have led me to think more and more about the utility of arts based research and the teaching of science through the arts – especially in a social context wherein narratives and stories often carry more weight among many population groups than any raw data seems to be able to.  As such, I wanted to use this space today simply to encourage others to think about the possibilities of arts based research within and beyond classrooms, and the ways such efforts might enhance attempts to engage and motivate students concerning complex and often socially and politically important topics in our world today.

Creating Cigarettes & Wine – a southern bisexual and non-binary coming of age story

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In this post, J. Sumerau reflects on the process of outlining, composing, and publishing Cigarettes & Wine, a southern bisexual and non-binary coming of age story set in the 1990’s and based on zir experiences as a bisexual non-binary person and researcher collecting stories of other sexual and gender minorities over the past couple decades. 

Yesterday, my first novel – Cigarettes & Wine – was officially released.  The novel is a southern bisexual and non-binary coming of age story set in the 1990’s based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with sexual and gender minorities throughout the southeast I’ve collected over the past couple decades as, first, a curious bisexual and non-binary kid and later, as a researcher focused on sexualities, gender, religion, and health in the lives of sexual, gender, and religious minorities.  In this post, I elaborate on the background and creation of the novel after many colleagues and friends have asked about its origins over the past few months.  For more information about the novel or to purchase it, see here.

Background

I was sitting in a hotel lobby with a colleague I deeply admire and appreciate.  We were talking about all kinds of things related to life, relationships, research, activism, teaching, and the world, and my colleague asked a question about the novels I completed in the preceding months.  The topic was especially relevant at the time since I had just submitted my first novel – Cigarettes & Wine – for consideration for the Social Fictions book series, and since my colleague had done me the favor of being the first person outside my little chosen family / inner circle to read the drafts of the first two novels I had composed.  My colleague’s interest and support and feedback on Cigarettes & Wine at the time was and remains invaluable, but I also enjoyed just how hard I laughed when my colleague asked, “So, this was so real, I gotta know, is this you, your life, it is, isn’t it?”

I laughed because though I had not thought much about it at the time, I understood the question.  The narrator of the novel is a non-binary, bisexual raised in a small town in South Carolina.  So am I.  The novel is set in the same geographic area where I grew up, and in a fictional town similar to the one that I grew up in.  The events in the novel are all things that – both from my personal experiences, from interviews I’ve done over the years, and from a lot of the people who read drafts along the way – have happened to people and / or are familiar to people, and thus, they are real events.  The novel is also written in first person more like a diary of sorts.  I laughed because it was a reasonable conclusion that I could understand, but not one I thought much about while writing the book.  I laughed because my colleague was incorrect, but not entirely incorrect.

My colleague was incorrect because the novel is entirely fictional – none of the characters in the novel are actual people and none of them are me.  Each one of them are composites of many people I have met, observed, interviewed, had relationships with, and otherwise encountered throughout my life.  Desperate for information on and experiences of bisexual (across the spectrum), transgender (across the spectrum), and poly (across the spectrum) people like me, and for even more information on lesbian, gay, asexual, intersex, kink, aromantic, and otherwise Queer people I admired, I began collecting the stories of everyone I could meet when I was a teenager.  Like the narrator, I would fill up journals with fictional versions of my own life (i.e., how it might be in other contexts) and fill journals up even further with all these stories of sexual and gender diverse experience, lives, and realities that were hidden just out of sight all around me.  Later in life, this actually ended up being incredibly useful training for life as an ethnographic, autoethnographic, content analysis, and interview-based researcher, and to this day, twenty years later, I still collect these stories every chance I get though now I do it both professionally and in my personal time.  My colleague was incorrect because the novel is not a retelling of my own story on its own, but rather, it’s more like a mix tape created by integrating the stories of hundreds of sexual and gender diverse / Queer people I have been lucky enough to meet, learn from, and become inspired by over the years.

At the same time, my colleague was not entirely incorrect.  While I do not exist in full in any of the characters or events, some of the events in the book are ones that I experienced as well.  Similarly, I remember very well living two distinct, separate lives as a younger person wherein almost all my straight friends and most of my family had no clue (to my knowledge, though I learned last year I was wrong in at least one case) about half of my life, and wherein my Queer friends knew more about the rest of my life but were never part of interactions I had with the straight, cis, mono world at the time (except secretly on rare occasions).  Further, there are little pieces of my personality, experience, and feelings as a teenager scattered throughout the book (i.e., a joke I like here, a place I hung out there, a conversation I had with someone here, emotions I felt in a tough or wonderful moment there, etc.), and in each of the main characters in the novel.  As someone very close to me put it after reading an early draft of the novel, “You’re everywhere and nowhere in this story.”  Put another way, the story is a mix tape of so many people’s stories, lives, experiences, and emotions, but I show up along the way as the curator of the collection hidden or embedded in this or that character or moment.

All these thoughts went running through my head as I sat in the hotel lobby with my colleague.  When I finished laughing, I simply said, “No, it’s not my story or the story of me, but it is one of what are likely millions of possible stories of people like me or like us.”  My colleague smiled, and asked what I meant.  I said, “Well, I basically took all the stories of people like us – mine and yours included – and put them together the best I could into a collective narrative illustrated through the lives of a group of kids in the 1990’s.”  My colleague laughed, and simply said, “How did you do that?”

Data and Methods

Integrating a wide variety of experiences is not easy, but luckily, it is what I do for a living as a researcher collecting and analyzing data sets of various sizes.  I began writing the stories that would become Cigarettes & Wine in my twenties, but I failed over and over again to accomplish whatever I wanted at the time (I’m still not sure).  I tried to write my own story, but I was never as good at that since I found other people more fascinating.  I tried to write it as a mix tape like I finally did last year, but I don’t think I had the skill set for that kind of writing before years of doing research for a living.  I tried to write it as a collection of disconnected journal entries from various people across the south, but it never seemed to work or flow well.  I gave up on it and pushed it aside when I got the chance to go to graduate school and try to develop a career as a scholar, researcher, activist, and teacher.  For eight years, while I published research, it sat there, a forgotten dream in the back of my mind.

When I decided to try it again last year with the support and encouragement of my life partner and best friend and after so many students suggested I should write a novel about all the stories I’d collected over the years, I approached the book as a research study and the stories I collected over the years – as well as my own experiences – as data for analysis.  Though I was only beginning to learn about it at the time, this approach is actually a rather common one in arts based research movements and traditions.  Despite the fact that, like the narrator in the story, I generally destroy my journals when I’m done with them because for some reason that feels good to me and they’re all made up fictional versions of life anyhow, I kept so many of the stories I collected from other people over the years and so I began to start reading back through them and thinking about remembering other ones and thinking about and making notes on my own experiences and those of other people.  Like I do with research papers, I began looking for patterns in the stories, and setting aside things that multiple people had experienced, dealt with, witnessed, or otherwise felt or known as part of their lives.  From this approach, I came up with a list of common events and experiences that appeared repeatedly in stories from people of varied sexualities, genders, locations in the south, religious backgrounds, family backgrounds, races, and other social characteristics.

Armed with these events as an outline for a narrative, I began creating characters based on integrating aspects of real people (say five or ten different people) into one whole character with thoughts, hopes, loves, fears, dreams, and personality quirks.  Although they changed a lot by the end of the composition process, these character profiles allowed me to start narrating the events that were common in the stories.  I initially tried telling the story from two other characters’ points of view before I finally got it to work with the narrator in the published version.  I also initially started telling a story that spanned from the 1990’s to now, but this proved to be way too much ground to cover so instead I broke it up into two and then three outlined novels (the second is now composed and the third is in progress of composition at present).  Once I had these raw materials (as I call them when I write research papers), I was ready to write the first rough draft of the story.

In the end, I wanted to accomplish three things with Cigarettes & Wine.  First, I wanted a bisexual and non-binary focused story after spending so many years wishing I could find one – much less one set in the world I grew up in – as a kid.  Second, I wanted a story where almost all of the character were Queer in one way or another and in different ways to illustrate the diversity of the amazing people I’ve met over the years who identify and live in so many different ways within the various umbrella terms we use.  Third and finally, I wanted a real story that captured experiences of Queerness in the south, and as a result, I only used events in the novel that showed up in multiple people’s lives over the years and explicitly sought to capture beautiful and ugly, wonderful and terrible things that Queer people experience in our world.

Results

Whether I’m thinking about my journalism, my blogging, my research publications, my short stories, or any other kinds of writing I have done over the years, I tend to agree with the perspective that only audiences can judge the results of a given work.  Personally, I feel like I accomplished the three things I set out to do with this novel, but now that it’s out, I believe that it will be up to readers to figure such things out.

Thinking about the responses and feedback of the people who were kind enough to do me the priceless favor of reading drafts of this work before now, I feel happy with the novel and I look forward to whatever comes next.  There were some that fully praised the work, and others who did not like it much at all.  There were some who thought it was too positive considering LGBTQIAP politics in America at present, and others who thought it was too negative in relation to the same.  There were some who thought the novel should have ended five chapters or so earlier, and others who thought it should have gone on for a few more chapters to offer more detail, resolution, or other bits of wrapping up.  For me, the fact that the reactions have spanned a diversity of opinions even among the relatively small pool of readers thus far suggests I may have got what I wanted – a real, complex portrait of the good, bad, and everywhere in between Queer people in the south experience.  I don’t know if this is correct or how others will interpret the work, but I’m happy with it and that counts for something in my mind.

Instead of trying to ascertain any concrete result or metric, when I think about Cigarettes & Wine as a now published work available for purchase by anyone, I think about the stories that have and continue to inspire me, that others have kindly shared with me so many times over the past couple decades, that resonate with me in cases of both similarity and difference, and that speak to a much wider, more complex, and more varied Queer existence then I can usually find in academic or mainstream media portraits and publications.

I think about talking with people in different states about things like burner phones, secret notes and mixtapes, and stolen kisses in the shadows where no one would see alongside so many other ways people found / find to live their Queerness in spaces that try to erase it from possible options.  I think about laughing with people of different races, ages, sexualities, and genders about awkward and sweet and sometimes scary moments when we first learned this term, that sexual practice, this type of toy or other material, or that type of intimacy.  I think about listening to stories about first loves who are still together – sometimes openly now and sometimes still secretive for many reasons – 30 years later, first loves that died way too soon, first loves that fizzled for any of a million reasons, first loves who were “such a mistake” and others who were “exactly what I needed.”  I think about violence that was explicitly directed at people for being sexual or gender diverse / Queer, violence that was simply tied to living in the south where guns and fights and poverty are often so visible and normal, violence that people heard about that shifted the ways they lived or felt in the moment, and violence that people were grateful for avoiding even when some felt guilty that they avoided it when others could not.  I think about discussions of accidents related to coming out or being outed by others, related to four wheelers, related to the friend who died when a gun went off or when the three wheeler flipped in the field, related to cars on highways and alcohol from plastic cups, related to lack of sexual education, and all kinds of other accidents that occurred as people tried to figure out who they were and tried to figure out how to manage rural and small town cultures.  I think about the conversations about the beauty of religion alongside the horror of religion alongside the fear and shame of religion alongside the liberation of religion depending on what religion, what location, and whether or not one’s Queerness was known to the religious.  I think about the conversations about hateful families alongside the conversations about supportive families alongside the conversations about chosen families.  I think about the conversations with so many more people who are out and open and relatively safe nowadays alongside the conversations with so many more who are still in hiding for one of a million understandable reasons who may or may not ever want to or be able to come out and live openly.

I think about all these stories and so many more, and for me, that’s what the book is about.  For me, Cigarettes & Wine is simply the first of a series of novels I am writing seeking to honor, celebrate, mourn, and embrace all the different forms and experiences of sexual and gender Queerness I’ve seen in my travels throughout the south.  For me, it is an attempt to share the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, and in short, the complex wonder of the many different ways sexual and gender diversity play out and survive and even thrive even in places – like the Deep South – where we don’t often expect it or see it as openly displayed.  For me, it is also an attempt to say to Queer people in the south – and especially the bi and trans and poly folk like me who rarely see ourselves in even LGBT academic and mainstream media coverage – that you are not alone, that there is at least as much beauty as however much pain you might be facing, that the pain you may face is real and not your fault, that the beauty and wonder you find in you and your friends and lovers is also real and worth celebrating and fighting for, and that in the both the best and worst moments of your life you are part of a much larger population, story, and tradition that has and will continue to survive and fight with and for you.