Fiction

Enneaka is new literary fiction for queer adult readers. It seems like a fairy tale at first, about a 12-year-old girl more clever than wise, who is trying to be the hero of her mirror city’s apocalypse. But as the fantasy worlds that Enneaka moves through continue to die around her, the story climbs further and further into the real world, and so does she.

The book is a story of bringing two voices together, and the narrative point of view weaves back and forth between them. While Enneaka is trying to save the mirror city from its own destruction, I’m out here in the real world — 40something, burned out, wondering what went wrong — digging into my oldest memories of feminine video game avatars and gender-bullying in grade school, in a pair of pop culture essays. As Enneaka comes of age on a flood-soaked planet, falling in love and having her heart broken, I’m using autofiction to re-live the moment I became so resentful of my girlish self that I tried to cut it out of myself forever. 

Throughout the story, Enneaka — the character, and the voice — keeps getting closer to the surface until she eventually breaks through into the world we live in and demands a place for herself among an unexpected family that has dropped fully-formed into my lap. 

This is a bigender coming out story. As an inherently queer narrative, the novel shifts form from chapter to chapter, reflecting the fluidity of the narrator’s gender experience. Chapters transition from fairy tale to post-apocalyptic adventure to speculative fiction, interwoven with essays and autobiography, finally emerging into a magic-realist world for adults.

Themes: non-binary identities; the climate crisis; bullying; video games.

I wrote a bit more about all this on my blog.