Anarchist Author Margaret Killjoy Crafts Trans Worlds in the Woods
From Autostraddle by Nico Hall
Dressed in all black down to her ankles, dark hair in two braids, Margaret Killjoy let me into her house in the forested mountains, where she lives a hermit-like life with her companion, her dog Rintrah. A transfeminine musician, podcaster, and author of multiple fantasy books, Killjoy lives in the mountains of Appalachia in a home filled with instruments, books, art, and medieval weaponry. For an author who wrote an upcoming novel described as “an own-voices story of trans witchcraft,” her home met my expectations and then some.
Killjoy’s first young adult crossover fantasy book, The Sapling Cage, comes out on September 24 and is described as a novel that hearkens back to gender-bending fantasy and speculative fiction works by women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Tamora Pierce.
I snuck in the interview just before the east coast book tour for The Sapling Cage. Killjoy tells me there has never been so much pre-publication buzz for one of her books before. But given the evil deeds in the book center around resource extraction and power hoarding, and the trans girl protagonist who is not only exploring her identity but training to be a witch, and the collective Millennial and Gen X longing for something like the fantasy stories of our youth, it’s easy to see why the moment is right for this book’s release.
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We can look to Tamora Pierce as an expert world-builder and fantasy writer, but we also must acknowledge the shortcomings of her multiple series, especially when it comes to gender. Her book The Song of the Lioness Quartet was innovative for its protagonist, Alanna, a girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to train as a knight in a system and world where girls were not allowed to do so. In a subsequent series in the same world, Kel follows in Alanna’s footsteps. This time, she’s legally able to train as a knight openly as a girl, but she faces unrelenting sexism while doing so. The series exchanges the stresses of secrecy for the barbs of resentment Kel faces and overcomes. While Kel is notably burly, tall, and level-headed, much quieter and less romantically inclined girl protagonist in contrast to the petite, red-headed and violet-eyed, love-triangle-having protagonist of the first series, these two series of Pierce’s works still keep to gendered expectations in a lot of ways, rarely venturing into discussions of queerness or anyone who isn’t cis. In recent years, it can seem like we’ve seen fewer stereotypical and cliche ideas around femininity permeating the young adult fantasy and speculative fiction genres, but a lot of tropes still persist, and despite a genre that contains infinite room for expansive thinking and reimagining of cultures, roles, and genders, we often still see cishet normativity win out in young adult books. Still, I know that Pierce’s works, which many queer adults read as kids, left us wanting when it came to representation that felt more direct, where we wouldn’t have to stretch to see reflections of who we were growing up to be in the text.
In The Sapling Cage, Killjoy presents us with a 16-year-old protagonist, Lorel, who is smart but still learning, pretty but not ridiculously so, strong but not the strongest, good at fighting but not the best. She is frequently conflicted, but often keeps these complexities to herself. She can be brave, but she can also be afraid or unable to stomach violence. Lorel struggles throughout the book to connect with her emotions. She’s spent so much time suppressing parts of her identity, that she cannot always easily define what she wants. Sometimes she has a sense of exactly what she feels is the right course of action, but often, she’s taking the thoughts, feelings, and advice of others into account, too. She exists on the demisexual spectrum, and her romantic feelings bloom sweetly and slowly.
Importantly, to both the plot, and as Killjoy hopes, the reader, Lorel is also trans. And so, in this new addition to the genre, Lorel swaps places with her cis girl best friend who was promised to the witches from birth, but who wants to be a knight. While boys and girls in this world can join various brotherhoods of knights, only girls can join the witches, so Lorel puts on a dress, and begins her journey from thinking of herself as being in disguise, afraid of discovery, to owning her identity as a girl who will grow up to be a woman — and a witch.
When I read the early scene where Lorel and her childhood best friend agree to switch places, it harkened back so beautifully to the first time I’d read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness. And it harmonized, too, because this was different. This time, we were going to follow the people learning magic, not knighthood. We weren’t going to a castle, but into the woods, and as someone who has often felt locked out of certain circles of girlhood or cis womanhood, the idea of following a character’s journey into a sacred women’s space, and, I hoped, into acceptance in said space, held some serious appeal.
Still, Killjoy had to wait some years to find a publisher for the book after she completed the manuscript in 2017. The book played with emotionality in ways that were atypical of the genre. “I was a fairly emotionally withdrawn teenager,” says Killjoy, “and so I wrote a book about myself as a teenager in terms of a lot of the emotional landscape that Lorel is facing.” However, as Killjoy puts it, that’s “not the way you’re supposed to write YA. You’re supposed to write these almost hyperbolically emotional characters.”
Killjoy takes great care with her handling of the “kids versus adults” dynamics pervasive in YA, resulting in a more complex book with crossover appeal. “I actually wanted her to have a realistic relationship with the power structures that she’s part of, as compared to in traditional YA,” Killjoy says. “I understand why it’s so important to give protagonists agency in the story, and I don’t think Lorel lacks agency in the story, but I think that it’s important for her to coordinate with the adults in her life as she’s attempting to save the world, you know? And I think that’s a more realistic way to solve a problem.”
In a recent post on her Substack offering writing advice, Killjoy notes in the section “Writing the Other” that “constant bombardment with negative portrayals of trans women kept me from coming out even to myself for decades.” When I ask about writing a trans girl in a YA novel, of course Tamora Pierce comes up.
Killjoy tells me about discovering the Song of the Lioness books around 5th grade. “I used to say it set me up to be a cross-dressing knight because, for a very long time, I was just a boy named Margaret who dressed like this, and then eventually came out as trans,” she says. “Then, I was like, no, I’m going to be a girl who pretends to be a boy, and then learns to be a knight.”
The Sapling Cage, she says, is in some ways a conscious inversion of the premise. “I was like okay, well I want a boy who wants to be a witch,” she says. “The most important gender part that I’m trying to convey is this idea that Lorel doesn’t know she is a girl trapped in a boy’s body. That’s not the only way to conceive of transness.”
“I think that we have this problem, although we got to it from an understandable point of view, in how we talk about transness right now,” Killjoy adds. In her childhood, she vacillated between wanting to do girly things, then wanting to change her name, then backing off a name change for a time. She describes a back-and-forth gender journey that is not necessarily neat and tidy. “I don’t want to convey to young kids who are questioning their gender that you have to be sure.”
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Margaret Killjoy is a master world-builder. She has built a large part of her writing career on speculative fiction and is the world-builder for the recently released tabletop role-playing game Penumbra City.
“I really like the idea of exploring gender in contexts that are not and don’t need to look like the modern world,” she says. And indeed, she does not and says she never will use the words “cis” or “trans” in the Daughters of the Empty Throne series (of which The Sapling Cage is book one). “Not because those are bad words,” she explains, “but because they’re not appropriate to the gender of this high fantasy Medieval setting, you know?”
Killjoy wrote 50,000 words of world-building for Penumbra City, a game where the players use reputation as currency instead of gold, wealthy God-Kings play with the world like it’s a chess game — and yet people find ways to carve out an existence even amongst trash piles and zombies, all while resistance and revolution brews amongst different factions. When it comes to her approach, though, while she does outline her novels, Killjoy thinks that having all the answers at the start is a bore. She prefers to begin by planting seeds, uncovering and discovering throughout her writing process, surprising herself and her readers with the way the world emerges as the story unfolds.
Her first encounter with fantasy world-building came through Dungeons and Dragons. She started playing with some friends, but when they moved away, Killjoy just kept reading the books. “It was what I spent my allowance on,” she says.
World-building is also political. “It bores the hell out of me with world-building when people basically recreate our world,” says says, “and they’re like ‘oh I mapped out everything about every single town,’ but they haven’t bothered to imagine that a town could use a different economic system.”
“I do see my writing craft as sort of a magical process,” says Killjoy, “and that is an attempt to influence culture and thought.” We discussed the influence of Anarchist writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who frequently explored gender in her work in ways that are meaningfully alien to the conceptions of gender we typically hold in the real world, which asks us to interrogate just why we believe what we do, and what, if anything, is a hard and fast rule that must be followed. In speaking to the importance of imagining new worlds, Le Guin said in her speech acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
In The Sapling Cage, for example, witches don’t eat meat from domesticated animals because to do so impedes their access to magic. Killjoy, who’s vegan, says, “I don’t believe that in a literal sense…But I can have characters in the magical world have that experience, and then I think that that’s more likely to make people think about what’s involved energetically in an animal raised in captivity versus a hunted animal versus eating plants.”
Collective and radical politics can be seen throughout the world-building of The Sapling Cage: the witches practice making decisions by consensus; there are varying levels of acceptance and understanding when it comes to gender identity and asexual and nonbinary characters; and while there are serious hierarchies, there are also sometimes collectivized farms. There are different magical systems, even, and no one, right way of doing anything, no single correct way to perceive of or even see magic — the witches in the book, The Order of the Vine, represent only one view and make that much clear.
For her work on her history podcast — Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a look at people who were legitimately awesome, good, or otherwise on the right side of history — Killjoy researches and writes a 5,000-10,000 word script every week. This, too, reflects her thinking around world-building, history, and perception. “Learning of this history has really, really informed my writing,” she says, “because the thing I love about history is learning about different ways that people have fought and felt and lived in essentially different realities and needs of the world in different ways, because humans haven’t changed, but our conceptions of everything have changed.” She talks to me about a recent search for mini-periods in time of increased LGBTQ acceptance and tolerance because history is not a linear march toward progress, but a twisting, turning thing full of backs and forths.
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One thing I noticed when reading The Sapling Cage was that the characters sure did wander, walk, and generally find themselves traveling. I ask Killjoy if her personal past had any influence on that part of the story. “I just wanted a weird, interesting life,” she says.
She grew up with a family who surrounded her with books, then went to art school, and then dropped out in 2002 after attending an anti-globalization protest. “There was a culture of traveling anarchists at that time, where we would go to different demonstrations, and then in between the big demonstrations, we would open squats and cook with Food, Not Bombs, and ride bikes around and you know, guerilla gardens everywhere,” she says.“It was the first thing in my life that gave my life a sense of adventure and meaning.”
She explored, traveled to new places, exposed herself to new people, and wrote her first short story in a squat in the South Bronx. “The window was broken, and it was winter, and I had this roll top desk that had just been in that room for probably the 60 years since anyone lived there before, and it was almost an aesthetic choice. I didn’t have a computer or anything. I just hand-wrote a story.”
From there, Killjoy wrote zines that fictionalized her life but presented them as authentic perzines while writing under various names, causing some confusion later when she began to publish the work of others, readers still assuming everyone was still Killjoy. This led to her consolidating under one name, Margaret Killjoy, and no longer publishing under pseudonyms. She continued to write and submit short stories, and started Steampunk magazine, which she describes as “a critique of Victoriana.” In 2009, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction, the first book Killjoy edited, was published.
In 2014, Killjoy published fantasy novel A Country of Ghosts and sold her first short story. She used the money from the story’s sale to attend the intensive speculative writing workshop at Clarion West in 2015. Following the workshop, Killjoy continued to write and sell short stories.
She recalls one of her instructors telling her he thought she’d be the most likely to make it because she lived in a van. She laughs, “I was waiting for him to be like ‘because you’re the best.'”
We talk about the realities of writing and publishing and money, about keeping expenses down and about writers who live in tents, on boats, or, well, in vans. Killjoy credits zine culture for breaking her into writing. She continued to publish books before she found an agent, including The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, the first in her ongoing Danielle Cain series, which follows anarcho-punk demon fighters and begins when a man-eating demon deer appears in a squatter town.
Traveling constantly, losing friends to violence, and seeing other people in the movement she was in go to prison culminated in increasing panic attacks. Killjoy knew she needed to seek some more stability — and also, her van wasn’t long for this world. She built a black A-Frame cabin on an anarchist land project, where she lived without electricity through the start of the pandemic before moving into the house where she lives now with her rescue dog.
Her house is filled with instruments, mostly a variety of harps she put together from kits that require some woodworking. She gleefully takes an instrument off a high shelf and tells me it’s a “goblin harp.” Killjoy strums it, and each string plays the same note. It’s a goblin-esque troll of an instrument. She pulls out a dulcimer and skillfully plucks away at the strings while it rests on her lap.
Sound, too, is an important part of Killjoy’s life and work. She’s a musician and founder of the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl. She’s involved in additional musical projects ranging from neofolk to electronica, and of course, also just plays for fun.
She also is part of publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Penumbra City is published through Strangers, and I ask Killjoy, if, as a publisher, there was anything she wished writers knew or understood better. “I wish people knew that rejection is not the end of the world by any stretch, and that a rejection of a book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, it just means it’s not what that the press can publish right now,” she says.
“I wish people knew it was a peer relationship,” she adds. She emphasizes that just as it takes a great deal of work from a writer to complete a book, it also takes the publisher an enormous amount of effort to get the book out into the world and to set the work up for success.
Killjoy takes me through her weekly writing routine, which is equal parts inspiring and intimidating. She writes 5,000-10,000 word scripts each week for Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, as well as a 2,000-4,000 word Substack post, and also, about 1,000 words each day on one of her fiction projects. The last one is looser, since Killjoy notes that actually completing 1,000 words of fiction each day would mean completing four books per year instead of the “two books a year or so I seem to be on right now.”
She holds a somewhat anti-precious stance when it comes to her work that keeps her producing. Even though she’s technically living in just one place now, Killjoy is constantly moving — and that’s how she likes it. “I love that my job is learning, and I’m not an academic,” she says. “Yeah, like that makes me so happy. You know, every now and then I’m like, oh, something’s hard in my life and then I’m like this is the sunset I get everyday, and it is paid for by me reading history books. And talking into a microphone. And I am one of the luckiest people who’s ever been born, and I worked really fucking hard to get here, yeah, you know, but like I am very aware of and grateful that I like my life.”
“So, it’s funny, cause then I realize that most people I know don’t actually want to live like I do at the end of the day, most people don’t actually want to basically be a hermit,” she adds. “My dad made fun of me when I told him I was a hermit, and he was like, you have the internet.” This is true, she concedes. But in an average week, she probably only has one in-person conversation with a cashier, or with her dog Rintrah. “But he doesn’t talk back,” Killjoy says.
In a typical day, she’ll spend time walking with her dog, and then most of her day is dedicated to reading and writing. She talks to friends, and of course, podcasts, and stays connected to the world via the internet.
“I don’t know if this is true,” Killjoy starts, “but a million years ago, I heard Enya just sort of got rich, bought a castle, and lives alone with cats in the castle and makes music.”
“And bothers no one,” I add.
“She’s not on Twitter saying turkey shit.”
Living in a place that allows her this life of solitude informs her work.. “Because it’s the mountains where no one goes, it has an attitude of ‘we let people be weird.’ We mostly just wanna let people leave people alone,” she says.It’s the kind of writing life some people dream about, and the kind that is definitely best with a silly dog who will keep trying to lick your face or bark at planes.
Despite wearing all black living in the woods, Margaret does not describe herself as a witch. “I don’t fuck with [magic] much cause I do believe in it.” Magic, real or not, is a metaphor in Killjoy’s writing. The villains in the book are resource extractors, people seeking to accrue and consolidate power. The Sapling Cage begins with a concerning, magical blight that leaves trees drained of all life. Margaret and I walk out of her house so she can show me around her land. Some of the oak trees are dying of some kind of blight here, too.
She talks about how, even here, at her hermetic outpost, she can see the effects of climate change, the ways in which the power hungry are sacrificing the commons of nature for their own personal gain. Still, the sun is setting over the rolling mountains, I am taking some very witchy photos of Killjoy, and her book fills me with a ton of hope. I’m rooting for The Sapling Cage to find its audience and its way into the hands of the kids, and especially trans kids, who will love it.
When it comes to what’s next, Margaret is, as you might predict from her writing routine, chugging ahead on future books. She tells me she’s just completed the next book in the Danielle Cain series, and then, of course, she’ll be moving onto the next book in the Daughter of the Empty Throne trilogy.
No need to wonder if she’s writing. She is definitely writing.
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killyjoy is available for preorder.