Writing requires a degree of conviction that does not come easily to me: the belief that what I am making is worthwhile. And so it is always frightening to follow the language down, chase an obsession, trust an impulse. And sometimes pleasurable, as risk often is. 

Two months before I went on estrogen, I started writing my way through the last question I felt I had to answer before I could: what would it mean to do this now, at thirtysomething, with all that was already behind me behind me? The Marschallin, the thirtysomething noblewoman at the center of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier, is not trans, but in her anxiety about aging, the passage of time, and the winnowing of possibility, I recognized a slant reflection of my own situation. And in hers, I found a voice in which it felt possible to speak after a long silence.

So began a stranger and more unwieldy book than I knew I was capable of writing, one sung across many voices—a series of literary mirrors. Not a disavowal of the lyric impulse, quite, but a refraction of.

I am extraordinarily grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for the encouragement this fellowship represents, and for the material support it will provide as I continue to find my way down and through this book, to new questions and still more voices.