A Glorious Conversation with Lee Mandelo
Photocredit: Sarah Jane Sanders
Lee Mandelo is an American critic, writer, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include queer and speculative fiction. Summer Sons, their debut novel, is a contemporary southern gothic dealing with queer masculinity, fast cars, and ugly inheritances. Their other work can be found in magazines such as Tor.com, Uncanny, and Nightmare, and they have been a past nominee for various awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo. They are currently living in Lexington and pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky. I had the pleasure of asking Lee about what are some essential traits that every great antagonist and protagonist should have to carry a story, what have they learned from their education to better their writing process, and what they think the role of a critic is in literature, and so much more.
UZOMAH: What are some key elements that a plot must have to reveal and draw out what the reader will find appealing about the character?
LEE: Broadly speaking, I don't approach "plot" and "character" as terribly separate—so, that certainly shapes the process of a revelation within my work. Story is character is story! I do think constantly about the emotional through-lines of how characters relate to one another, to their worlds, and to the social influences all around them. As the plot moves through scenes, those interconnected external events, the reader should be drawn along by the character's natural reactions… which also creates a connection to the character. It's a way of getting intimate with them. So for me, the key element plots should have for drawing the reader toward the character is a strong sense of effect. Or, put another way, the sense that events are happening not for the convenience of the narrative but because of a real emotional drive—so that, even if the reader doesn't agree with a characters' choices, they can feel how we got to those choices.
But I do tend to come to the drafting table with an emotion or a person or a theme in mind first, as opposed to a traditional "plot point," so maybe that's a personal idiosyncrasy!
U: How do you develop character arcs in your writing?
L: I often come to a project knowing what the central character arc, or thematic arc, will be—which shapes the structure of the whole piece. For example, in Summer Sons, I started out knowing I wanted to explore masculinity, queerness, and the ghosts of the Appalachian South all at once. In developing Andrew's character arc, I wanted to pull apart some of my own attachments around masculinity—good and bad—and inject a little hope in there: the hope that maybe men could be decent to one another could love one another well. Through that process, the book also has to grapple with grief and trauma. Knowing the desired arc, the plot evolves to drive forward and support those thematic/character changes. Second, third, fourth, etc. drafts are all about narrowing in on that character arc, making sure the emotional beats hit as hard as possible, determining how the other characters are shaping the plot but also how their arcs can be developed too, and so on. It's delicate work!
U: How has writing helped you be the most authentic to who you indeed are?
L: Art practice is, I think, only possible from a place of "authenticity" (if we believe in the idea of an authentic self at all!). What I mean by that is: the art we make is drawn from our guts, our feelings, our experiences of the world. When you make art, be that writing or otherwise, you've got to dig your hands into the meat of your own emotions and beliefs to pull something useful, thoughtful, or evocative out. I often find that, when I read through a just-finished rough draft, I've somehow answered for myself in fiction a question I've been grappling with within my personal life. I'm very drawn to messy emotions, to intimate kinds of complexity. A scholar I'm super fond of, Martin Manalansan IV, talks about how the best place to do research from is your own unique, messy, individual life—and I think what works for art, too. But it does require a certain amount of (sometimes cringe-inducing) honesty or self-reflection.
U: What have been the benefits of discussing gender publicly? Have there been any downfalls? What would you suggest to someone going through the same thing, and who wants to approach the issue the same way you did?
L: In the midst of a rising global far-right—which is and has always been obsessed with enforcing patriarchal norms around gender and sexuality, as Judith Butler has so thoroughly explained in recent essays in the Guardian and elsewhere—alongside the zombie-like revivification of certain forms of conservative white "feminism"… I don't see how, as a queer artist, it's possible not to talk about gender. So there's a political dimension, of course, one that for me is less about visibility or representation and more about an open, unapologetic presence. I'm borrowing from Ocean Vuong, there, who has spoken so well about the ways "representation" only glosses over the optical surface of material life for marginalized peoples. Presence instead brings our whole complex self to our art, to our conversations, to the field itself. The downfalls are, naturally, things like harassment or violence—which is also a danger of insisting on "visibility" as the central queer or gender-based issue. To get a little nerdy, per Foucault: visibility is always a trap. For example, the proliferation of transphobia in public discourse has come after the rise in awareness of trans existence… but so, too, has access to community and solidarity for more trans and gender-nonconforming peoples.
Overall, I think my main advice for anyone starting to feel a way about their gender or sexuality is: don't get too tied up in finding a tight-fitting label, one you have to stick to, as if to prove your place or worth in the community. Queerness is a fluid and dynamic identification; to be queer is to be resistant to normative cis-hetero patriarchal ideas of desire, bodies, relationships—which is why we should be looking for whose hands we can hold, who we can be in community with, rather than drawing strict categories to shut folks out. Be generous in your learning, be generous to your communities, and be generous to yourself. Plus: making art about your evolution, about the exploration of those new contours of your growing self, can be a beautiful way to process even if you never share that art with anyone.
U: How do you use what you have learned from your education regarding creative writing to better your writing process?
L: I think what my education has given me as an artist is a burning, constant curiosity about the world, which is reflected in my reading. For example, reading across as many genres as possible—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, scholarship, and so on—definitely strengthens and stretches my art practice. Bless the poets! They're doing such cool shit, and they always make me think about language in expansive ways. Reading closely, with an eye to how other people craft their prose… always gives you more tools for your toolbox. Workshopping, too, helps you get a sense of how other people receive your style or the central themes you're most obviously obsessed with.
As for me, there's also a reciprocal relationship between my work as a scholar, a critic, and a fiction writer. The scholarship informs my sense of history, politics, and ethics; the background research then sparks me toward exploring certain issues through art, such as the wrangling with whiteness and academia in the South in Summer Sons; the fiction writing then makes me curious about other folks' work, and how they achieved similar or different ends—hence the draw toward criticism. And then, back around the circle again. Lastly, I think my writing has benefited immensely from the way critical theory asks me to sit with challenging, conceptual prose and figure out how those ideas are communicated—but just as much, I benefit from reading horny fanfiction or shamelessly pulpy gay melodramas, which pull me back toward how the body feels things.
U: What do you think the role of a critic is in literature? What made you want to become a critic?
L: Criticism serves several purposes, sometimes simultaneously. Lots of my favorite fiction writers are also brilliant critics—Brandon Taylor, for example—which I think comes from a devotion to the art form. Like, powerful love for fiction and a fascination with what literature does to the culture at large. Critics are also generally obsessed with "how it works": why we make art, what art is for, what the art does and how. Scholars like Jennifer Doyle, who wrote Hold it Against Me: On Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, do criticism that helps us understand how to wrestle as audiences with 'challenging' art—and how intersectional factors like gender, sexuality, class and race pressure our readings (or, how we're read). Plus, as a reader of a lot of translated fiction, I also see a strange, almost-cousins relationship between literal translation and the work of criticism? They're both done from a place of desire to share the text with someone else in a new way.
Honestly, these days, I approach my essays on other people's writing as a combination love-letter and public conversation. I hope for the audience to maybe gain fresh insight into the book itself, a new cultural-slash-social lens to read it through, or a language to further express what resonated with them in the first place. And there's once again a political dimension: when I started writing criticism, at around nineteen years old, I was immensely frustrated by how little discussion I saw of queer books by queer critics. For example, I read a lot of criticism that flat-out fucking missed the point of the piece because the critic was so deeply unfamiliar with, and uninterested in, the perspective the writer was working from. This is, of course, a conversation we can also have about the ways a field made up of predominantly white, cis, middle-class critics tend to fumble overwork by writers of color, poor writers, and so on as well.
U: How can the literary and visual arts give more insight into what it means to be transgender and a part of the LGBTQIA community?
L: Two answers occurred to me simultaneously, since I was still gnawing on the question of criticism.
The first answer: engaging generously, over and over again, with arts and culture produced by creators who are different from oneself—and being chill with it not being for you—develops a more expansive understanding of the world as seen through their eyes. There are so many insights into queer life to be gained from the arts… but right now I'm particularly focused on the eros and resistance within how queer visual artists engage with bodies. Ren Hang, for example, often photographed bodies under pressure: naked flesh squishing onto naked flesh, the liquidity of piss or sweat or water in a bathtub sliding over skin, 'gender' dissolving in the face of genital frankness. Or there's Mark McKnight, whose Heaven is a Prison depicts fleshy men's bodies fucking under an open sky, contrasted to the starkness of nature. Then we might consider Cassils, the trans performance artist whose nudity and muscle and movement all perform statements on our cultures of violence—statements about impact. And there's Ron Athey, too, whose work is explored in the Jennifer Doyle book. Intense expressions of the risks and beauties of living with a body that can be hurt, that can be desired, that can feel pleasure as well as pain… provide some visceral insights into queer and trans life.
The second answer: arts and culture wherein queer and trans folks engage their own experiences, emotions, and stories without an eye toward straight, cis reception are truly powerful. The insights queer artists can offer one another, across times and geographies and languages, are also world-expanding, healing, and significant. But for us to access that power, I think queer artists (and audiences) have to be willing to get messy in our work, to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. As you might guess, I'm against the idea of respectability politics in art—the premise that our queerness should be packaged to be consumable and friendly to a mainstream audience. Nah, no thanks. Instead, I'd prefer we make art for ourselves, and let other people come to it, hoping for their willingness to be changed or challenged in the process.
U: What are some essential traits that every great antagonist and protagonist should have to carry a story?
L: Oh, a fun place to end!
Strongly felt attachments are essential for a protagonist or antagonist carrying a story. Desires, fears, hopes, shames, and so on all build our sense of why a character does the things they do, to whom, and what outcomes they anticipate. Even if the strongly felt attachment is an absence of attachment—like, isolation or loneliness—a great, fully realized character should possess a rich internal life and consistent emotional logic. Now, will the reader ever see those feelings made explicit on the page? Maybe not, especially for a secondary or side character, but the writer should know them. Drawing from those internal lives creates characters whose actions drive a story forward because they're naturally going to rub up against other character's own motives and desires.
For more information about Lee’s writing please visit their site. Also, follow them on Instagram and Twitter.
