{"id":312663,"date":"2026-06-26T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=312663"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:29:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:29:00","slug":"in-these-queer-books-animals-take-on-a-mythical-importance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/in-these-queer-books-animals-take-on-a-mythical-importance\/","title":{"rendered":"In These Queer Books, Animals Take on a Mythical Importance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When my friend and I planned to have a child together via IVF, we jokingly called her a baby fish, a salmon fry. A Fry is a stage in the salmon life cycle, after alevin but before parr, when the fish must begin to feed itself and swim free. This is a stage where they are most vulnerable to predators, birds, and larger fish, including larger salmon of the same species. While calling our future-kid a fish began as a joke, the vulnerability and brutality of fish-life seemed to me like a perfect metaphor for trying to have a kid when the only salmon we could afford was farmed, a process that I knew brought ecological destruction to wild fish populations. When the IVF process suddenly fell apart and I was left, again, with a childless future, my could-have-been child appeared to me as a fish; she was not a metaphor, she lived alongside me, she spoke to me, we went swimming in the Rockaways, I kept a tank of salt water by my bed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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As a queer writer, grief came out in my book Spawning Season<\/em> <\/a>as an animal. Perhaps this should not have been a surprise given the books I\u2019d been reading, the queer novels and essays and memoirs, all otherwise realist texts, in which animals become more than metaphor. They speak, they are guides, they are demons, they carry the souls of those we lost, those we never had, they allow us, even within large cities, to commune with nature. In these books by queer writers, animals play an essential, mythical role, inextricable from the narrator or the story. Queer writers, I think, often confound the bounds of realism\u2014in literary fiction and nonfiction\u2014in stunning and surprising ways. In these books, that surprise came in the form of the animal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n