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Supported by National Arts Council of Singapore

Jane Claire Bradley  is an award-winning queer, working-class writer, performer, therapist and educator. She is the author of a novel, Dear Neighbour (2023), and two chapbooks, Truth or Dare (2021) and Lost + Found (2024).  She has been published in a long list of anthologies, essay collections and literary journals, and is the the most recent winner of the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction from New Writing North.

Rosie Garland writes poetry, long and short fiction, and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Rosie is the author of three historical novels: The Palace of Curiosities, Vixen and The Night Brother (Borough Press). ‘The Night Brother’ was described by The Times as ‘a delight…with shades of Angela Carter.’ Her latest novel, The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates, and her first collection of short fiction is forthcoming with Fly On The Wall Press in January 2025.

In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. http://www.rosiegarland.com/ Image © Carri Angel

Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean writer-artist.  Her first child, GAZE BACK (Lambda loser, Singapore Literature Prize 2020), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the abject, vulgar and pleasurable, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Find her in her natural habitat: @marylyn.orificial (IG) & @grinchfucker (twt/X)

Read the transcript

Meet the World: Queer Desires

With Jane Claire Bradley, Rosie Garland & Marylyn Tan

ROSIE: I am absolutely delighted and thrilled to be here today, by the marvels of modern technology, to talk about queer desire with two writers that I really respect. I’m Rosie Garland and I’m a writer of short and long fiction. I write poetry, I write flash fiction, I write essays, I write song lyrics. More about that later. I’m absolutely delighted to introduce Marylyn Tan and Jane Bradley and we’re going to be talking about queer desire. Fabulous. Marylyn, would you like to introduce yourself first?

MARYLYN: Hello. I am primarily a poet. I’m a multidisciplinary artist and I work a lot with the body, with queer desire, with queer pleasure. I work to disrespect respectability and I do that through seeking out the vulgar, the obscene and the occult.

ROSIE: That’s fantastic. And Jane, would you like to introduce yourself, please?

JANE: Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Jane Claire Bradley. I am a writer of fiction in the shape of novels, short stories, performance poetry and I sometimes write non-fiction. I am also a performer and my day job is as a therapist. I mention that because I think mental health and its interaction with identity, embodiment, lived experience, trauma and how early experience shapes us are all things that I’m working with on a day-to-day basis and I think all those things are real, ongoing thematic obsessions in my writing as well. So, I write a lot about identity, subcultures, sex, queerness and class and, within that, identity feels like a real ongoing thread. So, this conversation is very much up my street.

ROSIE: Thank you so much. It does feel particularly thrilling to be talking about queer desire with writers who are based in the Far East, in China and Singapore, and also based in England. That is one of the real strengths of this programme, Meet the World, created by the National Centre for Writing, based in the UK, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. It’s a marvellous opportunity to just share ideas about queer desire across the globe. We haven’t got very much time, so I am going to begin by saying I have a multitude of queer desires and we might get a chance to unpick some of that, along with other people’s queer desires. I would like to start with a quotation from Bell Hooks that means a great deal to me and I’ll just do the quote now. ‘Queer, not as being about who you’re having sex with, although that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to thrive and speak and live.’ That underlines one of my absolute core queer desires and that is my queer desire to speak myself and my life and my existence into being. I’m less concerned with changing people’s minds and reasoning with the unreasonable. If I do change any minds, then that feels like a fabulous bonus. One of my core queer desires is to use the power of the word and power of expression to take up space and create and I would be really interested to hear other people’s views on that or to bounce off it or to come in straight away with queer desires that feel absolutely foundational for them.

MARYLYN: I think a lot of the time when I grapple with what it means to have a ‘desire’ to be queer, rather than just a desire or a desire that maybe a lot of other people have, it’s hard for me to tell what is supposedly mainstream or dominant anymore because maybe I have built a bubble of queerness so well around myself that whatever I seem to strive for, the people that I find are my chosen community are also striving for. For example, you mentioned creating, Rosie. Creating from a space of compassion, from a space of wanting to make space for other people is the queerest thing in my praxis.

ROSIE: Thank you.

JANE: I love what you said there, Marylyn, about the bubble and how being surrounded by a chosen community or chosen family of other queer people, especially queer artists, where performers and queer creatives can really be such a nourishing and needed thing and can give us that permission to explore our own desires. And it’s making me think about what you said, Rosie, about the idea that I’m not necessarily here to change minds. I’m here to speak truthfully about myself and to express myself truthfully and I think that is a powerful thing, not only for the person doing it but for other people as well. I can remember seeing Rosie Garland on stages, burlesque and cabaret stages, and just being so excited by how embodied and unapologetically queer you are and to see you performing that. I would experience desire, like, who is this person? I love them, I love their work, but also it would give me that desire to express myself and embolden the desires already within me. So, I think there’s something really interesting about that feedback loop. By speaking our desire, we also give other people permission to feel and act on desire.

ROSIE: Thank you.

MARYLYN: I really resonate with you as well, Rosie, when you talk about unapologeticness. You’re not looking to change anyone else’s mind. I think it’s so important in terms of connecting yourself to being authentic, to the feeling like that I’m not trying to prove anything, and yet that’s something that’s a truth that I just have to express, no matter what. It can become something that causes other people to say, ‘Oh, you’re trying to push an agenda’ or something, but it’s not that. It’s just unadulteratedly who you are.

ROSIE: Thanks, Marylyn. I’m somebody who collects quotes from other writers and other creators, almost like I have a kind of scrapbook in my head. That reminds me of a quotation from Albert Camus, who wasn’t a queer writer, as far as I know, which is, ‘The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’ That really resonates with me. The idea of living unapologetically and living authentically, as you put it, in itself becomes an act of revolution. Yay for that, really. I have to admit, I can’t say that I have always lived unapologetically because my desires have changed and altered and grown and blossomed. I remember times when it wasn’t quite so easy for me to live unapologetically and my desire back then was largely not to get sacked from my job. Way back in the late 1980s, I was in a job where if I’d been out as a queer, I wouldn’t have been so much sacked as they would have probably found a way to tell me that my job wasn’t needed anymore. There were points in my life that have radicalised me and one of them was in the UK. There was a law passed called, infamously, Section 28, which was an act of repression. You were not allowed to ‘promote homosexuality’ in schools. The idea was that schools would be silenced and I was working in a school. It was fascinating that that radicalised me to leave my job and find a job where I could be ‘out’ right from the start, and it radicalised an entire generation of queers to come out. So, it’s almost like the law had the opposite effect. Rather than making people go into the closet, the tagline became ‘never going underground’. So, I’m just very briefly, I hope, reflecting on how my queer desires have changed and many things have radicalised and changed me and I’ve chosen to have those potentially repressive life events change me and strengthen me rather than make me go underground. I hope that’s not too much of a tangent. I didn’t spring from my father’s brow fully formed like the goddess Athena. It’s a journey. It’s lovely that people say, ‘Oh, wow, you live so authentically,’ but it’s hard won and I think that’s something that I hold on to, that queerness isn’t necessarily an easy road but I wouldn’t choose any other. I couldn’t.

JANE: I think that’s part of what makes it so precious, the idea that it isn’t an easy road, and yet, there can be so much joy and pleasure and defiance and liberation within it. But there is also the adversity, frustration and grief. I think the idea of desire is so universally human. And yet, so much of queer desire is culturally restricted or legally restricted, as in that example. That sense of it being so moralised against and controlled, or attempted to be controlled, by the varying forces and systems that we live within, I think that speaks to the resilience and strength of queer desire and how wily and resourceful we have to be as queers. I can imagine that probably speaks to our creative practices as well, that that’s within our various personal and collective queer lineages.

MARYLYN: When you talk about resourcefulness, there’s also the sense that when we live from the margins, whatever margins they might be, I mean, it might not necessarily be queerness as in homosexual but any kind of margins, there’s a sense that you are responding to a repression or to an oppression. I don’t like the way it seems to define but it is a response and then a subversion of whatever dominant hierarchy seeks to control you at that point. When I think about queer desire, there is a sense that we really want to live, we want to be visible, not visible to the point of being a target, but we want to celebrate life. And we really are conscious of the fact that to be alive and to really revel in pleasure is such a privilege and it’s a privilege that a lot of us don’t get. I think that’s really interesting because when I think about so-called normal desires, vanilla or mainstream desires, there’s not the same sense that, Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful to be alive and we must be alive consistently as a form of resistance.

ROSIE: I really love what both of you said there about queer joy, which is really one of my big queer desires, and celebration. And I also like what you said about resistance, Marylyn. I feel that it would be nice if I didn’t have to resist but I do. I live in a world where one of my queer desires is to resist and I acknowledge the heteronormative and binary restrictions that I live in and those influences. My desire is to create and make space, so my kind of resistance is very much about I’m going to do this despite everything and resist those normalising systems. Any heteronormative system is lose-lose, as far as I’m concerned. It’s lose-lose for us and it’s also lose-lose for folk who live within those systems and think they are normal. So, yeah, resistance but also queer joy. I want to talk about queer joy more, please.

JANE: I think queer joy is really necessary. I think that it is its own form of resistance, isn’t it? And I think that probably speaks to why so many queer people are attracted to that really unapologetic exploration of not only things like sex and kink but also witchcraft because I know that’s something that comes up in your beautiful poetry, Marylyn, and that sense of having ways towards queer joy and queer empowerment. I think those things feel so needed and there is a real luxurious pleasure in exploring them. That feels like a really rich theme for me, both personally and creatively, because there’s no real separation between the two.

MARYLYN: Do you personally use witchcraft as a way towards queer joy?

JANE: Totally, yeah. I think all the witches I know are queer and that feels like no coincidence. Maybe that just speaks to my queer bubble. But also, I think there is something inherently queer about nature and the way I practice witchcraft feels very queer, that sense of connecting to elements, connecting to nature, connecting to the divine. All of those are things that overculture has restricted or poisoned for me, personally, and so, reconnecting to those things does feel magical, magic with a ‘k’ there, and it also feels very queer. It feels connected to Bell Hooks’ idea of it being counter to what mainstream capitalist culture expects and demands and wants to make a transaction, and so that idea of witchcraft being beyond those things or outside of those things, to me that feels really queer and all the more attractive for it.

MARYLYN: I think it’s interesting that you bring up mainstream capitalist culture as well because in recent years witchcraft has really been co-opted by consumerist culture and a lot of it is very superficial, very binary, and I think a lot of especially New Age movements replicate that heteronormativity, like, Oh, you know, define feminists this way and define masculinists that way, and so on and so forth. I just think it’s really interesting how, like, you create a movement and there’s a departure from the norm and then the norm chases after you and they’re like, actually, we’re going to bring it back into

what is normative now. And I think that it’s the same for what I observe in a lot of queer circles. I don’t know if you guys have the same thing, I’m sure you do, but the rise of homonormativity and assimilating into a way of life that is largely indistinguishable from any kind of normal, vanilla, boring life, it’s just, Oh, they’re two gays, two lesbians, but other than that it’s uncritical existence and I don’t know if I would consider that joy. They seem happy but I don’t know if I would consider that either queer or joy.

ROSIE: And again, it’s a reminder that not one size fits all. But I would personally agree with you, Marylyn. I’m going to do another quote. Peter Tatchell said, ‘I don’t want equality, I want liberation’ and that clarifies a lot for me, which is that I don’t want to be the same as or equal to. It’s just a no-brainer of course, to say you want to have equal marriage rights. If people want to get married, they want to get married, that’s their thing. But I don’t see equality and sameness and entering those binary heteronormative situations, personally, as queer and I want liberation from them. As Audre Lorde said, ‘You cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.’ I’m going to bounce us off into another area of queer desire and that is my queer desire to connect and to connect with others. Sure, others in general, but also other queers. I want to find and connect with my queer family across the globe, which is why I had such a big yes to this, for example. It’s not about sameness, it’s about finding commonalities and sharing them. That is one of my queer desires, communion and connection.

JANE: I don’t think I have more than half a formed thought, other than to say such a big yes to that. It’s reminding me of another Audre Lorde quote, which I will not be able to do as beautifully as Rosie did that one, about that idea that that connection is not about denying our difference but exploring it and celebrating it and building connection across difference. And I think that when we talk about building connection across whatever lines, you know, nationality, race, class, gender, all of those, that that sense of liberation for all is not going to come about through denying or reducing or assimilating and making our differences invisible or anything along those lines. I think it can only come from exploring and celebrating and sharing and building understanding and compassion and perspective across those things. And I think that’s why the arts is one of the ways that we do that, one of the ways that we share our lived experience and come to understand other people’s lived experience across difference.

MARYLYN: Would you say that it’s been easy to find a connection across the globe? Queer connection?

ROSIE: Not as easy as I’d like, which is why programmes like this are so important and being in a mentoring relationship with you, Marylyn. That’s why, again, I had such a massive yes to it. Going back to my history, I can remember, back in the 80s – yes, I am that old – I made contact through a girlfriend with the lesbian scene in Germany and it was an eye-opener for me because it was part of my journey to connect and just feel part of that global village. Where we are building our own house, thank you very much, or we have the opportunity to.

MARYLYN: Yeah, I want to connect with a lot of queer communities across the globe but I think it’s also a bit difficult to be in a community and stay in each other’s lives because there’s a difference between being connected, like, Oh, I know so-and-so from the scene, and then maintaining those connections, especially when you’re very much involved in the community, in your local region or your own circle or whatever. So, there’s a sense that the struggle is a poverty of time. How do you distribute your resources when connecting with other people? And then there’s a sense that the more you pour into the community, the more the community is supposed to give back to you. But I think sometimes it can be quite thankless work. And how do you then find that joy in creating something sustainable and building something for other people who may be less well-resourced than you or younger, who have far fewer networks, who come to depend on you for networks, and where do you get your own nourishment from? How can you make that relationship with your community equitable?

ROSIE: Yeah, the way I put it sometimes is it’s that point that I get to when I realise that all the energy is going that way and I need to focus on turning it around so that I’m actually receiving nourishment and feeding myself.

MARYLYN: Well, I would say that programmes like this that connect me to mentors like you, Rosie, and other writers, like you, Jane, they really help me in terms of teaching me different ways or when I have a conversation with people and learn from them and that’s my nourishment, to make sure that I’m always learning from people who have been there before me or are doing something different from me, and I think a lot of queer joy actually comes from curiosity as well and being open, remaining open to people.

ROSIE: Oh, I love that, queer curiosity.

MARYLYN: Queeriosity.

ROSIE: Oh, we have a new word! Quick, write it down. I’m going to write that down. Thank you.

MARYLYN: She’s writing it down right now!

ROSIE: Queeriosity, Marylyn Tan. There you go. I’ve got it on a piece of paper.

MARYLYN: Something that I’ve been thinking about as well is when we mention sex and kink, for example, and I’ve been reckoning with my own relationship to obscenity and sex and kink, and maybe ten years ago or even five years ago it was seen as something really shocking or the province of the gay perverts. But now perversion has moved towards the mainstream with Fifty Shades of Gray, with every other polyamorous heterosexual couple being like, Oh yes, we’re queer too. I’m just like, I don’t think that’s the same. But okay, not to hate on all polyamorous people, but I think queerness is undergoing a kind of cultural shift as well, even with drag culture or ballroom culture. Gayness has been moved to the sort of trendy coolness and is in danger of being co-opted and then shunted aside as the next trend that has come and gone. So how then do you continue? I don’t know. You understand what I’m saying? I guess what I’m talking about is that raw, electrical vein of what I feel is real and yet dangerous. How then do you maintain your connection to that when the culture is so insistent on taking it and co-opting it and making it palatable?

ROSIE: I find that one of the ways that I deal with it, because I hear you, is to put it in context. I contextualise it in terms of cyclical stuff because I could not agree with you more about that co-option and I feel I’ve been here before. There was a writer in the 1960s who wrote this book, I think it was George Melly, and the book title was Revolt Into Style, which encapsulates so much of that idea and a good example is looking at it in terms of the occupation of city centres, like New York City. In the 1970s, nobody wanted to live in Manhattan. The nice straight people didn’t want to live in Manhattan. In the 1950s, they’d all moved out to the suburbs and so the centre of Manhattan was a ghost town. Who moved in? The artists and the queers because they were the ones who can afford the lower rents, as nobody wanted to rent in central New York City, and so that’s why the artists and the queers moved in. What happens? It makes Manhattan a really fun and interesting place to be. And then? The heteronormatives who were all out in the suburbs look at each other and say, God, this is boring, because it is. So, they all move back into New York City, hiking the rental prices so that from the ’90s onwards you need to be a billionaire to rent in Manhattan. And it goes around in cycles. You can see it. I’m just picking New York City as an example, but you could pick San Francisco, London, Manchester, any city in the world, really. That is just one example of co-option. I just stand firm because I know that I might be trendy this week but I won’t be fashionable next week and I’m not chasing the fashion, I’m living as authentically as I possibly can. And every now and then people come round to me. So, I get off the merry-go-round. If I know I’m living authentically and I am connected with other folk like ourselves who are striving, then that’s one of the sources of my desire and joy. I’m not saying one size fits all but this is one way I found of basically just standing back and going, Oh, so we’re there again, are we? I have one more example of that, if that’s okay, because I want to touch on the vileness of transphobia that’s out there at the moment. That is something we’re coming back to, it’s not new. Because again, in the 1980s, when I was coming out as a queer and celebrating all of that, there was a lot of transphobia. And I’ll tell you something, it was a lot of exactly the same people. They’re still going. There are folk out there, women, and I say women because they are fuelling a lot of this transphobic, you know, splitting us up, saying, Oh, there’s the LGB without the T and then L without the G, and all these divisions, they’re coming back round. I didn’t have anything to do with it in the 1980s and I’m certainly not going for it now. I know, that’s me, quite passionate. But I am quite passionate about hatred and division.

MARYLYN: I think, having been through one or I don’t know how many cycles this thing has run, hopefully then you get a sense of what you need to get through this current cycle and then you can tell the people who are really adversely affected by it. I also wanted to talk about privilege and how some of us have more than others and we can kind of buffer the storm better than them. And I think that’s also a way in which queer joy can be shared, by acting as a bulwark against other people’s vitriol. I think it’s very easy to say, Oh, you know, just be unapologetically yourself, but I do understand and recognise that. I’m speaking from somebody who’s from Singapore, which is just famously racist, transphobic, homophobic, even misogynist, and a lot of the times I’m just like, well, better me than somebody else whose feelings actually get hurt because I’m a cockroach.

JANE: I don’t think this is a tangent but it’s come into my mind, so I’ll share it and see what you think. I can’t credit it because I can’t remember their name, but I was reading something this morning about the idea of the inherent vulnerability of desire. And so, the idea of having desire and to share desire, whether we’re talking about creatively sharing that or more personally, is inherently vulnerable. And what you’re saying there, Marlyn, makes me think about how perhaps for some people or in some circumstances it could be more vulnerable than others. Maybe a part of queer joy is when we see our fellow queer siblings being able to share that joy, whether that is through privilege or them having had a platform or been on a journey to the point where they feel able to share that and some combination thereof, that that is such a needed lantern in the dark that we can really take almost voyeuristic or vicarious pleasure in and that it also can connect us to that idea of desire and vulnerability and to our own desire and vulnerability because I think they are interlinked. I think that’s why I’m sharing that. I read that sentence this morning and it was like I hadn’t put it in those terms to myself before, but I need to compost on that some more, I think.

MARYLYN: I was just going to say that I think vulnerability is a huge part of desire because vulnerability is a huge part of seeing the ugly thing and what is real, and sometimes seeing what is real is very fucking terrifying because it just is. That’s my real underbelly that I’m showing you.

ROSIE: I’m really pleased that you raised the whole issue of privilege as well. Something that annoys me is when folk who are privileged say they’re not. And I’ll put my hand up, I’m privileged. I was around at a time when students got grants and, as a working-class kid, I was able to go to university in a way that I know is hugely privileged. And that privilege is not available in the same way that it was when I was going to university. I’m aware I have privilege because, let’s be completely honest, I’m white. And globally, that gives me a massive amount of privilege. I live in a big city and for all its faults, because I grew up in a very rural part of England, I’m aware that being in a city gives me, as a queer, a level of access to queer activities and queer family that being in rural areas really doesn’t. And I guess the way I see it is that if I have this superpower of privilege, I want to use my superpower for good. Again, one of my queer desires is to hopefully access the queer joy of other people, to support other queers in any way that I can. That’s part of my desire for queer connection and commonality.

JANE: Lisa Luxx is a poet and activist who I really love, a queer, non-binary performer and writer, and she speaks about the idea of when we say privileged, maybe we could say responsibility and think that if I have these privileges and these powers, what responsibility does that give me? That has been a really helpful thing for me to explore, that idea of, okay, there are protections that I have and there is power that I have as I navigate the world and what am I doing with that power? And to use that towards collective liberation. Unless all of us are free, none of us are free, so we do have a responsibility to use that power ethically and for good, as you say, Rosie.

ROSIE: That’s great. Thank you so much for bringing up Lisa Lux as well. Just because they’re fabulous.

JANE: They’re incredible.

ROSIE: Again, just this idea of the desire for connection. What nourishes me, and I’m talking about queer nourishment, is reading. It’s reading other queer writers and reading how they negotiate the world and not just people from my wee box, not just people who reflect me in whatever way but just sprawling out and finding queers who don’t reflect me whatsoever and thinking, well, okay, what can I receive in terms of nourishment from these writers and getting excited.

MARYLYN: Sometimes, if a writer isn’t explicitly queer and you still get a very queer perspective from them or ideas that fuel your queer way of life, then I think these are great tools.

ROSIE: Oh, that’s nice. I like that.

MARYLYN: I really liked what you said about responsibility as privilege or privilege as responsibility, Jane. When you think about responsibility, you also think about obligation and do we have an obligation to our community and in what ways? Because we always say we need to show up for each other and I’m not quite sure what that looks like to different people.

JANE: I think that can be so infinite. I think that queer, as a verb, that idea of queering, that idea of showing up for our community, sometimes it might be those very practical things, like doing collective elder care or showing up for our mates whenever they’re in a mental health crisis. But sometimes it might be like, I’m going into the bunker to work on my writing because that’s what I need to do to nourish me, and when that is done and if that becomes something that I’m willing and able to share, that might be part of showing up for the community and I think that connects to what you were saying, Rosie, about reading as a way of sharing experience, leaving those little breadcrumbs for the people to follow in the future, to have that discovery. I’m curious about the idea of reading as an embodied practice as well, because I know the body and embodied experience is something that is in common with both of your work. Certainly, the bits of your work I’ve seen, Marlyn, have that really visceral, embodied feeling to them. That’s the thing I really take from that. And Rosie, it’s in your work as well and certainly when I see you perform live. I think there’s something really special about how reading, literally absorbing words on a page, can be such an embodied experience and can be a really intimate thing, can be a really sexual thing sometimes, and that to me is just

fascinating, that we can connect on an embodied level across time and space and culture through the act of reading. That is witchcraft in and of itself to me.

ROSIE: I love that. That’s so exciting. We are writers, so, owning it for myself, I know that I interface and interact with the world through the word. I write not to hammer down answers or say ‘this is queer desire’ or whatever. I write to explore the questions in my head and how those questions develop and change over time. So, it is that kind of ongoing process. My desire is ongoing, I don’t see an end to it.

MARYLYN: I also had a thought that as a writer, as a queer writer, your writing is actually advocacy, right? The work is the writing and is what’s going to outlive you. And I think sometimes we really do have a responsibility to just sit down and write. I think I always get caught up with, Oh, there’s this community, I need to be out there, I need to be doing things, when actually I’m just like, actually, you need to be writing because the work has the legacy that’s going to make the connection for you across the world and it’s what it’s consistently been shown to do. It’s not me showing up to some random event. I think the work has more mobility than I do, definitely.

ROSIE: And that kind of loops back around to what I said at the start about speaking ourselves into existence and speaking our multiple selves and our multiplicities into existence. I’m going to go off on a tiny tangent and that is that I think about a lot of the creation myths in world legend and myth which start with the idea of there being a formless void and formless chaos and what brings it together into form is the breath and the word. I’m just thinking of the Christian tradition, which is ‘In the beginning was the word’ and that underlines beautifully what you just said, Marylyn, the idea is that we need to get out there, we need to create, to actually sit down and do the writing, because it isn’t going to write itself, because it is our primary act of creation, the word.

MARYLYN: I really like what you said about reading being an embodied act because I often feel like it’s so disembodied, completely cerebral, and I imagine it to be a cerebral act as well, but that’s not true. When you read something that really speaks to you, you get a physiological reaction like a stress test, and I can only hope that my work does that for other people. I think that’s the thing that we’re always chasing, that queer connection. To provoke a reaction, good or bad.

JANE: You’re right, it definitely does do that. The bits that I’ve seen really created that reaction in me. I was reading through your work this morning and I was all excited. It was really physiological. I think it’s really interesting what you say about that separation between brain and body. I don’t know about you two, but I can find myself slipping into the cognitive. I’ve got a half-formed thought here that I’m just going to say in case it becomes more formed through speaking it. I know that I was very, very embodied at one point in my life, almost too embodied. I found the world difficult, maybe too much, and then for a long time I was almost habitually disembodied and I think some of my journey the past few years has been a creative journey, personal journey, spiritual, queer, magical journey, I think they’re all threads of the same thing, that has been about how to be in my body and I think it’s made me a better writer. I hope it’s made me a better writer and performer. And I think it’s allowed me to experience my senses and my embodied interface with the world more deeply and therefore, thinking about what you were saying about the breath and the word, it’s both of them, because to be in my body, I would hope, then allows me to experience desire, sensation, joy, grief, etc., etc. and then to explore, experiment, and question and see how to put language to that. How can I capture that with words? And that is an ongoing exploration and source of fun and joy and I think there’s something about that idea of how do we name and put language to things that feel beyond language and you two are brilliant at that, so please tell me!

MARYLYN: I think you’re so right. That’s another queer desire of mine, actually, to be able to put down exactly what a queer experience is like so that somebody else can read it and go, Ah, I know exactly what she’s talking about, that’s exactly the way it is. And then I think, for me, to replicate or to accurately portray something like a feeling through poetry, which is not the most literal of mediums, is a feat in itself and I think it’s a desire to speak a common language that is only shared through people who are similarly queer, not just in terms of who you’re dating but the kind of way in which you meet the world.

ROSIE: Yeah, creating those doors and windows in our work so that people can get in, I know that I strive for that, to create those doors so that people can get into my work and experience it, whether that’s on the page or in performance. We are sadly running out of time and I haven’t even started talking about queer science yet. That’s for another conversation because I think science is inherently queer.

JANE: I’m just wondering if it might be a nice thing if we know any writers who do a great job at writing queer desire because I’m sure you two know ones that would be amazing for me to discover. I would love to give a shout out to Dorothy Allison, Carmen Maria Machado and Alexander Chee. And Audre Lorde’s autobiography, Zami, is one of my favourite books. I think that is a great one for desire, especially. All her work is incredible, obviously, but there’s so much stuff in Zami about desire and embodiment that I just could return to it again and again and find depth and beauty and nourishment in it every time. I’m just wondering what authors you two turn to when you need that kind of model for writing queer desire.

ROSIE: I do have some that I absolutely love and so I will chime in on this. I’m particularly excited by the work of Shivanee Ramlochan at the moment. She’s got a great blog where she reviews books. Not all written by queer writers but she says, ‘I do queer reviews of straight writers’ and that’s fab. And she’s got this wonderful collection called Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting. It’s marvellous and I recommend her highly. I’m also really excited by the writing of people like Anthony Vahni Capildeo because I’m interested in writers who explore multiple forms. I guess that’s because I explore multiple forms myself and it’s that thing about finding commonality. They also write poetry, they have a superb collection called Measures of Expatriation, and they seem to be unlimited by what form they can write in. They write fiction, they write lyric essay, and so I’m really excited by what they’re going to do next.

MARYLYN: When we talk about queer desire, of course CA Conrad comes to mind and a lot of their work was very pivotal to my understanding of how to make work embodied and pull off that sort of surrender that makes it so enthralling to read. And Justin Chin and Kai Cheng Thom, who is a body worker but also a performance poet and an author, though I don’t know if they’ve written anything in the way of poetry. Aas for fiction, definitely Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. I devoured that book in one sitting.

ROSIE: Thank you, Jane. That was actually a really great idea for rounding up the session, to do a shout out to writers who inspire us, people who are on the bedside table. Thank you.

JANE: Just my own laziness, more than anything else.

ROSIE: I think we have run out of time, but we certainly haven’t run out of queer desires or the desire to talk about them. So, I just want to do a big thank you to Marylyn Tan and Jane Claire Bradley for being part of this conversation today, and a big thank you to the National Centre for Writing based in Norwich in England and also the National Arts Council of Singapore for making this possible. And fly my pretties, fly.

MARYLYN: Thank you so much, Rosie, for facilitating the session and Jane for being such a lovely panel member.

JANE: Thank you.