Harvard College 2000 Podcast: Alex Myers

So will you tell us about some of your novels? Sure.

Evolutionary?

Yeah, Revolutionary is my debut.

And it is historical fiction.

And it tells the story of an ancestor of mine, a woman named Deborah Sampson.

And in 1782, she was an indentured servant and she ran away from home.

and disguised herself as a man and fought in the Revolutionary War.

So you can see, based on my own story, why that would be a compelling one to tell.

It was tremendously fun to do the research and then even more fun to make up stuff that wasn't true.

And I'd known her story since I was a little kid, so it was really fun to flesh it out in fact and fiction.

So that was my debut.

Since then, I wrote a realistic fiction novel based on a summer I spent between my freshman and sophomore year in college when I worked as a forest ranger in Wyoming.

Wow.

And that novel is called Continental Divide.

And that was hugely fun to revisit that year or that summer and to think about what I'd learned about myself by going somewhere far away and unfamiliar and sort of precarity of being a transgender person in that space and in that moment, but also the desire for the masculinity of the American West and the sort of cowboy mythology.

So that was really totally different.

And then I was on a two book contract and wrote two fantasy novels.

One is totally different.

Drive my agent crazy.

One was historical fantasy.

So that was based on a 13th century French poem called Silence.

And I studied that while I was at Georgetown.

And basically it's a part of the Arthurian legend.

And there's a knight who for complicated and strange reasons, her, their parents decide to raise her as a boy and name him Silence because he can't ever talk about who he really is.

And so there's this weird 13th century gender bending knight who's like what am I supposed to do like the nature made me this way but I've been nurtured that way and when I read the poem I was like I can't believe that's 13th century it was so cool and also deeply in the 13th century way ultimately misogynistic and weird but it was fun to take that fantasy romp with all of the battle scenes and Merlin makes an appearance and tell it with a sort of 21st century lens on gender.

So will you tell us about some of your novels? Sure.

Evolutionary?

Yeah, Revolutionary is my debut.

And it is historical fiction.

And it tells the story of an ancestor of mine, a woman named Deborah Sampson.

And in 1782, she was an indentured servant and she ran away from home.

and disguised herself as a man and fought in the Revolutionary War.

So you can see, based on my own story, why that would be a compelling one to tell.

It was tremendously fun to do the research and then even more fun to make up stuff that wasn't true.

And I'd known her story since I was a little kid, so it was really fun to flesh it out in fact and fiction.

So that was my debut.

Since then, I wrote a realistic fiction novel based on a summer I spent between my freshman and sophomore year in college when I worked as a forest ranger in Wyoming.

Wow.

And that novel is called Continental Divide.

And that was hugely fun to revisit that year or that summer and to think about what I'd learned about myself by going somewhere far away and unfamiliar and sort of precarity of being a transgender person in that space and in that moment, but also the desire for the masculinity of the American West and the sort of cowboy mythology.

So that was really totally different.

And then I was on a two book contract and wrote two fantasy novels.

One is totally different.

Drive my agent crazy.

One was historical fantasy.

So that was based on a 13th century French poem called Silence.

And I studied that while I was at Georgetown.

And basically it's a part of the Arthurian legend.

And there's a knight who for complicated and strange reasons, her, their parents decide to raise her as a boy and name him Silence because he can't ever talk about who he really is.

And so there's this weird 13th century gender bending knight who's like what am I supposed to do like the nature made me this way but I've been nurtured that way and when I read the poem I was like I can't believe that's 13th century it was so cool and also deeply in the 13th century way ultimately misogynistic and weird but it was fun to take that fantasy romp with all of the battle scenes and Merlin makes an appearance and tell it with a sort of 21st century lens on gender.