Saying yes/and to Truth & Dare

Part 2 of the So Mayer interview, make-believe science and a non-binary God

This week at the site Film Cred I published a feature on James Cameron’s career and what The Way of Water means for it, and it got me thinking: So Mayer’s short story collection Truth & Dare is the inverse of the Avatar series. Both worry at environmental destruction and the legacy of colonialism, both take inspiration from Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, and both feature triumphant sea creatures. But while one is broad strokes and big picture, the other cherishes detail; while one harnesses the hoariest genre tropes, the other is simultaneously science fiction and sui generis. One cost a small moon to make, the other can be bought for £10.99.

I’m loath, however, to sell you on its stories by listing their individual fantastical conceits, like a waiter trying to tantalise you by naming everything on a smorgasbord. Too many collections get promoted in this way, especially science fiction/fantasy/horror-adjacent ones from literary fiction publishers, as though to brag about their author’s plenitude and imagination, and yet when you read the book you find all the quirky conceits are just a pile of uncashed cheques.

Mayer on the other hand has the genre chops to make good on their promise; and at the same time, for me to list their story conceits would do a disservice to the way they’ve braided the collection together thematically, linguistically, tonally, like the challah bread in their story ‘House of Change’. Instead I want to outline what makes the collection, in the words of part 1 of this interview, one of the most scintillating to come out of Britain for some time.

Since Truth & Dare features so many libraries - in paeans, in childhood memories, even as a narrator of the story ‘Silicon’ - I thought a fitting comparison for it would be Terry Pratchett’s L-space from his Discworld series. Short for ‘library space’, it’s “the principle that the mass of information contained in a large collection of books warps space and time, and in consequence a sufficiently large library allows the visitor to access any library anywhere in space and time.” (Thanks Interstellar IMDb trivia!)

The stories in Truth & Dare are rich and dense with information - Spinoza and Jackie Collins, paleogeology and the Mpemba effect, words like ‘noctilucent’ and the etymology of ‘curse’. And they can take you anywhere in space and time: their repetition of the phrase “There to here” gives a sense of the book’s scope while binding it, bounding it together. But any such information is woven into the stories and relevant to them, and is always too fascinating to be superfluous. And its presentation is stylistically glad-ragged and decked-out - don’t expect the spare, ‘deceptively simple’ prose cliché here - without the stories ever becoming jazz-noodley.

This richness is most pronounced in Mayer’s language. You get the impression reading Truth & Dare there’s nothing they can’t write. From sensory detail as specific as it is palpable, like a swimmer’s “body that ripples with those arabesques of light that rise up from the gritty floor of the pool”, to the lyrical - “the skeletons of mist-mapped hedgerows” - to defamiliarising reversals like “coming into sleep”.

‘Defamiliarising’ might warn of an alienating reading experience; but all the stories are engagingly playful, winningly punning. Everything from their titles like ‘goes to see’, which implies ‘goes to sea’, to the names of the stories themselves, ‘contes’: a tribute perhaps to Italo Calvino’s separation of Anglo-American realist short stories from the more fabulist contes from the Continent, and also, in a book full of sex jokes, a pun too. After all what is polysemy than a double entendre (as is even the word ‘polysemy’—a kink handle if ever I saw one).

A pun is a kind of détournement - a hijacking, a rerouting, and the device that also unifies Truth & Dare. In the story ‘Lyonesses’, the trope of a frat-house stealing a mascot gets flipped into a sorority of amphibious footballers liberating Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid from Copenhagen harbour. The closing story, ‘Dune Elegies’ is a play on / with Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’, its castle on the Adriatic turned into a lighthouse near Camber Sands, with that Frank Herbert twist in its title and, in terms of content, a bow to Rachel Carson’s bird-mourning Silent Spring.

Environmental concerns - no, more than concerns: passions - also unite, ignite these stories. Mayer has taken up Kim Stanley Robinson’s gauntlet that authors stop with the dystopias and start doing the work of presaging and prefiguring other ways of being that might survive and in which we may yet thrive.

But that doesn’t mean the stories are about great radical projects; they’re more taken with the weeds that break between the cracks. (“Don’t let us be lonely,” Rabbi Yomtov quotes Ibn Rushd in one story, “but be weeds together.”) Really it’s a collection about the in between. In ‘green children’ Mayer writes: “Books and stories can save us only if we unchain them. If we read with a rebel robot alien eye for what we’re not being told, for the secret hidden deep in the gutter where the text isn’t supposed to be.” (Itself perhaps a reference to the gutter between panels in comics.) The stories’ obsession with etymology isn’t mere word-nerdery but compassion for neglected meanings and other minority reports. The narrators of ‘Pornographene’ bring about the end of capitalism but they’d only ever meant to invent a nicer-feeling dildo while students in Manchester (where (not) incidentally industrial capitalism began).

Speaking of Manchester, the narrator of the story ‘vampire’ reclaims a lyric from The Smiths and prelapsarian Morrissey to ask (with the kind of interrupting comma we covered in the last part, and so ask of the author): “So, what difference does it make?” The difference that Truth & Dare makes is the utopian example of its art. Its stories model difference and community, tradition and invention: model freedom. It left this reader feeling like another Morrissey lyric, which Mona-Lisa-smiles between desperation and hope: “There is another world. There is a better world. Oh there must be.”

ARTLESS: No one likes a border cop, not least in policing genre; but equally I think dilettantism is a problem, as did Ursula K Le Guin, who’d regularly call out writers who used genre but didn’t take it seriously. Your own deftness with genre is manifest throughout the collection, from name dropping The X-Files to subtler references like the Tolkienesque opening line of your story, ‘Dune Elegies’, “Here, at the end of all things”. The story ‘Changing =>’ even ends with the name of a sub-genre, “Slipstream.” Is slipstream what you see your stories as? Do you think of yourself as writing in genre or do you just write what you want and leave the marketing labels for others? And can genre writing be alternative in a time when the tropes and trappings of genre are everywhere, from blockbusters to Granta?

So Mayer: Ha, that’s a great point about “Slipstream.”, the final word of ‘Changing =>’, a story that is neither science nor fiction, but a memoiristic account of an embodied experience – AND YET. It is science fiction, first of all in that it contains numerous quotations from scientific articles about the stranger behaviours of water, interpolated into a second-person-address narrative; second, in that the idea of an ‘underwater body’ separable from a material body is a speculative conceit, as is the idea of a swimming pool as a computing interface—these are not presented as metaphors for lived experience, but as lived experience within a speculative present; third, in that it’s a story with a non-binary navigation of the world at its heart, and in lived social reality that remains a speculative fiction, not because there are not non-binary, agender, genderqueer, genderfluid people, but because we move within binary structures and systems, so it feels slipstream. So the play of the story is on an edge exemplified by the ambiguity of the final word—which refers to a liberating swimming technique as well as a speculative genre, and is both/and. 

Yeah, that’s a Tolkien reference: my characters swim in the same pop cultural and genre slipstreams as I do, and they make references to them. In ‘Dune Elegies’ and ‘corpus’ in particular, where the protagonists are, respectively, an alternative DJ and a book nerd/fan. I haven’t quite reached the crossover heights whereby “The Sopranos and Gilmore Girls exist as television shows in the other’s respective universe. But more alarmingly, this means that each universe has now become a televised universe of itself within their own universes,” but I feel very attuned to such examples of pop cultural literacy and fandom, especially when they’re deliberate like the self-reflexive Schurniverse, hinted at in a single cologne ad on a magazine in TV show The Good Place. 

Part of my interest in this is a respect for fandom, of which I am a part, and a respect for texts and fields considered ‘fannish’ that are often dismissed as not being high culture or literary, which is Le Guin’s most excellent, always precise and articulate beef with Ishiguro, Lessing, Atwood and others – there’s nothing more disrespectful than extracting tropes/narratives/ideas/forms from communities or spaces that you don’t respect, believing you can do them ‘better’. It’s extractive and a kind of colonialism. 

So yes, I write as a fan, swimming in genre writing: I read a considerable amount of global SFFH, and I’m especially excited that more is being translated into English (while also recognising that English should not continue to dominate literary fields or conversations). Right now, I am on an anthology kick (in hot anticipation of Kurdistan + 100: Stories from a Future State, edited by Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gundogdu), with an outstanding stack that embraces Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, edited by Leone Ross; Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, edited by Cat Fitzgerald and Casey Plett; This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction, edited by Mykaela Saunders; and Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction, edited by Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan. That last collection, which is of very thoughtful criticism of SFFH across all media, sets out the stakes: genre writing (especially queer, feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, and anti-carceral) is where I have learned about community and survival, and so it’s how I frame writing community and survival. 

With books like these (and the immense and brilliant Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Sheree Thomas and Zelda Knight, as well as Joshua Whitehead’s anthology Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Comma’s ongoing + 100 project, and even the cheeky contribution made by Unreal Sex, edited by moi and Adam Zmith), I feel like the everywhereness of the tropes and trappings of SFFH, and of speculative fiction in particular, is – on the one hand – a shared literacy, which creates a space in which these genuinely and ethically speculative texts can reach and resonate; and, with that awareness, the highly palpable marker of an ongoing militarised imperialism that stands mostly unreflectively at the 19th century Eurocentric root of those genres. I also think it’s game on, time to step up and be genre advocates rather than litfic snobs, to literary publishers who are sometimes doing a disservice by not reaching out to genre readerships for hybrid novels they’ve brought across from literary cultures where the realist/genre distinction is so much less a factor, i.e. pretty much every culture outside of Anglophonia and its imagination-phobia. So I’m all for the slip, the seep (and also really recommend The Seep by Chana Porter), the seed, the stream because ffs we are living in science the fossil fuel industry wants to make-believe is fiction, and which (unlike Anglophone high lit realism) science fiction has done so much to help us see as real.

Thinking of a swimming pool as a computing interface reminds me of John Barth’s short story ‘Click’ and what now reads as its charming Web 1.0 excitement. And I’ve just finished rewatching Mike Judge’s TV show Silicon Valley where the dreams of a better internet are forever scuppered by money-hungry tech-oafs. I’m showing my bias but I worry that the frame of the debate - the internet is for fascists trolls vs. the internet gives the marginalised a voice - is a phantom. That the Actually Existing Internet is incapable of being liberatory, and that by 2023 it feels like the net has been a net negative.

However, in your stories internet-age tech runs throughout - apps both real and speculative, creative uses of 3-D printing, haunting podcasts, even Twitter joke formats - “Cis men really will write poetry rather than go to therapy”. Beyond including these for verisimilitude what is their role? Do your stories say of the internet ‘It didn’t have to be this way’, or more, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way,’ or more, and to borrow your quantum tenses, ‘It doesn’t have to have been this way’?

Hahaha, poor John Donne. I’m always giving some hapless white cis male poet a kicking, although I think they can take it after centuries of canonisation (and Donne was, although sadly not literally a Canon, an actual Dean of St Pauls, as well as Royal Chaplain and an MP). I agree that the frame of the debate is hopelessly wrong-headed, as these debates always are, because they don’t question who is setting the terms. It’s worth remembering that the actual internet (deep structure) is a military technology with the liberal-libertarian vision of the worldwide web built on top of it, and the corporate turbocapitalism of data-scraping services disguised as social media and search engines on top of that. But that’s true of pretty much all Eurowestern technologies, from the poem and the ploughshare onwards (fight me, David Graeber).

What I’m interested in, always, is how we use what we have, knowing that it is corrupt and not fit for purpose at root, and not being resigned to it being the only way. ‘The only way round is through’ (or ‘no way round but through’) is a phrase I think a lot to myself when I’m tempted to not write about something traumatic, or to fudge a narrative transition, or otherwise not be accountable, because it’s hard work and I’m lazy. And I think it is true: we can’t fix things by ignoring them. So, as with the legalistic libertarian imperial language acts of the “new reality”, I play with the terminology, language and manifestations of the digital as well, absolutely to say ‘It doesn’t have to have been this way.’ Joshua Whitehead’s poetry book full-metal indigiqueer, Nnedi Okorafor’s ongoing project of Africanfuturism, even the literal clamshell laptop in William Gibson’s Idoru, are some of the many inspirations for this ‘yes, and’ approach to engaging with technologies thematically. 

I am also an unashamed, although not uncritical, cyberfeminist: I encountered Donna Haraway, Chela Sandoval and Sandy Stone via reading academic essays about The X-Files; or, Dana Scully has a lot to answer for. In ‘The Cyborg Manifesto,’ although these aren’t the bits that are most often quoted, Haraway draws attention to several marginal groups of practitioners within cyber tech: factory workers assembling microchips (whom, as she points out, are most frequently women of colour); anti-military feminist protestors; and science fiction writers like Anne McCaffrey and Vonda McIntyre, all of them both participating (non-consensually) in, and altering through their presence and intentions the onslaught of the “new reality” that the military-industrial-computing complex wants to determine. Spanners in the works. Pebbles, grit, bits of difficult and glinting matter. Because however much it tries to abstract itself into the cloud (which is made up, exactly, of water and oxygen and other necessary chemical compounds for ongoing life) or the Discourse, technology – like literature and film – is made of matter and by material bodies, and that’s the workings of technology (like the FabRyk in my story ‘Pornographene,’ or the podcasting stones in ‘Dune Elegies,’ or even the library in ‘green children’) that I try to make evident as a narrative crux.

To come back to poor old undone John Donne, maybe we have to let go of all this religious (Christian in particular) flaying of the flesh, and be in our messy, beloved, spirit-and-material bodies because that’s what connects us to the world? I reckon that technologies would have been coming into being very differently were more embodied cultures and cultural practices their shapers. Or at least, that’s what my stories dream, from where we are and what we have.  

One thing I appreciated in Truth & Dare is all the detail and specificity, whether it was scientific, historical or the everyday. It reminded me of Updike’s line that “precision is a function of attention, and attention is a function of concern” or Le Guin’s own professed love for facts. The narrator of your story ‘ghost’ says of ghost ballads that “they still carry the charge of the individual, the local, the remembered.” What is the importance of “the charge of the individual” in these stories for you?

That line from Updike really resonates for me, and it reminds me of a novel that was hugely influential for me, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, wherein the central character Jakob Beer works to repair the, and his, world after the Shoah by attending to everything, and particularly to the literally granular detail of geology and ecology, gathering together ‘fugitive pieces’ through his singular poetic consciousness. Beer’s practice, which suffuses the language of the novel, is redolent of tikkun ha’olam (Hebrew), repairing the universe: big task, right? There’s (as you would expect) centuries of rabbinical and philosophical debate over what it means (did God break the world? did humans? are humans the pieces of the broken jar? do we repair an individual piece or the jar itself? what happens then?) but post-WWII interpretations have made it a powerful phrase framing Jewish commitments to social justice movements, including anti-Zionism (Judith Butler explores this in their book Parting Ways). What fascinates me about this is that the imperative sounds big picture – repair the world! – but the parable it stems from tells us to attend to the details in order to work within the big picture. It’s ecological and holistic. 

Which is an important context for the word “individual” there, by which I mean the individuated and granular, not the individual human consciousness. That description of “the charge” is a tribute to one of my favourite passages in contemporary political thought, from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated and studied too, right now.” I think “the unmanageable” in particular really gets at the significance of honouring details: it’s much harder to assimilate and reify and package granularity than grand narratives, the individuated butts up against any claims to the universal, reminds us of the weirdness of being, and how much density it carries.

In the case of ghost ballads (a particular subset of murder ballads that are narrated by the victim), the argument is that they retain some evidence of the historical person who was specifically murdered, however much distantiated singing has smoothed down the narrative. And it’s that very specificity, that charge of association with a deep, real grief, that powers the song to connect to so many people: not that it’s universal, but that its specificity enables it to resonate (sorry, I overuse that word a lot because it’s how things most feel to me, in the ribcage). And so we put the pieces together, in all senses.

And that’s a reminder that actually the puzzle is an important non-caaaahhhhnflict narrative structure: detective stories being a prime example, which work best for me when they rest on an inner struggle that engages both logic and emotion and ethics, a questioning of the meaning of being and doing. Because I think as beings among beings, we are inclined to putting pieces together, to pattern-making (another name for that [non]narrative form), and to healing thereby. Our inclination is not supported by colonial capitalism, but I believe that it’s there. 

You mention above “community and survival.” One of the words I kept noting through Truth & Dare was “community”. Elsewhere it’s a word abused by politicians, journalists and dubiously-appointed spokespeople, to the point of meaninglessness. But as an idea it’s perhaps one of the most important, one whose absence is most felt in the lack. How do your stories rescue the idea and language of community?

I probably do overuse it dubiously, and often without defining. In Truth & Dare, the most conscious accountability to myself, and to challenge myself, was the decision to write further stories in first-person plural after using it for a well-defined collectivity – a football team that is also a pod of mermaids – in ‘Lyonesses’. It’s not easy being ‘we,’ but it is an important part of kermunism (a word I have been trying to get into the OED since 2012’s Muppets reboot), a hippy ideal I imbibed from kids’ TV in the 1980s that contrasted sharply with Thatcherist hyper-individualism and competition.

The ‘we’ in Truth & Dare is as varied as any other pronoun use: in ‘Pornographene,’ for example, it could refer to any number of student collaborators from two upwards, and in fact becomes literally expansive as the fabric they accidentally create while trying to reinvent the dildo starts to transmit feelings and imaginings consensually between the people who wear it. In ‘verde te quiero verde,’ this goes further, as the collective narrator/s is/are becoming-plants, who as we know not only grow in same-species clusters, but are interdependent across species. So then, what is the individual or community? – a profound science fictional question, one asked so brilliantly by Octavia Butler in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy (previously known as Xenogenesis). 

Butler’s work frets profoundly at the barrier between the nuclear family and other kinds of kinship, between closed religious communities and open survival communities (thinking of both Fledgling and of the Parable diptych), without offering utopian answers – Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is the most brilliant recent book to explore this, too. For many people, the nuclear family is a deeply problematic and limiting, even punitive, community, sometimes because of the larger community of which it is a part which mandates purity and exclusion agendas (for example, the upper class) which may have initially been a defence against a hostile larger community (for example, in diaspora communities, particularly orthodox faith-based ones). Leaving such a closed space can make entering into other communities both challenging and rewarding, and there’s a lot of stories to be told about how that is often a process of activating and then unlearning older behaviours or fears. Or in other words, it’s not easy being ‘we.’

A bit like with the fragment and the jar as subjects of tikkun ha-olam, there’s definitely a tension between the interiority of the individuated self and the community for me: I’m an introvert who challenges myself to participate in forms of communion. Challenging, because even a queer club night can be sensorially painfully similar to the religious services of my childhood, using music, proximity, special clothing, heightened attention, etc. Literature feels like a good form for me to participate in this challenge: readers are together, alone – everyone who reads Truth & Dare will read the same book (although I love books like The Dictionary of the Khazars and House of Leaves that play with this expectation), but read it separately and distinctively in relation to their own experience. A library is in fact my model of communitarian utopia (including that it can be a place to sleep rather than read): people being immersed in their projects alongside each other, an endeavour shared in its vibes rather than its ends, and heterogeneously collective towards a bigger picture made up of fragments. One of the most exciting aspects of publication has been hearing from friends who are librarians or work in institutions that have libraries that they have ordered Truth & Dare (including the University of Sussex, which features in ‘corpus’! The UL is of course a copyright library, and I’m thrilled that ‘Silicon’ will therefore necessarily be there), and the idea that it is/I am entering these overlapping communities of books, and of readers, given that so much in the book draws on and directly references libraries, books and the act of reading.

To go further into diaspora communities and orthodox faith ones: In the story ‘zeus’ the narrator points out that despite many a Biblical exhortation, “the Lord didn’t do shit to stop” Jewish persecution and so they “owe him no allegiance.” It reminded me of that meta, Elie Wiesel-esque bit: ‘Two rabbis are telling each other jokes in heaven, when one of them makes a Holocaust joke. But God overhears and tells him, ‘That’s not funny.’ So the rabbi shrugs and says, ‘I guess you had to be there.’) I wonder if you could talk about how your stories deal with Jewishness as a lived experience, a history of trauma and how you relate it to the trans experience. The collection, bedecked as it is with Jewish history, theology, esoterica reminded me of that book by Iain R Edgar, The Dream in Islam; what is the Dream in Judaism?

Part of the tikkun ha-olam parable is that the jar is broken because God has left or that God left because humans broke the jar… Either way, God’s absence, as both a signifier and cause of evil, is definitely a facet of Ashkenazi Jewish thought, although I can’t drop the exact Mishnah on this, but that joke is definitely representative of a millennial-old thread of thought. It’s deeply part of the incredible unfolding of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated into English by Jennifer Croft, which is steeped in the Messianic, Hasidic and Orthodox Ashkenazi Judaisms of 18th century Poland/Ukraine (and beyond). And on the one side, that thought is abandonment (“God sometimes you just don’t come through,” to quote my spiritual adviser Tori Amos), and on the other is a movement towards human self-responsibility, both of which could be said to mirror the structure of children’s relations with their parents.

Which is to say two complementary and difficult to articulate things: one is that orthodox Judaism and God are, for me, identified explicitly and painfully with my father, as mutually-assuredly destructive domination; and the other is that ‘it doesn’t have to have been this way,’ that millennia of cultural and spiritual history and practice, and of the particularities of anti-Semitism and also of Jewish participation in European colonialism (i.e., of non-assimilation and assimilation), are my history at a cellular level, not necessarily genetically (let’s not go there) but because I believe that sound alters and shapes us.

The first music and the first what could be called intentional, magical, shaped, composed language I heard was prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic: repeatedly, insistently, and pedagogically. My first experiences of performances, of drama and storytelling, both participatory and as silent audience, were in synagogue and at the seder table. I learned to perform and to create – to sing, dance, act, write and think – within a religious, Ashkenazi tradition and education. And this was within a diaspora culture that sought to mark its difference, so I didn’t experience the supposedly ‘common’/‘shared’ Church of England church service or hymns until I was at a non-denominational secondary school. In my early adult life, thanks/due to that secular secondary school education, I was able to separate myself from orthodox domination – but it took another decade to see that a post-Enlightenment liberal secular education was also a form of domination, of cultural imperialism. 

Religion was 100% one of the things I tried to go round rather than through, and I’m still only at the beginning of that vast travel, especially in relation to ceremony and its sensory overwhelm. It’s important, as I’ve written elsewhere (in a piece called ‘denim’ that appeared in Wasafiri, for instance), because there are too few diaspora Jews, fewer now in the UK than in the US, who are outspoken about being Jewish and anti-Zionist. Zionism is domination and imperialism, and it is not – to me, and to many, many others – any part of the Jewish Dream, or the Dream in Judaism, no least if we take tikkun ha-olam as a call to mend (and, as Puck says, to ask pardon as a prerequisite for mending). So I want to be a small voice alongside many voices, if I can be, for a Dream of capacious inclusion and mending, of opposing all domination and all punishment of material being and its interconnectedness. 

‘House of Change,’ is a story that grew out of the real fact that London did have a Domus Conversorum, a House of the Conversos (formed Jews forced to convert by the Spanish Reconquista) which was the only place that Jews of any kind could be in the British Isles until Oliver Cromwell reversed their banishment. And it also grew out of the meditative experience of watching my friend Masha braid challah in Finland, the first time I’d seen challah made for thirty-five years, and joking about how with three Jews at Arteles, it was probably the biggest kehillah in Finland since before WWII. And out of Masha asking me, as she braided, why the UK is so institutionally transphobic. All these questions of inclusion and exclusion braided together into the story, which says at its centre:

The truth is: trans is Jewish, inclusive. God is non-binary as angels are: messengers in the ancient world being the gender of their sender, and God’s being whatever they want to be. What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against.

To be different is to be in difference, in solidarity; not dreaming of assimilation. All too often under current domination, solidarity across difference feels like a fiction, is described as a fiction, is legislated out of reality. For me, to hold onto that is the only dream, and what I hope these stories in their small, scattered, silly and spiritual way can keep, going.

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