Djuna Barnes

But there are footsteps here.

And it's made by Nan Golden, Peter Hujar, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Juna Barnes, Emily Dickinson.

I said, oh, I thought I was so alone.

I thought I had to take this big leap of courage to jump off the road.

So I told myself, can I bring these questions into the novel form? in the same way that the Greeks brought themselves into Troy with the Trojan horse.

Can I sneak this? There's a poem in that novel, right? Can I sneak poetry? Can I sneak queer theory into it and not assimilate to the novel form that is the 19th century golden age, quote unquote? Again, we have to ask, golden for whom? Because other parts of the world wasn't writing like that.

And so I knew that I wanted to do this mischievous thing that, again, because I had such incredible queer elders, you know, Bono Kapil, Juna Barnes, Arthur Rambeau, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote this really strange novel, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson.

So relative to them, On Earth was quite formally conservative, I think, right? It was just like a pretty normie book with some weird stuff.