One Month Until CRAWL

A book about transgender!!! Ever heard of it??

This is the email in which I tell you that my book is coming out in one month (October 21st, 2025) and that there are multiple, concrete steps you, yes, YOU, can take to ensure its enduring success. Every little thing counts, every little thing moves the needle on sales, exposure, and my chances of one day being invited to talk about my book on late-night TV, should late-night TV continue to exist through coming weeks. I will give you those action items in a second—feel free to scroll there now, in fact, because I am about to miserably attempt to put my book in today’s political context.

I am hundreds of years old. I may not look it, but I have been alive for hundreds of years. And it is for this reason that I am able to so expertly keep my eyes on eternity when it comes to my work. Hopefully I go viral on TikTok or something before the book comes out and the launch makes a big splash—if you have the power to make Crawl go viral on TikTok, please do so, and hurry—but it is far more important to me that this book is one that endures. I don’t know what the future holds for trans people in America. I don’t understand what role trans art has played, is playing, or will play in that future. All I know is I tried to write the book I wanted to read—lyrical, realist fiction exclusively about transmasculine people. I wanted a book that honestly, rigorously depicted a present-day transsexual man’s consciousness.

I wanted literature about trans men because I didn’t know how to think about myself when I transitioned. All I had was desire, raw and immediate and wordless and true. The desire for women, then the desire for men. Desire is undeniable; a truth of the body. I have been obsessed with the concept of truth for as long as I can remember—as a trans person with OCD, how could I not be? Truth is elusive when you have OCD. You can’t trust yourself to know what’s true all the time. Did I lock the front door? Am I really straight? Am I really cis? Truth is mandated when you are trans. Are you sure you want to transition? Does your therapist agree? I didn’t have the language. All I had was desire. With this book, I tried to put language to desire—the desire for sex and romance, the desire to be understood, the desire for respect, the desire for privacy, the desire for safety, the desire for certainty, the desire for peace, the desire to live as a man.

There will always be trans men, and trans men will always have to confront the task of executing their vision of ideal manhood for themselves. I hope this book is one trans men everywhere can look to for ways to think about their lives and their place in their communities. I understand the situation for trans people in America is very bad right now and not exactly poised to improve. My book is not for the people who are responsible for escalating the bad situation. My book is for trans men, now and in the future.

Okay, okay, the not-trans-men reading this? The book is for you, too. All the stuff anyone comes to literary fiction for—beautiful sentences, surprising insights, bonafide freak shit—is the stuff of Crawl. Hopefully the blurbs from George Saunders, Torrey Peters, Carmen Maria Machado, Andrea Lawlor, Mona Awad, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Dana Spiotta and Grace Byron have convinced trans men and not-trans-men alike. But if you’re thinking I paid these people off or something, you might be swayed by this starred review in Kirkus Reviews or this glowing endorsement from Publishers Weekly. You could wait until the tour, I guess—it’s shaping up to be a 13 city marathon, featuring events in New York City, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Syracuse, Austin, Seattle (again!), Ann Arbor, Madison, Chicago, and Las Vegas, among others. If you’re STILL not convinced the book is inarguably good, well, stay tuned on Instagram, because I’ve got more shit to brag about that I can’t share yet.

All of the above is very promising for Crawl's success. However, the best shot this book has of exploding onto the scene and finding readers far and wide is in your hands. Here’s what you can do now and/or when the book comes out next month:

1. Preorder from your local bookstore. Listen, I know we’ve already done this. If you’ve already preordered, THANK YOU, I LOVE YOU. If you haven’t, please specifically preorder from your local bookstore, because it will help convince the bookstore that my book is good and that they should stock it. Don’t have a local bookstore? Get it from one in Seattle, then, where every story in Crawl takes place. I recommend Elliot Bay Book Company and Third Place Books, who are hosting me for my two Seattle-based launch events. Bookshop.org is good, too. Crawl is a paperback original, which means it only costs $17 before tax. $17 is how much I paid for a sandwich in Santa Monica yesterday. A sandwich! It was a good sandwich, but come on.

2. Request the book through your local library. You’ve got a library card, right? RIGHT?? Well, go to the little website for your library and see if they’ve ordered Crawl. If they don’t already have it, put in a request. If they do have it, check out the book! If you forgot how to read on purpose, a choice for which I’d fault no one, that’s completely fine. Don’t even read the book, whatever, just check it out from the library and then return it later. Checking out the book from the library boosts library sales, which are a huge deal.

3. Rate the book on Goodreads or The StoryGraph. Seriously, you don’t even have to write anything if you don’t want to, just rate it—or you can shitpost, I don’t care. I mean, I really care about the wonderfully generous reviews I have already received on Goodreads/The StoryGraph, and I will really care if you write something wonderfully generous. But if you just write, like “lol this rocked” or “sickos.jpg” and give Crawl five stars, I’ll think that’s awesome. Not as awesome as this review, for instance, but still very, very awesome.

4. Post. Yes, I am calling on you to Post. I don’t care how many followers you have or on what platform. Please, for the love of God, if you like the book, just post. My ideal post about the book is trans men taking shirtless selfies with physical copies. That is a pretty specific ask, I know, but somebody already did this and now I am hungry for more, so I’m going to put it out there. If you need an excuse to post a thirst trap, I am begging you to make my book your excuse. If that’s not your speed, post a photo of a page or paragraph you like. Post a tirade about how much you hate the book on your Instagram story or your Blogspot. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE… DON’T PROVE I’M RIGHT/POST!!!!

All right. I think that’s plenty for now. I will tentatively plan to send another newsletter on or around pub-day, which I’ll remind you is Tuesday, October 21st. I’ll have more stuff to brag about and maybe more tour dates to announce. You can learn how to RSVP to various book events/generally keep track of the tour here. In the meantime, be kind to yourself.

Cover + first blurbs for CRAWL

Hold onto your hats, 'cause these blurbs are A TRIP

Friends… Today is the day. My debut short story collection, CRAWL, is now available for pre-order.

I think you should pre-order this book. I think, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, this book is gonna include all kinds of stuff you’ll enjoy. But hey, don’t take my word for it…

…take the word of any one of these authors, who have written some of my favorite books of all time. I’m still having a lot of big feelings about these incredible writers saying in writing that they liked my book this much, and it’s paralyzing me a little, in terms of what I say here. But the good news is the book doesn’t come out until Oct. 21, 2025, so I have lots of time to gather some more coherent thoughts about the book’s literary lineages and influences, like Detransition Baby, Tenth of December, Friday Black, and Eat the Document (!!!!!!), in the interim.

For now, I’ll just offer an initial, heartfelt plea to consider pre-ordering the book. It’s a paperback original, so after shipping it’s gonna be like $20 total for most people. Pre-ordering is a huge deal for authors, especially debut authors—it’s a strong signal to everyone in the book industry (publishers, booksellers, etc) that this book should be promoted in media, stocked in bookstores, and generally worth their time. I hope I can continue to write books like CRAWL for a long time, and pre-ordering is the single most helpful thing you can do to support that.

What do I mean by “books like CRAWL,” exactly? Well, to put it simply, books about trans people, specifically trans men. That is what I do, that is what I care about. CRAWL is a book about trans men and is for trans men, above all else. None of my blurbers, you’ll notice, are trans men, so don’t worry if you’re not a trans man, I think you’ll like it, too. But there’s a shortage of books about trans men in the world. More on that soon. For now, thank you all for reading this far, and for considering pre-ordering the book, and for caring what I have to say. Most people subscribed to this newsletter have been here reading my work for a long time and have seen it in a lot of different forms. Get ready for my most-polished, edited best.

….Here’s that pre-order link one more time!

Hello again

Half-coherent thoughts on my book, the genocide, ???

This—writing a new Substack post after so many years—feels a little like stopping a stranger in the middle of a busy city sidewalk to ask them to sign a petition. I’ve never never held a little clipboard with the intent of racking up signatures or email addresses, but I can imagine how I’d feel doing it: low-grade terror just before launching into a bid for attention from someone who I, correctly or incorrectly, assume does not want to give me attention. You, the reader, have given me no real indication that I should strike up a new conversation—I’m just sending it to your inbox and hoping its a wanted or at least relevant intervention in your day.

I have signed a lot of petitions in my life, and especially in the past year. Forgive me if I’ve grown a little jaded with familiar forms of protest. I guess I’m not the sort of person who’d canvass, anyway.

If you’re receiving this email, it’s because some time ago, you signed up for the newsletter Max Practice. I got rid of all paid subscribers in 2020; I’m sure we’ve all changed a lot since then. I have no intention of bringing back the paid subscriber model, or of posting to this newsletter regularly. All posts will be free, and will go out when I feel like it. If I do bring back the paid subscriber situation (unlikely), you’ll be the first to know.

The main reason I am writing is to share that, in a little less than year, my debut collection of short stories, Crawl, will be published by Graywolf Press—October 21st, 2025. I will use this newsletter to promote the book, especially as we get closer to publication day. Don’t be shy about unsubscribing if this isn’t of interest to you. There is also a form on my website for those who want to be notified when my book is available for pre-order. I will only email that list about pre-orders, so sign up for that if you just want that notification; stick around here if you want that notification AND my sporadic commentary on Books and Writing. I will certainly write a heartfelt newsletter about the importance of pre-orders at some point, as is literary Substack tradition.

I’ve been thinking about how I’ll talk about my book when it comes out. Why I wrote it, what it’s “about” other than the concrete facts: trans men, 2010s, Seattle. I keep coming back to the concept of truth. I think my book has value because there is truth in it—because a reader picking up the book will, I hope, encounter truth. When I was first coming out as trans, I searched voraciously for these kinds of encounters with truth through art that was specifically about being trans, or realizing that you’re trans; while I’m eternally grateful for what I did find, it didn’t feel like enough, or quite what I was looking for. It didn’t feel like I was finding art or writing in general that spoke to my experience of transmasculinity, or of making the decision to transition. I was looking for a way to think about my own transness—art to think about transness with so I could figure out how to live the rest of my life, now that the possibility of transition had occurred to me.

So, in less than a year, my book will come out. I also want to acknowledge that a couple weeks ago, we passed the grim anniversary of one year of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

I have not held back in voicing my support for Palestine, during the past year or before the genocide started. I will never forget the first time I made a Facebook post about Israel’s pinkwashing, which I first learned about thanks to Dean Spade’s documentary Pinkwashing Exposed. The post was about gay soldiers in the IOF, I think. I shared a lot of political posts like these on Facebook at the time (when was it? 2017, maybe?) and remember being shocked at the degree of vitriol I received from the Zionists in the comments section. They were friends of friends, mostly, people I didn’t know and would never meet in person, writing paragraphs upon paragraphs about why I was wrong to criticize Israel. I don’t remember arguing with anyone very much. I think I just left the post alone.

For the past year it has felt wrong to post/write anything that isn’t about the atrocities Israel continues to commit, or about the suffering of Palestinians. I haven’t tweeted about much else during the genocide, and I feel similarly unable to promote my book without reckoning with this context. I am proud of the book I wrote, and thrilled to publish it with Graywolf Press, which continues to feel like an absurd dream that cannot possibly be true. At the exact same time, I am profoundly ashamed at my complicity in this genocide and so many other instances of colonial violence. I do not believe Israel has the right to exist, nor do I believe the U.S.A has a right to exist. As a white American, especially, I believe there is something rotten in me that will never go away, because my life is made possible by these systems. Early in the genocide, I remember seeing this message from someone in Gaza: "Tell Muslim countries not to offer funeral prayers for us. We are alive and you are dead." It’s among the most powerful, truthful sentences I’ve ever encountered.

I agree with Andrea Long Chu: speech is a material act. There is no way for me to talk about the value of words and books and truth without talking about Palestine, about the violent suppression of speech about Palestine (from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free), the IOF’s deliberate targeting of Palestinians journalists, the W.A.W.O.G. call to boycott PEN, the canceling of the LiBeraturpreis award ceremony for Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel Minor Detail, Israel’s murder of Refaat Al-Areer, and Mosab Abu Toha’s revolutionary poems and essays. In the midst of this horrific genocide, the power of language has never seemed so clear.

This newsletter first started as a way for me to “practice” writing, to figure out if I was a writer at all. In less than a year, I will have the extraordinary privilege of calling myself a published author. In this sense, the time for practice is over. Time to sink or swim, say what you mean.

New Story at Joyland + Some Thoughts!!!

Sorry everyone this is about to be so earnest

Hi everyone,

It’s August 9th today, which means my short story, “Sex is A Leisure Activity,” has been live at Joyland for a whole day! I was so excited to hear Joyland wanted to publish me—the wonderfully kind and brilliant Jo Barchi edited and they made the story so much better. Joyland also has a long history of publishing excellent fiction: I first heard about them way back in 2012, when I read one of their especially popular stories, a flash piece by Amelia Gray called “The Swan as Metaphor for Love,” but I really became obsessed with Joyland’s stuff when they published my genius friend and mentor Corinne Manning’s short story, “The Wallaby.” It was published there in 2017 (and in Corinne’s brilliant collection WE HAD NO RULES) and I remember feeling so alive and inspired about the possibilities of fiction and writing in general after reading it. I had never read a story that so candidly engaged with things like queer assimilation and messy butch-femme dynamics. There’s just no way I would be writing fiction, period, if I hadn’t read “The Wallaby” in Joyland.

Joyland also published a story, “I Want Too Much,” by the brilliant Mona Awad in 2013, my professor at Syracuse with whom I workshopped an early draft of “Sex is a Leisure Activity.” She completely got what I was trying to do with the draft and helped me get it into shape for publication. They more recently published stories by two beloved, genius writer friends of mine: fellow Syracuse MFAer and all around cool guy Nabeel Chollampat’s “Private Viewing Mode” and my Mineral School residency buddy and one of the funniest writers I know, Sara Jaffe’s “Today’s Problems.” Do yourself a favor and read both of these—so funny, so beautifully written, just so, so, so, fucking good. There are so many other writers Joyland has published that are doing singular, exciting work. Whenever I publish in a new lit mag I like to hang out in that mag’s archives deliberately for a while after and I can’t wait to go deeper into Joyland’s.

ANYWAY, THE POINT IS, getting this story published in Joyland means a lot to me and I wanted to acknowledge this little Joyland lineage because I think it rocks! I think lit mags rock and it’s worth it to point out the ones that are doing interesting things.

TLDR; I really hope you read my story in this cool magazine, Joyland—IF YOU DO READ IT, I would be so happy if you would share it on social media or text it someone or let me know what you think. It means so much to me when people reach out or I see my work reaching new readers, it’s the whole reason I do this obviously!!! Even if you hated the story or thought it was super boring, I would be psyched to hear from you…. But, hopefully, if you are at all interested in 1) fiction about trans guys 2) t4t stuff 3) navigating polyamory 4) super long and graphic sex scenes 5) regional comedy scene dynamics 6) clueless cis men 7) writing about weed 8) what I have to say about any of the above, you will find something in there worth reading. OKAY, THAT’S ALL FOR SELF PROMOTION TODAY. SEE YOU NEXT TIME!!!!! ENJOY THE STORY!!!!!! HERE’S THE LINK TO THE STORY AGAIN!!!

PRACTICE is OVER

and so is Twitter, probably

Hello beloved Practice-heads,

You may have noticed that Twitter has become a slow-motion car crash from which many terminally-online people like myself must leap. In truth, I will remain on the bird site until the bitter end, but I also think it’s probably smart for me to reinvest in my presence on Substack. If you’re receiving this post as an email, you are subscribed as a free subscriber—there are no paid subscriptions anymore for Max Practice/this Substack account. Everything I post here will be free for the time being, which I expect will just be Notes and the occasional writing update. If I decide to offer a paid newsletter in the future, I will let you know and you will need to re-sign up, but there are no current plans for that. Just mentioning to confirm there will be no surprise costs for anyone receiving this email!

My updates for the moment: I’m in the middle of my MFA in fiction at Syracuse University (In 2020-21 I was at The Ohio State MFA for creative nonfiction, but left after one year). My most recent short story was published in the 69th issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, but anyone who finds the cost of the issue prohibitive should email me and I’ll send you a PDF. I also have an essay in the upcoming Graywolf anthology Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon. That comes out in November of this year. Check out my website to read other stories of mine that have been published—I’ve got another one scheduled to come out at Joyland this summer. I’ll email you all when it comes out though, so PLEASE don’t panic. The biggest update is that I am closer to being done with a short story collection than not done with a short story collection, which is mind-blowing to me.

Anyway, just wanted to say hi and say yes, I think I am going to do the Notes, and I am going to use Max Practice to send career updates semi-regularly. Tell your friends or unsubscribe or do nothing at all based on your current newsletter needs. I have gone through and hidden (successfully? I hope?) almost all of the old Max Practice posts, save for a few favorites. Everyone should be able to still read, for instance, about how Cadet Kelly Was Lesbians.

That’s all for now! Write to me with questions, concerns, greetings, Cadet Kelly commentary. I hope you’re all having excellent days.