On Saturday afternoon, Prairie Lights Bookstore was packed as people patiently awaited Torrey Peters, a New York Times bestselling author. The second level of the small bookstore in downtown Iowa City was packed with people standing along the bookshelves on the walls and sitting on the floor, stairs and in rows of chairs.
Peters received her MFA from the University of Iowa. Her debut novel, “Detransition, Baby,” had won several awards besides being a New York Times bestseller, including the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction. The novel tells the story of several women, two transgender women, one of whom had detransitioned and one seeking motherhood, and a cisgender woman.
“I think that’s such an important aspect to show that it’s not black and white, like you are something or you aren’t something. I think that gray area is a space that queer folks aren’t often afforded,” Adiah Siler, an attendee of the event, said.
Before publishing her debut novel, she was a self-published writer, which she highly encourages for all artists. For Peters, self-publishing was a way to learn something you can’t learn any other way, and you are able to learn how to promote and sell your own works.
Recently, Peters released her new novel, “Stag Dance,” a comedic collection of several short stories and one longer novella.
Peters read from her short story, “The Chaser,” which details the romance of roommates at a Quaker boarding school. This story was inspired by her time at a Quaker boarding school, just a short trip away from the UI.
She also read an excerpt from her novella, a story of lumberjacks logging during the winter and planning a dance in which some men would attend as women.
After reading from her novel, Peters answered questions from Jenny Singer, a graduate student at the UI, as well as questions from several audience members.
While answering questions, Peters talked about the importance of sharing these queer stories. She claimed that bad feelings such as shame can be liberating, as writing helps others realize they aren’t alone.
“This one, ‘Detransition, Baby,’ and I haven’t read any of ‘Stag Dance,’ but I felt like those are much more attuned to the trans-fem experience,” an attendee of the event, Danny Willis, said.
Peters wanted her novels and short stories to focus more on transgender culture rather than the transgender experience. She also wanted to highlight the fact that the transgender experience doesn’t have to be separate from the cisgender experience. By writing in different genres, Peters hoped to prove certain tropes and plots work in all stories, regardless of the protagonist’s identity.
Along with this, Peters explained the fact that transgender writers should realize they don’t have to cater to an audience that doesn’t define them. She reminisced about her first time reading one of her works in front of a transgender audience, a story about her shame as a transgender woman that was geared toward a cisgender audience.
Peters said that by writing for herself and for her friends rather than trying to cater to cisgender audiences, she had much more fun and discovered more about herself, both through her characters and through art that was made to coincide with her novels.