february 2025 + three poems

I wonder if you feel like Proust or something

Hannah in a lamp store in Manhattan taken by me

writing

It’s been hard for me to write lately. I appreciate everyone who’s stuck around on this newsletter despite my writing not being nearly frequent enough to justify the the paid option. I’m planning on returning to a regular schedule (and resume the updates) in March.

The election depleted my motivation to write a lot more than I want to admit, especially about trans topics. There is a sense that no one is listening — wants to listen — to trans people right now, or at the very least that our opinions and thoughts count significantly less than those of cis people who want to either clumsily defend or persecute us. I am broadly unconsoled by the ways people have been talking about the state of things for trans people — we have always been here (in this sociocultural form, with so much to lose?) and we will always have each other (is that really all we have?) — the abyss of abjection is opening up in front of all of us, regardless of our achievements. Writing feels pointless in the face of it, and increasingly, saying anything in public as a trans person feels like entering into a hostile field where interpretation is generally used like a melee weapon. I have no interest in making my writing invulnerable or confrontational. It felt like an impasse.

I posted an uncharacteristically vulnerable thread on Bluesky a few days into Trump 2, fresh on the heels of the “gender ideology” EO, about trans writers choosing silence, and heavily implied that I was doing the same. The responses were of two kinds: people saying that your work means so much to me, or people saying some variation of this sucks, but I get it.

Later that night, at someone’s birthday party, I had a total breakdown. I sobbed into my best friend’s shoulder, saying that this was all just too hard, that I didn’t have what it takes, that I’m so tired of feeling misunderstood, lauded without material support, hypervisible in some ways and ignored in others. I wheezed out the names of trans women writers who had killed themselves — a pretty long list — as she handed me tissues in this weird black marble basement bathroom. They were stronger than I am, I kept saying.

My best friend told me I was full of shit, that I would find a way, and that I just needed to find a better job so I wasn’t worrying about money all the time, and that strength doesn’t work like that. As usual, she’s right. It felt important to have that moment of doubt, and there’s definitely a before and an after to the way I’ve been thinking about my own practice since then, but I’m going to keep trying.

I guess what changed is that I no longer expect anything to change. The optimism that came with the “tipping point” — the progress of which coincided with my own coming out — is over. Publication is never guaranteed, the slanted field of literary prestige is beyond my control, and all I can do is keep doing my best in hopes that it reaches the right people. Even if that right person is just myself and my friends, that’s still a reason to keep doing it. We need to not only stay alive and keep fighting, but also continue to articulate our visions of the world. We’ll need them.

And of course, things aren’t all bad. Something I am optimistic about is my generation of trans writers finding our voices a little more. I have an essay coming out in the first issue Picnic Magazine, a print-only publication focusing on trans culture, which is edited by my Figure It Out cohost Joyce White and my dear friend Alma Avalle. The first issue is coming out this spring. The magazine is arriving at just the right time, I think — as the information economy shudders and contracts, there’s an opportunity to take things offline and go in a new direction.

For some reason I started writing poetry more earnestly recently, something I’ve done off-and-on for years but that I’ve never felt confident enough to share. It might be because I’ve been reading more poetry recently (Timmy Straw’s The Thomas Salto, Trish Salah’s Wanting in Arabic, Stevie Manning’s Joan Would Say). I’ve been trying to spend less time on social media recently (more on that in a sec) and so I’ve gotten into the habit of writing a line or two in the unavoidable dead moments on commutes, waiting on line, etc. They are obviously not the lines of a seasoned poet but they’re something, and I think I’m learning some non-obvious things about writing from doing this.

I attached the three best ones I came up with to this post as a sort of thank-you to everyone who’s stayed on the paid tier. I’m getting back on it next month.

editing

Pre-orders for the spring LittlePuss books close on 3/1, including for our usual “deluxe packs.” Get on that if you haven’t already.

Gretchen Felker-Martin inadvertently announced this on Bluesky, so I guess it’s fair game now — the book I’m editing for LittlePuss, my first, is called Persona and it’s by Aoife Clements, who you might know from the soundtrack to Louise Weard’s sprawling, brilliant film Castration Movie. Aoife’s book is some of the most merciless trans horror I’ve ever read — it pursues to a terrible conclusion the fundamental abjection of transness. The thread of human connection and yearning that runs through it glimmers in this darkness like a jewel. It’ll be out in early 2026.

you can hire me to edit now btw

I’ve started offering developmental editing and manuscript consult services while I’m still looking for a full-time job in this hellish market. I’m opening the books for March now.

Developmental editing is a thorough work-over of the text with Track Changes and comments, along with 3-5 pages of notes about guiding the bigger picture of revision. This is basically what I do at LittlePuss. I charge $0.04/word for a round of this, and a slightly lower rate for trans women who write literary fiction. (You need to meet all of these criteria, sorry.)

A manuscript consult is just the revision notes and is $250 for anything shorter than 80k words — generally this is more geared toward specific problems you might be having with the text or more broad-level questions. I can help you find reference points or comps, talk to you about the broad structure of the book or its themes, help out with query letters, talk about style and prose tightness on a macro level, etc.

I can also do sensitivity reading for cisgender authors who write trans women characters. I like to think of this as a sort of cultural-competency crash course: less about telling you you shouldn’t say a certain thing or that a certain thing is offensive, but more like showing you the terrain of trans discourse on which you’re walking for the first time. Cost is on a case-by-case basis.

For any inquiries related to these services, the best way to contact me is at emilyalisonzhou [at] gmail (dot) com.

events

We had the Figure It Out “winter special” in January and completely packed the house at Topos Too. The rooftop edition is returning in May, more on that soon.

I’ll be at AWP this year with LittlePuss, and I’ll be moderating a book event with Vivian Blaxell to support her book Worthy of the Event in New York in April. I’ll say more about these closer to the dates here and on my socials.

personal/etc

The super of my neighboring building has been spraying the pigeons that nest on the roof with a hose and I’m trying to muster up the courage to tell him to stop. (It doesn’t deter them. It would probably deter me if I was a pigeon in New York in February.) Whenever he sees me from up there he calls me “honey.” I think I might actually hate him.

I finally deleted my twitter accounts shortly after the Trump administration got started. Twitter did a lot for me — I first found trans community there during the pandemic (it’s hard to imagine now, but I barely had any trans friends before then), and a lot of my first friends in New York were people I first met on the platform. As Elon Musk and his “aides” take a sledgehammer to the federal government and the site continues to fill up with fascist brainrot, it finally felt too stupid to continue using it. I am sad about this, but it is necessary. I’m still on Bluesky (where I am significantly less inhibited in what I feel comfortable saying) and Instagram for now.

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three poems