The Truth About Fiction

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RM: Do you feel like you have been pigeonholed as a queer writer? How has this impacted your career?

MT: I don't think I've been pigeonholed. I am a queer writer, so I think that that's fine. I came into writing, I came into the publishing industry completely unconnected. I didn't go to school. I had no access to publishing. It's completely miraculous that I got published at all. I feel like that's been more of a struggle. Coming from this really lower working-class, not academic, not connected background and having to really learn and persevere my way into publishing. That's been a struggle much more than being queer has for me.

RM: Why should non-queer-identified readers want to read your work?

MT: Oh, I don't really want to answer that. I don't want to tell straight people why they should read queer writing. I just don't even like the division that much. That makes me feel pigeonholed. I understand why you would ask that question, but I just feel like, you know, Why should white people read the work of people of color? Why should men read women's experiences? Hopefully if you are a reader you just want to read about life. I just try to not even participate in that kind of thinking. I personally don't like queer authors being differentiated on bookshelves from non-queer authors. It creates lots of problems. If you have a queer author who has written a book where everyone's straight, do they still go on the queer shelf? What if you have a straight author who's written a really important queer book? I mean, what ends up happening is it ends up being a status/success thing. There will be bookstores that have a queer shelf, but do they put Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf on that shelf? Is Dorothy Allison even on that shelf? No, because those people have made it, and they are part of the larger world of literature. That ends up pigeonholing people, putting them on those little shelves instead of putting them out into the more general readership.

RM: Can you describe some of your involvement in the literary community in San Francisco? How have these activities bolstered your own writing? Why is this kind of community involvement important to you?

MT: When I first came to San Francisco, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't really know what that meant because, like I said, I didn't really go to college. I didn't know anyone who was a writer. I didn't know how a person went about becoming a writer. And then I found this really amazing, driving, spoken-word community that was happening every single night in different bars all throughout the city. And there were all these people who also came from really working-class backgrounds. They were kind of alienated from the world and certainly from the publishing world. And they were writers. They were publishing their own work and they were creating an audience for their work by coming to these events every night. I found this whole scene as a way for me to enter the world of writing. So I started working on pieces and making sure I had new pieces all the time to read so that I could participate in and keep being part of this community. And then I went on to host my own open mic and went on to host Sister Spit, which later became an all-girl performance tour that would tour the country. We did that for about four years. And since then, I've done other performance tours that aren't girl specific but always have my kind of aesthetic hand in it, so they are really girl centric or queer centric.

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