Diana Goetsch, Lars Horn & Putsata Reang: A Conversation

Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, among others. She also wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. For 21 years, Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher at Stuyvesant High School and Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. This Body I Wore: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) chronicles her long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. “How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” is a question often asked of trans people, and Goetsch addresses it with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a beloved teacher, and her plunge into the city’s cross-dressing subculture in the 1980s and ‘90s. This Body I Wore is not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of trans life, one at once unusually public and closeted.

Lars Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, on Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Horn is the author of Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, (Graywolf Press), an essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In their hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book weaving short vignettes about fish, shrines, and antiquities serving as interludes between longer essays. Horn swims through various subjects, roving across maritime history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. These essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of “the body” as a cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.

Putsata Reang is an author and journalist. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Guardian, Ms., and The Seattle Times, among other publications. Born in Cambodia and raised in rural Oregon, Reang has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries, including Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Thailand. When Reang was 11 months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending 23 days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, “Ma” resisted the captain’s orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, she rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child’s life. The story became a family legend. Over the years, Reang lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt. But her adoration and efforts were no match for Ma’s expectations. And when, at 40, tells Ma she is finally getting married – to a woman – it breaks their bond in two. Ma and Me: A Memoir (MCD) explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty.