Morgan Thomas

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Whenever I read new story collections, I try to think of the reason(s) the writer had for writing that story, for including those words in a selection of them intended to make a reader form an idea of their creator. When that test gets me into a swivet, a frustrated screaming match with that absent author, I know I'm onto something worth following to the end of the trail. I had that sensation reading Morgan Thomas's words from the beginning.

As an example, there's "Taylor Johnson's Lightning Man." This was one of those fantastical reads that grows as you recede from the words but get the feelings so much more powerfully as memories. Those high places got scaled again in the strange, futuristic "Transit," in which the story's liminal between-space left me slightly sadder that I'd been born. There's no way that much longing and unrequited need can not teach you the truth of samsara. And the less-than-desired results of reading other stories, eg "Alta's Place," bring that into ever-sharper focus. The balance of going with Author Thomas's peripatetic imagination to its manywheres comes down on the positive, occasionally excellent, end of the literary map's scale.

In the time-honored tradition of this blog, I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole at the link. There are too many lines for it to fit well into the spaces provided.… (altro)