In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 256.
Transness, in its disruption of supposed bodily norms, powerfully destabilises essayistic conventions. Marginalised bodies are surreptitiously expected to “perform” aspects of their personhood for cultural consumption—often by consumers located outside of those identities. In the case of trans creatives, this frequently means placing them within discourses of activism, politics, or discussing embodiment in a linear narrative of “transition.” In this sense, the definition of what constitutes trans expression is being generated from within cis perceptions of transness as “other,” the tendency being to look at trans as opposed to looking as trans. But what might transness look like when it abandons cis legibility?
When the experiential specifics of a body are centred as formal origin, what essayistic possibilities, intelligibilities, shifts, and slippages might ensue? How might one’s being-in-the-world inform the content and dialectics of a body and self’s expression in art, and how might that individual expression alter—or, explode, expand, decentre, recentre, invert, replace—the parameters of artistic or literary expression as a whole? How does one queer or trans essay form? What movements, what dimensions does the essay inhabit when Native, Indigenous, Black, when signing, neurodivergent, when inflected around the contours of another language, across different continents, when written from other centres, within other forms?
“I think I can show you,” writes signing Deaf poet Meg Day. “I think you’ll mistake me for silent white space on the page, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.” Here, Day elucidates the power dynamics in resisting culturally dominant modes of expression. If Day refuses to make themself legible within written language, instead expressing themself through American Sign Language and the signing body, a non-signing, hearing audience might not understand Day on Day’s own terms. So arises the question, not only of how one might reinvent the hegemonic but also of how readers—who live within some forms and outside of others—will expand their literacy, render porous their own ways of thinking, knowing, or being.
How to write a body, or more precisely how to render somatic knowing—that which understands sensorially, spatially, kinetically—in language? To translate what I understand from trans embodiment into language poses a problem of effability—what can be said and how the structure of saying alters or fails to communicate that bodily knowing. How language shifts and contours what is knowable or thinkable. What is transness at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? What textures, dimensions, or discussions does it bring to essay as form, genre, and critical discourse? To look as trans. To explore transness not only as content but as syntax, to consider those works of trans creation that remove cis lenses for approaching, organising, and understanding trans experience and literature. The trans body and its artistic expression necessitate an engagement with form, often with form becoming other form. The trans body emerges as a rich centre from which to rework ideas of embodiment and essay form. And from that centre it disrupts any concept of a centre.
Understanding must always elaborate between reflections, between a point and its multiples, where each is centre and periphery. So might an essay, so might inscription—this desire not only to inscribe, to exist, but also to understand—elaborate in the triangulation of visions.
I am interested in how one might trans the essay. Sensuous knowing as a means of producing sensuous knowledge. A work in which the trans body and its experience exist as subject, mode, and relation. Less essay, more dream, more night drive. A letter written beside dark window. A diary maintained under the glow of forty-watt bulb. Song, lecture, radio—the vitality, the intimacy of the voice, the body that lives. A poetics. Closely whispered philosophy. Book, body—slippery in their space and time. This—a sensual philosophy. A philosophy of rerouted pathways. A project of the sensual sentence, in which philosophy cannot emerge outwith poetics, nor poetics outwith philosophy. In which being and knowing are entangled, inviting a reapprehension of the word.
Lars Horn’s first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and teaches nonfiction at Columbia University.
image credit: Giulia May
