Tag: queer

Meet Our New Intern: Halsey Hyer

Photo by Elwyn Brooks (2022)

I didn’t know I grew up in Appalachia. 

Or that I could even begin to consider myself Appalachian at all.

Everyone learns to play “Smoke on the Water” on a lap dulcimer to pass fifth grade. “Crick” and “crans” (“creek” and “crayons”) were just how you said it.  Pittsburgh is the place only ever referred to as the city, and if you live there, as I do, that means you made it (out). 

I’m from Mars. Pennsylvania, not the planet.

I’ve always said It would make more sense if it were the latter. I’ve always thought myself to be simply alien(ated).  

I couldn’t read until I was seven. Everyone else could. Not me.

Numbers and letters might as well have been the same. I got by with sheer memorization of words or phrases. My parents required I read to them—my mother Goodnight Moon, my father Good Night, Gorilla. Slow speech curling from tongue & teeth in tandem with the drag of my mother & father’s fingers beneath sentence fragments. I stop when they stop. I start when they start. 

Kindergarten had one Y2K Apple desktop & two CD-ROMs, Oregon Trail and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and the teachers instituted a two-book reading mandate in order to play. Games were the only thing motivating me through the drum of childhood.

I was strategic—I was sure to gun for the books when it was time to choose so I’d make it to the shelves first, select whichever we read during story time because they were fresh in my mind. 

I performed for my teachers.

I took my time. 

Dragging my pointer finger along the bottom of each sentence, lingering on the cliff of it, & I knew if they quizzed me, I’d be able to make them believe I read the two books required. I’d do anything to button mash my way from Paris to Minnesota to Australia searching for Carmen, or to risk dying of dysentery on the way to some new frontier home.

Anything but learn to read.

I’d have chosen to scour a pixelated world for pictures for images for clues as to what life was like for others who weren’t from Pennsylvania like I was. I wanted to know anyone who wasn’t like me. I learned young that who I was wasn’t someone I was supposed to like. I knew the world was kept from me, & I wanted to know. 

I didn’t know the empowerment of words. I didn’t know books other than the Bible could send me to ethereal worlds not otherwise known.

My mother became so desperate for my literacy that she took me to the next town over to peruse the library’s shelves in the hopes I’d delve into a book beyond my disapproving look of the front and back cover. The library was the only place she didn’t censor me.

There I found books about betrayal and vengeance, secrets and alienation, love without adverse consequence.

There was where words became worlds.

There I became empowered to explore word-worlds and build my own world of words.

Here I must invoke a quote from Audre Lorde—the writer whose words I rehearse in my head as I lie in bed at night and look at this Justseeds Artist Cooperative Celebrate Peoples History poster:

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”

“Litany for Survival.” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde

Without words, I have no worlds.

Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author forthcoming full-length hybrid collection, Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024). Their microchapbook of micropoems, Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and their debut chapbook, [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2022 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Based in Pittsburgh, PA they’re a collective member of The Big Idea Bookstore and the 2022-2024 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find out more on their website—www.halseyhyer.org.

Sundress Releases Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities

Sundress Releases Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities
edited by Nicole Oquendo

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Sundress Publications announces the release of Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, an anthology edited by Nicole Oquendo. The anthology features the work of Jennifer E. Hudgens, Nic Campeotto, Nina Sudhakar, and Emily Corwin, along with over two-dozen writers and artists tasked with uniquely articulating what it means to occupy a hybrid identity.

In these poems, narratives, photographs, and striking hybrids of genre, Manticore compellingly reveals the ways in which the seemingly unified self is composed of infinite ways of being in the world. The anthology is not only populated with beautiful, multimodal works of art, but also includes statements by each contributor about how they conceptualize and are inspired by the notion of hybridity. Though not all of Manticore’s pieces are explicitly presented as autobiographical works of nonfiction, they each offer the honesty and vulnerability of the intensely personal. The result is an intimate, powerful, and visually striking collection that is as unique as its talented group of contributors.

“Hybridity, for me, has always equated to possibility, and the creative work I enjoy most inhabits multiple genres at once. Within the last few years, growing and changing along with the labels that make up my identity—nonbinary, disabled, queer, Latinx, brujx, and so much more—I have discovered there is a glorious intersection of identity and form when it comes to the creation of work outside the boundaries of what is traditionally accepted. In gathering the work for this anthology, I wanted to focus on hybrid identities and the hybrid work these identities inspire, and I believe this collection—in the form of various media, highlighting both the truth and what is imagined—is a fantastic representation of what we can do when we embrace possibility with ferocity.” -Nicole Oquendo, Editor

“Manticore is as surprising as it is lovely; exquisite, gut-wrenching hybridities that capture what it is to be outside. This collection of stories, poems, and images will captivate readers—its venom heady and delightful as it is deadly. A monstrous kind of magic is afoot here.” – M.R. Sheffield, author of Marvels

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Nicole Oquendo is a writer and visual artist that combines these elements to craftmultimodal nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, as well as translations of these forms. Their work can be found in literary journals like BOAAT, CutBank, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Stream, among others. They are the author of the hybrid memoir Telomeres, as well as five chapbooks, including their most recent, Space Baby: Episodes I-III.

The anthology is available for free download HERE.

Adam Crandall on Growing Up Queer in the South

Growing up queer anywhere in the United States can be a very difficult experience, however, attempting to come to terms with your sexuality in a region labeled “The Bible Belt” brings a unique set of challenges to the table. I was born in New York state, in a small town where you only went to church on Christmas and Easter (and occasionally when you happened to be at your grandparents’ house on a Sunday).

It was not until we moved to East Tennessee that I realized, as one of my younger cousins so perfectly stated, “God is bigger in the South.” Church became a weekly experience, not to mention choir, youth group, and hand bell practice, because that was the socially acceptable thing to do. There was never a point where I remember my family “becoming more religious,” religion just became a larger part of our daily life, because religion was a larger part of everyone else’s lives around us.

It was also around the time that we moved here that I started to discover my sexuality. It became quickly apparent that I was developing feelings that did not fit in this religious society I had moved to. Illustrated by my Livejournal entries, you can see as I transitioned from a carefree adolescent into a teenager living a double life.

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Luckily, I found an amazing group of friends that knew my secret and couldn’t care less, but around my family and the rest of the world I wore a mask. It was terrifying to even think of coming out in a place where lawmakers attempted to pass a bill that would forbid teachers to even talk to students about being gay. Luckily, through the support of my friends, I was able to come out to my family, who accepted me for who I am, and the rest of the world.

After leaving home to attend college at the University of Tennessee, I learned that this happy ending was very rare for queer people in the South. Almost none of my queer friends had come out to their parents and were still living the double life that I struggled with in high school, and those who had come out to their parents were usually not on speaking terms. Everyone I met had a unique struggle, but most of them centered around coming out in a deeply conservative region of the South.

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This year, I was chosen as SAFTA’s performing arts intern, and when I first met with Vania and Courtney they pitched me their idea for a project called OUTSpoken. I immediately fell in love with the concept, and couldn’t wait to get started on this amazing program. It combined both my love for performance and my desire to be an advocate for LGBTQ people living in Tennessee. We wanted to portray people’s experiences growing up in the South in a productive way that would hopefully help both the people sharing these stories and the audience witnessing them.

As we get closer to the date of our first workshop, I cannot wait to hear the stories of other queer Tennesseans, and maybe share a story or two of my own.

Adam Crandall is a 2013 graduate from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor’s degree in theatre, where he was involved with both Clarence Brown Theatre productions as well as student productions with All Campus Theatre, including his directorial debut Almost, Maine. He has grown up with a passion for performing arts and is very excited to be working with SAFTA as a performing arts intern.