Torrey Peters visited The Arts Campus at Willits (TACAW) last week to discuss her latest work, “Stag Dance,” a story collection that explores gender, transness and self-perception.
The panel event was part of Mitzi Rapkin’s “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing” podcast series, in which Rapkin interviews different authors and talks about their work as well as the process of writing.
Peters’ event at TACAW also follows a brief interview she did with the local radio station KDNK, in which she talked about her experience and process with writing. A snippet from the interview can be found on KDNK’s website.
The doors opened at 5:30pm, when attendees began trickling in. Fans of Peters from throughout the Valley came, including a local book club that had just finished reading “Stag Dance.” The event began at 6:30pm with Rapkin interviewing Peters about her work, personal experiences and thoughts on writing, later opening up to take audience questions. After the event, Peters signed copies of the book as well as copies of her first novel, “Detransition, Baby,” in the lobby.
Peters first rose to prominence with her 2021 debut novel, which details the lives of three characters and their experiences with transitioning, detransitioning, motherhood and divorce. After its release, the novel was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named one of The New York Times’ best books of the 21st century.
“The brain you use to write a novel isn’t the one you use to promote it,” Peters said. “You have to be likable and charming when you’re on tour. But writing is about being uncomfortable. It’s about saying the hard things, the impolite things.”
After taking a few years to work on a new book, Peters is back with her release of “Stag Dance,” which was published in March. Her new book is made up of three short stories and a titular novel.
The first story, called “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” is a post-apocalyptic tale about a gender plague that renders humans’ ability to produce sex hormones useless. The second is titled “The Chaser” and details a boy who questions his sexuality after he enters a relationship with his roommate. The third short story is titled “The Masker” and follows a character addressing their own identity after people turn on another character. The novel included after the short stories is “Stag Dance” and it follows a lumberjack and his experience as he attends his camp’s ball as a woman.
One of the distinguishing features of “Stag Dance” is its hybrid structure, combining a novel with three novellas, each in a different genre. Peters said she appreciated being able to let each piece take its natural form.
“Publishing asks you to either write stories or write novels. And that’s not always the length that stories want to be,” Peters said. “I was given the space to actually have them be the shape and the form and the variety that they are.” The goal, she said, was to create “a kaleidoscopic experience” of gender.
Peters, who spent two years writing for television between her two books, noted that “Stag Dance” was, in some ways, her reaction to the pressure of a follow-up. Peters said nobody would’ve anticipated a Western frontier novel written entirely in lumberjack slang. “So there were no expectations. It was liberating,” said Peters.
In a political climate that acts critically toward trans people, books like Peters’ that discuss nontraditional gender ideas are facing scrutiny. However, Peters’ experience with this type of criticism has been limited. She attributed some of this to the genre she writes in. Peters said fiction “sneaks around the side so that you can discuss these ideas through emotions, through characters, rather than the polemics that could be accused of being political tracts and therefore banned or attacked.”
Stopping at TACAW was the last stop of Peters’ tour for “Stag Dance.” After the event, Peters said she’ll be continuing work on the sauna she’s building in Vermont and working on her next release.