Courtesy Gabriella Marks
If you’ve ever visited George RR Martin’s Beastly Books bookshop and engaged with its programming, chances are you owe a bit of gratitude to Twig Delujé. A writer with nearly two decades in the biz, Delujé is that glorious combination of ultra-nerdy and openly queer, which just so happens to be the intersection of awesomeness for so many word-lovin’ fools it’s insane. Next week, Delujé hosts a workshop dubbed No Villains or Victims: Developing Powerful LGBTQIA+ Characters (4-5:30 pm Wednesday, June 25. Free. Beastly Books, 418 Montezuma Ave., (505) 412-0575), an informative experience designed to help writers flesh out queer characters without falling into tired patterns amounting to little more than trauma porn or outdated stereotypes. The workshop is an excellent addition to Santa Fe’s many Pride-adjacent offerings this June, so we reached out to Delúje to learn a little more. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Alex De Vore)
Let’s start with your background in writing. What’s your basic story for how you got into it and how you got where you are?
I moved here originally in 2001 for undergrad and went to the College of Santa Fe for creative writing—when the college still existed. I did my undergrad in creative writing. And my mom passed away right before I graduated, but I plowed through and ended up getting into grad school at Portland State University. I wanted to go for their MFA, but the window had closed, and they had this publishing program where I could study all the things I’d have learned in the MFA, but also the business.
So I opened a small press with a fellow student from PSU, and that didn’t last terribly long, it was just…the recession was starting to take off, and I was young. It was called Bare Bones Press & Productions. We closed that and I had to move back home to take care of family things. But I came back here to help my friends open a little farm in 2011. I thought it was going to be six months, but I ended up staying.
In there, I ended up accepted to Lambda Literary, a big deal for queer writers. And I got to work on a piece I’d been struggling with for a long time. Then the Country Queers oral history project reached out to me at some point; I was asked to judge for the Lambda Literary Awards; and through all this…life happens, things get hard. The muse doesn’t necessarily come to you as easily. I ended up working for George RR Martin’s Beastly Books, and I got to be around all these amazing people and industry folks and people taking off with their writing. It was so lovely, but between the press, the marketing and working, I realized I was helping everyone get their stories going, helping them with their careers—without a lot of help for my own. So I hit that wall for a bit, but I’m still working within George’s world, just over in the offices. That has allowed me to have a little more brain bandwidth and the time to once again focus on my own stuff.
Your workshop is about developing better queer characters. Why do you think so many writers lean on a handful of sad tropes when it comes to writing queer characters?
I totally feel that. I myself am, well, I wouldn’t say guilty of that, but it’s something that happens. My friend Cooper Lee Bombardier, also a writer, was saying…I asked what kind of stories he wanted to see, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said, ‘I want to see the trans guy rob the bank, get away with it and get the girl.’ Yes to that—and I think the other part of it is that these sad things, these realistic situations of ‘queer, gay, lesbian, bi, trans folks getting murdered,’ something bad happening? That still happens so frequently, so I feel like it’s cathartic for a lot of people and this way to process for themselves. I’ll stop writing about them when they stop happening.
But I do think there’s ways to balance it out a little more. It’s not like it was in the ’80s and ’90s. Everything I was reading as a teen—I mean, what I could find in a middle America school library, anyway—was a sad story. The majority of gay America, and this is something to remember, lives in rural areas. We’re concentrated in these pods in urban settings, so it looks really big and loud, but the majority of people are out there just living their lives, and this is a long way of me saying there needs to be a lot more kinds of stories to even things out. There are happy endings. Things do work out sometimes. We can have a happy life. But with things that are happening politically right now…it’s important to remember this doesn’t mean it always has to look bad or sad, but these things still happen.
So with the workshop, we need to know where we are now, and also where things have been in order to emphasize what pieces to include. This is what a queer existence looks like: It’s a thousand different things, and it doesn’t have to be heteronormative with the white picket fence, the marriage, the 2.5 kids—you can also just exist and have that be enough. The stories that are not happy endings, not positive, I do think a balance-out needs to occur so it’s not always our narrative that we’re going to die. But is it a very real fear? Yeah, fuck, yes. There’s still no way I’m going to let anyone try and dictate my ability to just exist. Within the workshop, at least, what I’m going to focus on is how do you as a writer, a verbalizer, continue the dialogue forward in a way that is encompassing both of those narratives.
If you had to give your younger self a piece of writerly advice, what would that be?
You’re better than you think. Have the courage to write the thing you don’t want to write.
