Searching for Self in a Land Where Men

Are Men: An Interview with Alex Myers

by Margo Orlando Littell

 

Belonging, acceptance, identity. In Alex Myers’s “Continental Divide” (UNO Press, 2019), the search for such elemental treasures is complicated for young, transgender Ron Bancroft, who yearns to live as a man without revealing his childhood as a girl. His desire for a kind of pure recognition takes him to Wyoming, a world away from his East Coast upbringing, where the definition of manhood seems more straightforward than in the queer community he leaves behind. A connection to the land—to a dramatic and often dangerous landscape—offers Ron a new way of understanding himself, though what he finds in those wide-open spaces is both uglier and more life-affirming than he imagined when he started out. His journey is fueled by his determination to “pass,” but his experiences ultimately reveal to him that there are many ways of being truly and fully seen. What Ron has long believed to be the reality of the West is more nuanced—and conflicted—than tradition has allowed. Narrated with candor, thoughtfulness, and sharp humor, “Continental Divide” is a unique coming-of-age story that twists the mythology of the American West into new shapes.

Alex Myers, who is also the author of “Revolutionary” (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and the forthcoming “The Story of Silence” (HarperCollins, July 2020), is a high school English teacher and advocate for transgender rights. “Continental Divide” is the winner of the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize.

I was out West. The land of the rugged individual. The land where you got a chance to prove what you were really made of. The land where men were men, or they got the hell out of town.

—Alex Myers, Chapter One

MARGO ORLANDO LITTELL: The South Fork versus the North Fork. The two sides flanking the “Continental Divide.” Alex, the topography of your novel beautifully echoes the divide Ron feels in his own existence—the conflict between external and internal, private and public, enough and not enough. Can you talk a bit about the connection between your storytelling and the significance of the terrain?

ALEX MYERS: There’s a great literary tradition of American masculinity belonging in the West, and a tradition of characters heading out West to explore, discover, conquer, and test themselves. I think there are many problems with that trope and the effects it has had, but I also found myself intrigued by the tradition. When I was a kid, I loved Kit Carson and Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett and this idea of the “frontier” and manliness. I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder and, later, Willa Cather, and their frontier experiences (around gender) as well. And, the older I got, the more skeptical I became about what was being suggested about masculinity and land and self-discovery and the “real” America. So I wanted to put Ron in this place and let a decidedly unexpected story unfurl. Early on in Chapter One, Ron says that Wyoming is a place that never imagined him. In a sense, I wanted to take a very familiar terrain of masculinity and the American West and put a very unfamiliar character in it. What would bend? What would break? Who and what would change?
 

LITTELL: Ron sees the West as a place of authenticity. “Real life,” Ron explains, “not the coddled and over-intellectualized swirl of the East Coast. Out here, things were what they were.” Wyoming, with its rugged, stereotypical masculinity and lack of urban sophistication, is a difficult place for Ron to find a footing, yet he’s drawn to it for exactly those reasons: on a ranch, in the mountains, the definition of a man seems clear cut. Men drink beer, use chainsaws, deal with grizzlies. In big East Coast cities, on the other hand, queer men and women navigate broader definitions of “man” and “woman”—and have greater freedom to establish their own connotations. But, time and again, Ron rejects the casual acceptance that places like Boston or New York offer. Why does Ron seek the more difficult path?

MYERS: Ron wants approval, and I think, like many of us, he unfortunately seeks it from the least likely places. Ultimately, what he wants is to like himself … and no one can give that approval except himself. But it takes him a while to figure this out. In the meantime, I think he wants to make himself bulletproof: if he can be a man in Wyoming, he can be a man anywhere.

Here’s the thing: If you’ve been shown how to get someplace, you can retrace your steps pretty easily. If you’re told where you’re supposed to go, you can always stop and ask for directions. But if you have a map, it’s all there, everything you don’t know. All the streets, all the buildings, all the possibilities.

—Alex Myers, Chapter Two

LITTELL: Maps and lists appear throughout “Continental Divide,” and Ron relies on them to tame and understand his world. Yet the most momentous crossroads Ron faces are those that he navigates without these crutches: meeting Gus at the bus station; falling in love with Cassie; being thrown off the ranch and making his way to Pete and the ranger station. For all his list-making and map-reading, Ron is often at the mercy of chance, and of the kindness of strangers. In many ways, Ron is thoughtful, logical, and deliberate, but talk to us about how fate affects Ron’s journey.

MYERS: Yes—and Ron seems oblivious to this! Even if he did occasionally consider fate, I think Ron would insist that he’s got everything planned out. He wants to bring this order to chaos, even when his planning doesn’t actually do anything. I wanted to suggest that sense of fate through the motif of the message in a bottle. That struck me as both a desperate and romantic gesture. Writing down a truth—a need—and letting it be taken by the tides and currents. Ron knows that he doesn’t control everything, and he is gradually getting to be okay with that. I think gender identity (and other aspects of identity) can feel that way. We might want to be or not want to be … and our desires, our attempts at control and self-determination, they don’t have any effect. That’s fate. That’s self. Better to love it.
 

LITTELL: The friends Ron left behind, especially Jane and Laurel, are not physically present in the story, but they are still influential in Ron’s evolution out West. Jane sends advice; Laurel sends testosterone and syringes; Ron rarely acts or reacts without reflecting on what Jane might say or do. The community of ranch workers and forest rangers that Ron builds in Wyoming is much different from his community back East. What do these disparate, seemingly incompatible communities offer Ron?

MYERS: I think it is a past/present thing. Jane and Laurel knew Ron “before”—this is one of the divides in his life that he’s got to figure out how to bridge. Some part of him doesn’t want to build that bridge; he’d rather burn it. But, as you say, he keeps thinking of them, keeps reaching out (at least mentally). He was who he was; that’ll always be a part of him. And I think, at the ranch and the station, he very much feels like a part of him is missing. He can’t talk honestly about his childhood or his college experience, or really much of anything. The present communities seem, at first, to offer him a blank slate and a chance to remake himself, but over the course of the novel, he figures out how to let his whole self exist in the present.

There was the me I knew I was, and then there was this other me. The past me. The one I wanted to be done with. Why couldn’t I get away from it?

—Alex Myers, Chapter Twelve

LITTELL: Violence, when it finally comes to Ron in this story, is as hateful as Ron has always feared. It’s interesting to note that not long before he is attacked, Ron injects himself with testosterone for the first time, which he had long been reluctant to do. He feels this choice as a kind of betrayal of the body he’s always accepted as his—though the injection leaves “No blood. No mark” and, afterward, he’s “the same as [he] had always been.” In a vivid and moving scene after the attack, Ron sees the first hint of facial hair along with the gruesome bruises on his cheeks and neck. As the bruises fade, external signs of physical masculinity will grow more prominent. Can you speak to this juxtaposition—of other-inflicted violence and self-inflicted physical change, of pain and transformation, of physical trauma both positive and negative as a kind of trial that Ron passes through?

MYERS: Dysphoria can have different manifestations to different people, but I often hear trans-folks talking about hating their bodies, not recognizing or wanting their bodies, or even wanting to do violence to their bodies. In Ron’s relentless running and then training at the station, there’s a sort of self-inflicted punishment—his body isn’t good enough, and it seems like it never will be. Ron has a pretty profound mind-body disconnect. He understands himself to be a guy, and throughout the novel, he doesn’t fathom why anyone would question or doubt that. His body is his body … He’s still a guy. The decision to take testosterone is ultimately a positive one for Ron: he feels better about himself, it makes it easier to pass, it makes his body more in line with how he wants. But it is also fraught with some pain—taking the testosterone is “giving in” to what’s socially expected (admitting that he wasn’t, without it, really a guy). As for the external violence, I think that cements in Ron’s mind that, no matter how he looks or acts or what he does, some people will always hate him and want to do him harm. There’s a way in which gender expression is about negotiating how the outside world perceives us, and sometimes that can be a part of avoiding the negativity or violence of others.

I blinked, hoping the landscape would resolve itself into something familiar. Pine trees? A pond? Maybe a boulder or two? But it just stood there, mute and waiting, and I remembered that this had been the idea: to get off the over-crowded, everything’s-been-discovered-already East Coast and head out West, where real people lived.

—Alex Myers, Chapter One

LITTELL: Myth, tradition, the American West. It’s hard to get more quintessentially Western than Wyoming, and part of Ron’s struggle is determining where he fits into the very American story of masculinity, wildness (wilderness), and the land. Could this story have been set anywhere else? How might Ron’s path to radical self-acceptance have looked had he traveled to the South, the Midwest, Appalachia? And how dependent do you think Ron’s happiness is on his chosen landscape—do you believe he’ll be able to carry his contentment back to the East and beyond?

MYERS: I have to admit, I was happy to leave Ron at the moment the novel ends. It feels to me like he could go anywhere. But in order to be truly happy, the place he needs to work on is within himself. When I was in Wyoming, the attitude I encountered quite often was the same as I found in northern, rural New England: at best a “live and let live” and more often a sort of “if you don’t shove it in my face, I don’t care what you are.” Neither of these are perfect attitudes, but both of them can be starting places. I haven’t spent enough time in the South or Midwest, or talked to people like Ron from those places, to know what the difference would be. But I do think that certain geographical areas make it easier or harder for someone to come out, to be visible, and to be understood.

Cool air filtered through the screens on the windows, and I listened to the sound of insects whining out there, the more distant sound of the North Fork rushing along. This side of the “Continental Divide,” it drained, like all the rivers of my childhood, to the east. If I had a bottle, I’d slip a note inside. I’d heave it on the current and let it be carried away.

—Alex Myers, Chapter Twenty

LITTELL: In your blog posts and other interviews, you’ve explained that your autobiography aligns with Ron’s in many significant ways, including time spent in Wyoming. Did you always intend to write about your time in Wyoming? In transforming your lived experiences into fiction, at what point or points did the two diverge most meaningfully?

MYERS: I was always interested in writing about Wyoming. That was a wonderful and powerful time for me, and a very lonely one. I read a lot. I thought a lot. I ran a lot. I never came out to my boss or my colleagues—only to one other person the whole time I was there. I think that’s the biggest difference between my experience and Ron’s in terms of how we negotiated identity. The other plot points: he has a romantic relationship, he is subject to violence … Those are totally fictional (as is the fire fighting). That’s substantial too. I hid; I went stealth. I kept quiet and therefore didn’t form relationships. I was afraid a lot of the time, and confused a lot of the time (Ron is, too, but in a different way). One of the fun aspects of writing fiction is getting to ask: What if? And follow possible paths.
 

LITTELL: “Continental Divide” is your second novel, and your third is forthcoming this year. What connects your work, and what sets “Continental Divide” apart? What’s next for you as a writer?

MYERS: My other novels are not based on my real lived experience or set in anything like the present moment. My third novel, coming out sometime in the second half of 2020, is historical fantasy, and I will be working on something else in the fantasy area after that. So, very different! Gender is the through-line for me, though. Even when I try not to write about that, it bubbles up.

 

Margo Orlando Littell, Interviews Editor