Queers at the End of the World

Tonee Mae Moll joins Nino (and Nat!) to talk about You Cannot Save Here, her gorgeous 2023 book out now from the Washington Writers Publishing House. We cover teaching in and learning from the end times, polyamory as apocalypse preparedness, video games as canon, and wading into the lyric absurdity of endings.

Tonee Mae Moll is a queer & trans poet & essayist. They are the author of Out of Step: A Memoir, which won the Lambda Literary Award in bisexual nonfiction and the Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her latest book, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize and is available now from Washington Writers' Publishing House. Their poetry has also received the Adele V. Holden award for creative excellence and the Bill Knott Poetry Prize, along with nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. Tonee holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from University of Baltimore and a Ph.D. in English from Morgan State University. She is a Gemini.

Find her at https://toneemoll.com

or @toneemoll on socials.

Sara Ahmed talks with Nino about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, out now from Seal Press. Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of color whose work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. We talk about the radical potential of killing joy, complaining as an inter-temporal feminist practice, and why utopia might just be beside the point.

Get your Killjoy Handbook here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-feminist-killjoy-handbook-the-radical-potential-of-getting-in-the-way-sara-ahmed/19712059?ean=9781541603752

and find Sara's recommended books from UQP Press by Chelsea Watego and Eileen Moreton-Robinson at these links.

Sara Ahmed blogs at feministkilljoy.com. You can find her on twitter @SaraNAhmed and Instagram @SaraNoAhmed.

Nino discusses a 2006 postapocalyptic artifact from the US's "war on terror"--World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, and talks with oral historian and librarian Kae Bara Kratcha about what it means to be a speculative oral historian, and why oral history is such a meaningful tool for recording-and imagining-queer history.

Find more of Kae's work at their podcast feed, Subjunctive Mood Transmissions:

https://open.spotify.com/show/4O6MWjBArrJ5iDzoBPmf0n

https://bodyhomemaker.ohmaexhibits.org/

Bodyhome Maker is a companion project to the amazing podcast Working 2050, you can find all its episodes on any podcast app.

For the real oral history projects we talked about, visit the NYC Trans Oral History Project to listen to trans New Yorkers narrate their lives: https://nyctransoralhistory.org/

and find the Queens memory project here: https://queensmemory.org/

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi talk with Nino about Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, their novel of oral histories that document a speculative near future of world-wide luxury communism. "Everybody in the book is queer or trans," as M.E. puts it. We talk about the erotic pleasures of mass protest, Why apocalypse movies are always destroying NYC, the political desires that created this book, and what it means to be ready for a new world just around the corner.

Find Everything for Everyone at Common Notions Press, and find M.E. O'Brien's newest book, Family Abolition, here!

Nino and Nat talk about Steven Universe! Created by Rebecca Sugar for Cartoon Network, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl (and Steven!) have gotten us and many of our friends and compatriots through this very apocalypse. In this episode, we cover the show’s queer ethics of education, family making, and grief, and it’s commitment to the earth--what it means to be a human and be here.

Steven Universe is a huge show, so we only focus on a tiny subset of its characters and story arcs. We hope you’ll go right off and watch the entire thing. You can find it streaming on Cartoon Network or HBO, and you can find the essay we mention, by Arundhati Roy, here.

Also! This is our final episode of season two! Big changes are coming for season three, which will be back in just a few months. Meanwhile, we're thanking you with every bone in our flannel-clad bodies for supporting the show. Thanks for listening, and for sharing Queers at the End of the World with us this season!

On this QatEotW Presents we talk to Adam Garnet Jones about his short story History of the New World, from Love After the End, an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, and out from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2020. Learn more about Adam and his work at adamgarnetjones.com. You can also see their gorgeous beadwork by following him on Instagram @adamgarnetjones, and learn more about APTN, the first TV network for and by indigenous people, here.

Thanks so much to the Ottawa Writers Festival for permission to use audio from their 2020 book launch for Love After the End. Check out the full event, with readings and a fantastic conversation among three of the collection’s contributors, moderated by Joshua Whitehead, editor of the anthology, and poet and fiction writer, most recently of Making Love with the Land.