Tanaïs’s new book, Stellar Smoke, is available now from Dutton, so we asked them a few questions about writing practice, interviews, favorite non-literary media, and more. Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood bully, etc.) Friends I love still, but haven’t spoken to for the last several years, because we fell out of friendship. Because I ghosted them, or they ghosted me.
Because I hurt them, or they hurt me. I’ve been on both ends of a breakup. I think of us as planets ellipsing our own orbits; we needed the space to be, and to become.
There’s an intensity to queer femme friendships, and sometimes the merging has been too much to bear. I’ve come to understand that whenever there’s a breakup, there’s a need to wrest back energy, and to pour this into ourselves, into our art, our work. I don’t know, but sometimes that’s how books get written.
Those lost loves, and the subsequent years of relief and regret, shame, and silence; are all embedded in this novel. Writing a book feels so relentless, sometimes like the hardest thing you can ever do, but then you realize that a phone call, sitting down together, eye to eye, crying, or upset, is much, much harder. What time of day do you write?
I write 9 to 5, but pm to am. I need to write when the veil is thin, when the world is asleep, and no one can disturb me. I like to write by candlelight, with my computer dimmed to the color of dusk, and often I write by hand, without my glasses, so my face is right up to the pages of my notebook.
It’s the most real that I feel, the most in touch with my natural disability of limited sight, but it’s liberating to be that close to my words. The early process of a book is all written by hand. I have to transcribe this scrawl into legible pieces of text.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
