We're interested in the notion that creative success means something different to every artist. Can you describe a moment in recent history when you felt that you succeeded creatively?

About a month ago, I was working on the final version of my manuscript before it was to be sent off to my publisher to be formatted into book pages, and there was one part of the book centering around college graduation where I just knew that I hadn't written my best work. I knew that I was glazing over things, but didn't think I had the creative energy or time to fix it. And then, like an eleventh hour miracle, I finally figured out what I needed to say. I sat down at my computer at noon on the day that the draft was set to be finalized and I wrote what was perhaps the most brilliant seven paragraphs of my entire life. It was like nirvana. It was like electricity. It was transcendence. In those moments, when something is just flowing through you from goddess knows where, you almost feel like a prophet. It's sublime. I live for moments like that. That's what success looks like for me.

What are some of channels you use to connect with your audience? How do you most like to make use of these channels?

I mostly use Instagram, but it's hard. I never feel like I'm enough for the platform. It fills me to the brim with feelings of inadequacy. Every time I log on and see who is getting engagement and who isn't, it makes me feel ugly and boring and undesirable and poor. It's something I'm increasingly trying to work on, because on the one hand, people tell me that seeing me on Instagram gives helps them to feel supported and powerful in the world. But participating in Instagram culture makes me feel terrible about myself. So how can I engage with my main audience-building platform when it is also the thing that most undoes me? How can your main source of support also be your greatest trigger, your greatest mental health challenge? That's the unbearable conundrum of queer and trans visibility I guess.

What is something that you've done that has helped you build sustainability (emotional, financial, or otherwise) into your practice?

The best thing I've done for myself lately is learned to walk to work. I never, ever start my day working from home. I always make myself get up, get showered, and walk to the coffeeshop near my apartment to check emails and start my day. Getting out of the house each morning, first thing, puts me on track for a productive day most every day and it's the only reason I'm able to have a career. It's ironic, but Hollywood is extremely difficult for extroverts. As someone who thrives when surrounded by dozens of colleagues and coworkers and other people each day, the isolation of developing my career and building up to making my own show can be punishing. And then I'll get a gig, or a project will move forward, and for about a month or so, I'll be super super busy and back to back and completely surrounded by other people. And then it'll dry up again and I'll be alone. So finding a ritual to combat the feeling of isolation — walking to the coffeeshop first thing, getting out into the world first thing every single day and accepting that that means paying $4 for a latte — is the only way that I've been able to make it through the precarity of my early career. It's been worth every single dollar. Cups of coffee are the best investment I have ever made in my mental and professional health.

Whose work have you been engaging with this summer? How has the work of others influenced your own over the past few months?

I've been super inspired by my friend Blake (@JohnDeeriere on Instagram). His work is such a refreshing rebellion for me. He talks so openly about being a queer person from the south/midwest and feeling completely alienated living in cities like Los Angeles and New York, which is 100% my experience. As someone who grew up in North Carolina, as someone from the "underdeveloped" "uncultured" part of the country, I've always held a lot of resentment about the fact that I HAD TO move to Los Angeles or New York if I wanted to have a career as an artist. It's so unfair that I had to leave behind my family and home community in order to have my voice heard, but it's how our entertainment and media industries are built, even in the internet age. Blake has helped me to be less afraid of claiming my dissonance from Los Angeles, from New York City, from "big cities," and from wealthy/connected/cultured people. These are places and people that have mistreated me as much (if not more) than they have treated me well, and I felt afraid to talk about that for a long time. So I'm super inspired by Blake.

I'm also really inspired by Roxane Gay and her book Hunger. There is something so compelling about her prose. It is accessible yet sublime, literary while effortless. She aches onto the page and compels her audience to face that without remedy. Her work is an exercise in the limits of empathy, in compelling people to feel the kind of powerlessness that unruly bodies (of many types) are subjected to in our world. In a media landscape where I feel constant and relentless pressure to be a "perky trans writer," Roxane is a shining beacon of how you can have a career as a person of difference by simply aching, by bleeding onto the page and not apologizing for the mess.

Where is the best place for people to keep up with your work?

Sadly, Instagram is where I do most of my announcements and stuff. It's the social media platform that is least destructive for my mental health (which is not to say that it isn't destructive for my mental health, just to say that it is least destructive) so it's what I use most often. Follow me if you please, but much, much more importantly, buy my book Sissy when it comes out next Spring <3 And please buy from your local bookstore if you can afford to! And be sure to pass the book around to friends who don't have a lot of money right now so that they can read it too. Borrowed books are happy books 🙂