Dear friends,

As you may already know because I can't talk about anything else, I am headed to Croatia for nine months, starting at the end of September, to work on a book project. (It's forbidden to crowdfund while naming the grant.) I've informed my employer, and I'm full-speed ahead to leave!

BUT: Now that my name is freshly and finally changed to Evie, I have to get new (and rushed) everything: an emergency passport especially. Additionally, the grant can't be disbursed until my new passport AND my flight itinerary are in hand. (In other words, I have to bear a lot of the cost up front, and I don't have the $.)

ABOUT THE PROJECT (if you are interested):

This speculative book project involves a series of interviews with at least 20 trans Croatians across generations, ethnicities, and class backgrounds. These interviews start with fairly standard oral-history-style questions before pivoting to hypothesize alternate paths, conditions, and selves (as well as the art, activism, and whole lives those alternate selves might carry out).

Rather than offer transcripts of these interviews to the archive in an optimistic gesture of trans representation, these answers will serve as starting points for speculative fiction writing that I will continue to bring back to interviewees for collaborative input and revision. The goal is a speculative text that imagines something besides the bleak anti-trans present and future the world relentlessly inflicts on us—and which uses trans collaboration to do that imagining.

As I hope you can tell, this process and project are dear to me, and I am not a little stunned to have been awarded this unnamed grant when I stated so clearly what I hoped to do and why I hoped to do it.

If you have the capacity, your further support would help me head into my final weeks of preparation with some confidence about the smoothness of my travels as an out trans woman (!)—my first international experience since transitioning.

Please feel free to share this widely (without saying the name of the grant!!!!) <3