Guest Host [sarah] Cavar

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Hello from sabbatical, where I have been on-and-off sick for the past couple of weeks! This sickness is not surprising, as it’s coming on the heels of ten days of intense travel and socializing, but wow am I ever bored to death of being sick. 

You know what never gets boring, though? Caring for yourself and your community. Check out my linktree for resources to distribute throughout your community to help people who are vulnerable right now, nearby and around the world.

Now, meet your guest host for this week’s digest! [sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (Featherproof Books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They are editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place, and their work can be found in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of California: Davis, Cavar teaches bicoastally and lives on the internet. More at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com. 

Take us away, Cavar!

-gailey

Hi everyone! I’m excited to guest-host the Stone Soup Digest this week. While I have a lot to share this week—some fun, some thought-provoking, some sobering, all (hopefully) interesting—I’d be remiss not to open by acknowledging the recent uptick in violence in the ongoing Palestinian genocide, and the downstream impacts of said violence here in the imperial core with the attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil. These events and others are a reminder that the devastation of u.s. empire will always, always find its way “home,” and that robust anti-fascist action is only possible when we are willing to fight for the liberation of others at least as hard as we fight for our own.

I hope that the links and readings I offer you this week will help readers with the luxury to do so to replenish their precious stores of energy. Balance, community, and intentionality are how we make it through *gestures at the general state of things* all of this. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and keep fighting for a better world for all of us.

Never Ask Permission

First, for reads: this article from 2022 might be one of my favorites of all time. Titled “‘Never ask permission’: How two trans women ran a legendary underground surgical clinic in a rural tractor barn,” it’s pretty much what it says on the tin –– trans women doing the labor of care when it had to be done, when they –– and their patients –– realized that no state or medical power was going to come and save them. This is the kind of action I dream about –– hell, it’s the kind I wrote about in Failure to Comply and yet imagined had not, could not, would not happen. But we find a way. We always find a way: out of the carceral logics of gender, out from beneath the boot of state power, out from the clinical gaze.

(Did I mention how much I love trans people and being trans?! And the speculative art that is trans life?!?!)

KB Brookin’s Instagram Account

You can also find some trans joy in my second recommendation, which is my writer-friend KB Brookins’s instagram account. Lately, they’ve been making reels dedicated to “trans news that doesn’t suck,” helping us sustain practical optimism in this moment of escalating danger.

The Library of Trans Alexander

A recent discovery of mine in the trans art world is The Library of Trans Alexander (LOTA), an archive of transmasculine literature, broadly understood (including zines and more in addition to traditional books). They’re based in Brooklyn, NY (isn’t everything?) And hoping to open their library for circulation this summer. In the meantime, their site is a great way to find new books. Also, there’s The Transfeminine Review, which is a bit more established as a resource for discovering transfemme-authored fiction. They do great work in promoting small-press works.

Art on Instagram

I’ve been appreciating a lot of lesser-known art and artists lately, especially those who are playing with ideas of personhood, embodiment, and non/compliance with those expectations. I love the instagram account 10tonfetus. It’s run by Madison Polidoro, an artist of the uncanny and weird and deeply, deeply unsettling. I am so compelled by art that takes the human body, or what is imagined to be the human body and disrupts it in ways that make us uncomfortable. 

Uncanny Cities and Strange Entities

Speaking of the uncanny, a game/webtext/experience I love is corru.observer, in which you can explore strange cities and meet (and not meet) stranger entities. Playing it is kind of like speed-running a bunch of the pages on the SCP Foundation site, but in an artistically unforgettable audio/visual setting.

Failure to Comply

Lastly, I wanted to quickly return to some news from my own book-life, particularly, to this interview I did with Keene Short for Archer Magazine. In it, I talk about the complexities of writing a book where gender-affirming and self-injurious modes of body modification were central to the plot, and furthermore, depicted as not-always-so-different-after-all. 

Some of the most exciting trans art I’ve encountered in the last few years has come from a space of risk, vulnerability, and a willingness to embrace unpalatability –– I’m thinking of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s work, of course; of Rivers Solomon’s latest book, Model Home; of Andrew Joseph White’s books; of the indie novel Transmuted by Eve Harms. The other thing these books share is an orientation, implicit and/or explicit, toward Madness—I capitalize it to refer to its political dimensions as well as its individual ones—as a way of understanding trans life in a cisheteropatriarchial world.

It matters so much to me that we think about trans liberation beyond the ability to do “healthy” things with our bodies, and beyond the idea that the ideal trans subject must be mentally and physically “well.” I am actually very unwell, and I fight alongside unwell people. Failure to Comply is about a couple of unwell, toxic, crazy trans dykes struggling against medico-authoritarianism. They aren’t heroes, per se, and they often do terrible things to themselves. They can be mean to each other. They want new bodies for reasons that feel nefarious. This is the point—that we deserve bodily autonomy with no strings attached. I always want to live in a creative world in which risky, trans, Mad lives are celebrated as they are.

CAVAR IS CURRENTLY READING: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

So, I have a bit of an allergy to buzzy books, which means that when I do read them, it’s almost always a year or more after the buzz fades a bit. I guess I try to make my own buzz when the time comes! Currently, I’m late-buzzing about The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, an ingeniously-told tale that honestly feels too expansive and innovative for the “frame story” label. It’s about guilt, and empire, and loyalty, and heritage, and the most brutal aspects of kinship. It is also an active dialogue, a myth/past, and a present at once. 

I recommend everyone check out this kinda impossible-to-describe-in-the-best-way book, including those of you who (like me!!) are not Fantasy Readers per se. (Shades of A Stranger in Olondria?!) This is the kind of book that will launch 1000 dissertations, and can be loved on a story level and a craft level and an everything-level at once.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

CAVAR RECOMMENDS A FEATURED NEW RELEASE: Wrong Winds by Ahmad Almallah

I'm incredibly excited about Wrong Winds (Fonograf Editions) by Ahmad Almallah, a Palestinian poet whose work I’ve been following for some time now. It was written during the first few months of the genocide, and defamiliarizes the archetypal Classical Poet –– white, male, European –– while reappropriating their language to attempt to describe the devastating and indescribable. 

Fonograf is itself a really, really cool small press, whose books are gorgeous objects themselves. They also have a Bandcamp, where you can listen to sample tracks of a few poems.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Thank you, Cavar! 

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In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—gailey