Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Image: Dorothy Edwards)
One recent Sunday evening, writer and queer activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore was walking from her home near the Capitol Hill branch of Seattle Public Library and toward Volunteer Park when she spotted one of the neighborhood’s ubiquitous feral rabbits.
“Look at that cute rabbit,” she said, delighted by the small creature as it scurried along the sidewalk toward the protection of a row of hedges. “The rabbits are the best thing that’s happened to us in the last five years. They came right with the pandemic, too. I mean, we’ve always had rabbits, but you might have seen one a week, if you were lucky. Now, you might see ten a night.”
Neighborhood walks are essential to Sycamore’s creativity. This was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, a productive period when she wrote two books that proved popular among readers and critics. So, when the opportunity arose to interview Sycamore for CHS, it made sense to do so while on one of her regular neighborhood walks.
A lot has happened since CHS last spoke to Sycamore in 2020. Her memoir, The Freezer Door (Semiotext(e), 2020), drew favorable reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post, was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books by O, The Oprah Magazine and an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, earned a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Touching The Art (Soft Skull Press, 2023), a mash-up blending memoir, criticism, and social history, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards and the Washington State Book Awards.
Sycamore, 52, was born in the Washington, DC, area and lived in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Seattle over the past 30 years. She has edited six anthologies and written four novels and three memoirs over the past 25 years. But nothing has quite connected with audiences like The Freezer Door.
“I think those themes of alienation, disconnection, and urban loneliness [in The Freezer Door] really resonated for people because of the pandemic,” explained Sycamore. “Obviously, the book was written way before that. But I think in some ways that [pandemic period] did help with the critical reception.”
Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, which Coffee House Press will publish on November 11, centers on its narrator, Terry Dactyl, a trans girl raised by lesbian mothers on Capitol Hill. The story spans four decades—from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement of the 2020s—with Terry spending her teens populating Seattle’s late-night house parties and her twenties and thirties amidst New York City’s art galleries and drug-fueled, gender-bending nightclubs, before she returns to a gentrified Seattle rattled by the pandemic lockdown just before the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
“In 2020 and 2021, I was going on long walks at every chance, and the character of Terry Dactyl emerged in my head,” Sycamore explained as we meandered past Lowell Elementary School toward East Prospect Street and the entrance to Volunteer Park. “Everywhere I was walking, I was thinking about Terry in minute detail: her formative years in Seattle—the Biltmore, where she lived as a young child, the house on 12th Avenue near Volunteer Park where she grew up after that—and her relationship with her mothers. So, the story was very place-based on Capitol Hill. I just kept ruminating on every detail. When I started writing it, it was very organic because I had been thinking about it for so long.”
Neighborhood residents will find familiarity in the novel’s settings, past and present. There’s the pre-QFC Broadway Market, as well as shuttered businesses like the Gravity Bar, Bulldog News, and the Pink Zone along Broadway. Over in the Pike/Pine area, the Egyptian Theatre, rainbow crosswalks, and the Cuff make appearances. Terry’s skewering of weirdly named cookie-cutter-designed modern apartment buildings is especially entertaining—from Solis (“Obviously pronounced ‘soulless’”) to Beryl (“Gives mint green a bad name”) to Sunset Electric (“Prison yard aesthetic”).
Terry Dactyl has already earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and a book launch event will be held at 3 PM on Saturday, October 25th, at the Seattle Art Museum downtown.
By the time we reached Volunteer Park, many of its features—the brick water tower, granite Black Sun sculpture, and rippling reservoir—were shrouded in darkness, but Sycamore came alive as we stepped onto the vast and open lawn. “I just love Volunteer Park,” she marveled. “We just stepped into this whole oasis. The trees are gorgeous. To me, the trees are the best thing about Seattle. It’s very quiet. I love sunbathing when it’s warm or walking here in the rain. It’s just the right distance from my place. It’s a nice walk, but it’s also like coming into another world. I love that about this park.”
Next up for Sycamore? A four-city book tour for Terry Dactyl that includes the Strand in New York City on November 19, Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on December 1, Greedy Reads (Remington) in Baltimore on December 3, and Powell’s Books in Portland on January 13. She’s editing the anthology ACT UP Beyond New York: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis, which Haymarket Books will publish. She’s also finished writing a “hybrid nonfiction” book entitled Social Distancing.
“My goal in writing is to be as vulnerable as possible,” Sycamore reflected. “The only way I can connect with the world is by being vulnerable. It’s how I survive. In my writing, sometimes I say things I wouldn’t actually tell someone. If there’s something I’m too afraid to say aloud, I put it in my writing. I think being as vulnerable as possible helps my writing, and it helps me.”
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