'Saving' Trans Author Carter Sickles ? Women Born Transsexual

From The Advocate:? http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2012/11/09/saving-trans-author-carter-sickles

Transgender author Carter Sickles is making waves in the literary community with his powerful storytelling that resists the temptation to make precious the hardships in rural Southern America.

BY Sunnivie Brydum
November 09 2012

Carter Sickles made an impressive entry into the world of fiction with his heartfelt debut, The Evening Hour, a compelling exploration of the wreckage wrought upon rural Appalachia and its longtime residents by a harsh type of coal mining known as mountaintop removal. The Evening Hourhas been widely praised, with many critics commending Sickles? power to create genuine, complex characters through stark, honest language.

Sickles? ability to create insightful, tender and profoundly human characters shines through in his short story ?Saving,? featured in The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, now available through Topside Press. The characters in ?Saving,? a trans man and his cisgender girlfriend who travel to the rural south to pack away his dead grandmother?s home, are flawed and messy, both finding themselves in a setting ? and relationship ? that no longer feels right. ?Saving? holds its own against an impressive gathering of short fiction from 28 trans authors and emerges as one of the most honest and universal stories in The Collection. We caught up with Sickles, who identifies as a gay trans man, to pick his brain on character development, queer identity, and what he would have said to his younger self.

The Advocate: Both The Evening Hour and ?Saving? create powerful landscapes set in rural southern America. Is that the environment you grew up in? Where were you born and raised?
Carter Sickles: I grew up in central Ohio, actually. My grandparents and most of my family are from southeastern Ohio, not far from West Virginia, where The Evening Hour takes place. Much of the culture and the socio-economic landscape in that part of Ohio is very similar to West Virginia.

You received a good deal of praise for your earnest portrayal of rural Appalachia in The Evening Hour, some critics saying you stripped away the rural romance that often clouds these stories. What drove you to write so honestly about this locale, decimated by mountaintop removal and corporate, economic, and social exploitation?

Continue reading at:? http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2012/11/09/saving-trans-author-carter-sickles

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Source: http://womenborntranssexual.com/2012/11/10/saving-trans-author-carter-sickles/

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