Interview with Sam Elkin

(he/him)

Interview by Mackenzie Stolp

Sam Elkin is a writer, event producer and co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (Allen & Unwin). Born in England and raised on Noongar land, Sam now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. Sam’s essays have been published in The Griffith Review, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Kill Your Darlings. He hosts the 3RRR radio show Queer View Mirror.

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Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia is the Demure Book Club selection for October and we cannot wait to read It with everyone. We are so thankful to Sam for chatting to us and his work in the editing and creation of this incredible book.

How did Nothing to Hide originate? Were you approached to edit?

Yves and I first met when I interviewed them on my podcast Transgender Warriors. We got talking and realised that we were both doing TGD memoir writing and we talked about how great it would be to develop a trans writers’ group and one day get an anthology of trans writing off the ground. That turned into Spilling the T Collective, a TGD writers’ group that we ran which was supported by Transgender Victoria and a small grant from the City of Maribyrnong. From there, Yves and I actually worked with Gordon and Tiffany at Bent Street to put a TGD themed edition out called Soft Borders, Hard Edges which is another collection that I am really proud of. Yves got a book deal with Allen & Unwin to write their memoir All About Yves: Notes from a Transition so they had an agent Jacinta Di Mase from that. Jacinta agreed to represent the project so we wrote a proposal with an indicative list of writers and co-editors that had agreed to come on board if we could get a publisher. We were thrilled that Bobuq and Alex were up for coming on board. Bobuq has actually been in the USA for the whole period but has deep networks in the TGD and writing community in Australia, not to mention absolutely first-class editing skills so they were absolutely vital to the project’s success. Alex is a Sydney-based poet and they were our chief poetry editor which was essential as neither Yves or I have much experience in poetry. Anyway, once we had the co-editors and an indicative list of contributors on board Jacinta sent the proposal out to all of the big Australian publishers. As it turned out, Allen & Unwin were the only ones that were interested, so it made our choice of publisher very simple! We did this whole project during lockdown, so every editorial meeting occurred online, so it’s been great to attend the launch events and author talks as I am still meeting different contributors for the first time.

How did you select which authors to feature? Was there a submission process?

Alex, Bobuq, Yves and I came up with a short-list of people we really wanted to be in the collection as they had something really important to say, did amazing work and/or spoke to a particular experience that we felt needed to be included (e.g., sex worker perspectives, new migrants, older and younger people). Some came on board immediately, others declined, others agreed and then dropped out later on, so it was occasionally a bit of a scramble. It felt very important to have an open call out as well as we wanted to make sure we had a chance to include a number of people that we didn’t know. I think about 10 or 12 of them came via the open call out in the end including Shreya’s amazing piece which they wrote when they were just 18 years old. We had about 100 pieces come through the open call out and so we had to reject so many really quality, interesting pieces that I would’ve liked to include for space reasons. Allen & Unwin were very clear with us that we could only have a maximum of 30 contributors in it, though we still managed to stretch that out to 32 in the end.  Fortunately, we introduced Alex and Ursula at A Thousand Threads Press to a number of those writers who are publishing an amazing new collection called In Flux which includes a number of these pieces; that’s launching on 3 December at the Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray so please get around it.

How was the experience of being an editor for you?

I learnt so much about editing and the publishing industry from this experience. I was really impressed with the close editing skills of my co-editors; they are a really talented bunch. Some of the pieces I worked on required me to interview people and write drafts for them to review (such as Crystal Love Johnson and Tiff Tan’s pieces), which was a really rewarding process. I do a radio show on Triple R called Queer View Mirror and have done shows on Joy 94.9 and 3CR before so I have a bit of experience interviewing. It mainly involves being quiet and letting other people speak, which you wouldn’t think would be that hard but it is for some! I’d love to do more collaborative writing like that in future to share the stories of interesting people in our community who wouldn’t necessarily sit down and write a book themselves. I don’t think I’ll do anymore close editing; I don’t think I am very good at it! I really enjoying commissioning the work, the bigger picture stuff and the project management aspects of it though.

Nothing to Hide has been widely celebrated! How does that feel?

It’s a great honour. I am so proud to have been a part of shepherding all of these daring voices into a completed book. It’s been so easy to get out there and champion the anthology because it’s just full to the brim with amazing pieces, none of which are my own! I hope that this book leads to further publishing opportunities for the contributors and other TGD writers as so many people are doing amazing stuff that deserves more attention. It still blows me away when I see it in bookshops across Australia, especially with Ruby Allegra’s beautiful cover.

What advice do you have for emerging writers? Especially trans writers!

Write a lot, submit a lot, don’t be too deflated by rejections. You just have to keep plugging away at it. Calls for submissions are great for ideas and deadlines. I saw something on twitter the other day that said ‘write the novel you really want to read as you’ll have to read it 75 times during the publication process.’ I reckon that’s very good advice. I personally hate the final stages of editing so you really have to love the work to push through, so try not to write the work other people are expecting of you. There’s always new ground to be broken, even if the publishing industry errs on the side of commissioning less challenging work. You can always get together as a group and self-publish collections like A Thousand Threads Press have done while the powers that be catch up. I’ve found the Griffith Review and Kill Your Darlings to be incredibly thoughtful editors who have really helped improve my writing, so I’d definitely recommend sending stuff their way.

What can we expect from you next? Perhaps a book of your own?

I wish. I am working on two full-length novel manuscripts but it currently feels like I will never get over the hump of completing them. Writing a whole book is really hard! I am on a fellowship with Scribe at Varuna in the Blue Mountains right now which has been great.

I do have a short story called Elasticity in the Resilience Anthology which has just been published as a collab between Mascara Literary Review and Ultimo Press. The launch of that is on 8 Dec at Loop Bar in Melbourne.

I also have a personal essay called Detachable Penis: Gender Dismembered coming out in the Counterfeit Culture of the Griffith Review in February next year.

I’ve even had a go at writing some queer YA short-stories lately so perhaps they will see the light of day at some point. I love new challenges (though perhaps this is also why I’ll never get my own books done!)