[This profile originally appeared in our sister pub The Stranger. -eds]
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore takes long and meandering walks through Capitol Hill most days. From the height of summer to the depths of winter, if the sun is out, sheâs soaking in it. On these walks during the pandemic lockdown, Terry Dactyl came to her. She couldnât write it immediately because she was working on her memoir, Touching the Art, which came out in 2023. Before that, there was The Freezer Door, Sketchtasy, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, among other novels and memoirs, plus six anthologies and another currently in the works. Sheâs a prolific queen because writing is survival, she says.
âWriting is my process of staying alive,â Sycamore says. âIt is embedded in how I live. Specifically, writing everything that I dream of, and everything that fails me, all of the emotional reality. Often, there are things Iâm afraid to say, and then I put them in my writing, and theyâre said. Then I can say it! I can read it in the book, and people arenât that shocked by it. Often, what people are shocked by has nothing to do with what Iâm afraid of. When I write the things that I think, âIf I write it, I might die,â and then I write it and I donât die, thatâs part of the process of staying alive.â Sycamore goes deeper still about this question of life or death, how it has been quite literal for her, and how writing has shown her how to live differently in the world.
âWhen I was a teenager, growing up in a world that wanted me to die or disappear, I had to project invulnerability in order to survive. There was no other way. That was just reality, you know? I needed that invulnerability.â Once upon a time, The Strangerâs Homosexual Agenda column described Sycamore as a âgender-fucking tower of pure pulsing purple fabulous,â and Iâd say that description stands, in case you need context for why she grew up thinking the thickest of skins was a way to stay alive.
But thatâs changed for her. âNow, vulnerability is how I connect with people and my work,â Sycamore says. âIâm always writing toward the gaps, the moments of failure or frights or fear, anxiety, loneliness, and the moments that allow us to survive. Those sudden moments of connection in the world, when we move deeper into breath, whatever creates that. I think often what creates that [breath] is being honest about all the depth of everything that weighs us down.â
Terry Dactyl is filled with these moments, one after another, and itâs what makes the novel powerful and compulsively readable, especially as she essentially restarts the story halfway through. But weâll come back to that.
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