UI grad Torrey Peters reads from new book ‘Stag Dance,’ discusses writing for a trans audience at Prairie Lights

On Saturday, April 5, Torrey Peters stood in front of a packed room at Prairie Lights Book Store and read excerpts from her most recent, bestselling book, Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories. One of the many literary guests at the Mission Creek Festival, Peters answered questions from University of Iowa Creative Nonfiction grad student Jenny Singer about the genesis of her book, what she’s learned about self-publishing and how it has helped her career as a novelist.

Peters is the author of the 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novels and was named one of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” by the New York Times. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Peters has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa and an MA in comparative literature from Dartmouth.

In 2015, Peters was living in Seattle and decided to write short stories and novellas, each in a different genre, with the goal of publishing them as zines and exchanging them with other writers. She explored horror, soap opera and teen romance.

“I found out writing a soap opera is hard,” Peters said. “But that novella eventually became Detransition, Baby.”

Self-publishing provided useful knowledge and experience she couldn’t have acquired otherwise. “Now I can go to a meeting with Penguin Random House executives and say, ‘I know how to sell this.’ And that’s because I was involved in the self-publishing process. I know what it takes to sell a book.”

Peters discussed a revelation she had early on in her career after hearing a trans author read from their work while holding the mostly trans audience enthralled.

“I realized then that I had been writing about guilt and shame for a cis audience,” she said. “I realized that the content of my writing implied I was ashamed of everyone in that room.”

She thus reshaped the intentionality of her writing and her target reader. “There have been many authors who write with a specific audience in mind,” Peters said. “Toni Morrison, for instance, knew she was writing for a Black audience.”

Shame is explored in “The Chaser,” a Stag Dance story from which Peters read at Prairie Lights. The schoolboy narrator avoids showering because he hates “getting naked in front of other boys, for anyone to see his chubby, feminine body and his tiny cock,” the narrator bemoans.

She also talked about the title story “Stag Dance,” following a group of restless lumberjacks that plan a dance in which some volunteer to attend as women. Peters conducted research on how loggers spend long winters falling trees — winter being the best season to drag the logs on the snow. “Those are cold and lonely periods in the forest,” Peters said. “A man would perform the dance to symbolically become a woman.”

She ended the talk by saying she’s more interested in depicting the “trans culture rather than the trans experience,” and recommended Trauma Plot by trans writer Jamie Hood. “That’s a book that explores trans culture and all its nuances,” Peters concluded.