A story about finding love, figuring out your place in the world, and learning to embrace the challenges life throws in your path.
DANCING BAREFOOT
by Alice Boyle
Text Publishing, Summer 2022
Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Patch is also trying to avoid a vindictive school bully, forgetting to be supportive of her transitioning best friend, Edwin, and worrying about a potential new stepmother turning out to be the evil Baroness from The Sound of Music.
Alice Boyle is an English teacher and author living in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s written for SBS Voices and the Stella Prize, and her short story ‘The Exchange’ was published in the anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia. In 2019 she was highly commended for the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program.
The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection MANYWHERE witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.
On an early-April dawn in 2003, in a Portland hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby girl comes back to life and turns a vibrant cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rumanni’s beloved soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in a bombing. To Nuha, the girl’s great-aunt, there’s no question that this inexplicable child somehow embodies their sacred family history, when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a famous, unlikely love.
In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.
A powerful, heart-warming novel sharing the embarrassments and excitements, horrors and humiliations, glories and defeats of a group of twenty-something year-olds, navigating life, love, sex and their dreams. Trying to appear ordinary on the outside but inside obsessing on the unspoken rules of what’s okay and racked with self-doubt.