Tessa Gratton

My newsletter is irregular, but comes with essays, book news, sneak peaks, free fiction and more!

When you sign up, you’ll receive a link to read “This Whole Angry Ocean,” an exclusive sequel short story to Strange Grace. It stars Arthur Couch and All His Emotions.

Why Writing with a Knife?

“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create…when I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart…My soul makes itself through the creative act.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

The first time I read Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, I was twenty-one. It’s a book of essays and poetry about borderlands—physical borderlands between the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, sexual borderlands, linguistic borderlands, psychological and spiritual and creative borderlands. Anzaldúa explores in vivid, lush, bold words those places of liminality and intersection, and she does it to create and recreate a shifting identity for herself. 

Reading it was like peeling back my flesh and pulling out my insides to explore them. It was exciting to follow someone as closely as I—a white queer and genderqueer person familiar with different international and gendered borderlands—could follow, as Anzaldúa traversed this landscape that I didn’t know myself and could never truly be part of, but that I could feel the emotional resonance of through her poetry. The pieces I didn’t know—couldn’t and can’t know—were revelations, too, limitations that my identities construct and require of me, and it was a sharp lesson to learn, but maybe one of the most important of my life. I can feel this, I can touch the resonance, but I cannot be this—nor should I need to. Anzaldúa’s queer space was glorious and violent, and it made me hungry to discover and explore my own Borderlands. I needed to find those places inside myself, the liminal spaces in my identity, and excavate them with as luminous and devastating consequences. Because  Anzaldúa also gave me this gift: she said if you change yourself, you change the world. This has been an anthem I’ve returned to over the years, taking it to mean that only by being brutally honest with myself, my privileges, my slice of the margins, and putting them all into conversation with myself could I learn to be better, choose to be better, stronger, and therefore slowly, one day at a time, maybe make the world better, stronger. The work…is work.

That’s an anthem I have always applied to my writing.

The quote above, “when I write it feels like I’m carving bone” struck me in particular at twenty-one. At the time it spoke to my gender dysphoria in powerful ways, showing me a path toward exploring the violent edges of what I felt and fantasized about through writing and connection. There’s always been a fine line for me between writing my queerness and writing body horror but this passage is one that still reminds me that it’s ok, that maybe there’s not something wrong with me because I write, and dream, with a knife. 

Today I try to write with more joy than violence—or at least with joyful violence—but that’s because I’ve been able to do so much of this work with Borderlands/La Frontera at my side. So much of it clawed into my guts and stayed there. When I need to remember who I want to be, and what I want to do, I pick up the book and favorite passages and challenging verses, dipping into it more like a touchstone than a religion. It always reminds me that as a queer writer I need to to ground my work in my unrest, and in remaking myself, and continue exploring my ever shifting Borderlands.

So I’ve named my newsletter Writing with a Knife because that’s what I strive to do.