Vetch

October 19, 2015 7:03 AM

Vetch (dropbox PDF link) is the first known literary journal for transgender poets and prose writers.
posted by roomthreeseventeen (5 comments total)

My wife and I stopped in at their launch party just this Saturday, just long enough to hear Kay Gabriel read. Her delivery is really rapid and angular, and her poems are a bit oblique even on the page, so for someone like me without a background in classics, it was especially challenging trying to keep up. Most of the audience was laughing more often than I was, so I think I'm just less literary than your average literary magazine enthusiast, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the hell out of it. On top of that, it was really awesome for me to be – for the first time – in a trans-oriented space, seeing all at once a huge variety of gender presentations and attitudes toward passing. I really wish we could have stayed longer, but we were actually at The Center for tango that night, and we didn't want to miss the last tanda.

We did ask about a print edition to take home before we slipped out, but it looks like they don't exist. I found the PDF later that night and realized it's 72 pages long, so I can totally understand why they wouldn't want to front the cost. I haven't had a chance to read the longer-form stuff yet, but I've read everything else, and a lot of it is really, really good. A few highlights for me: Breakfast, Mess, and Competitive Excuse.
posted by WCWedin at 8:10 AM on October 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

This paragraph, from the second link, struck me:

“Vetch” assumes its audience knows what it means to be transgender, or if not, can do the necessary research to find out, O’Brien said. Freeing the poets themselves from providing that explanation gives them the space to address new material, he said

I was at a tech education and diversity summit last year, and one of the things that all the participants remarked on in the postmortem was just how much time we could save, and more stuff we could get done, with an audience where you could presuppose that the work was valuable, where we didn't need to spend time justifying it and could get straight to building more of it out.

Huge economies of time and effort there, that felt really liberating.
posted by mhoye at 8:47 AM on October 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Nice name origin too:

The journal is named for the vetch plant, a hardy legume that is often planted in ditches and other places where ground has been disturbed. “This is the kind of resilient beauty of which we know trans poetry is capable,” the editors wrote in a preface to the journal.



I thought it might be related to kvetch, but that's my scrabble side showing....
posted by lalochezia at 9:14 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am glad it is in this format! Print is just impossible, it's so expensive, it's so hard to find unless you've got a pretty devoted bookstore that is on the lookout for stuff, but at the same time, webpages have become so fiddly and impossible to read that half the time I just give up after my browser crashes a few times. So, yes to this format.

So far, my favorite bit, from Sara June Woods:

I am growing
new limbs to understand
how insects feel. I’m burying
myself in dirt for the winter
so I can feel
all the cold the ground
keeps.
posted by mittens at 10:47 AM on October 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments removed. Folks, I know that it's a word that looks like another word from that line in that movie that some of us have seen, but please stop trying to make "vetch happen" jokes happen and just discuss the actual link content maybe.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:25 PM on October 19, 2015 [2 favorites]