Any Other City

Hazel Jane Plante

Description

·        Publicity by Nectar Literary

·        Advance reader copies (print and digital) to major reviewers and LGBTQ+, literary, cultural media

·        Advertising in library wholesaler catalogs and LGBTQ+, literary and cultural media, online and print

·        Online advance reader copies available on Edelweiss

·        Co-op available

·         Any Other City is the follow-up to Hazel Jane Plante’s award-winning and critically acclaimed novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), published by Canada’s Metonymy Press in 2019. The book won the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction and the Expozine Alternative Press Award.

·         Any Other City joins a growing list of critically acclaimed and commercially successful trans titles, including Casey Plett’s Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman, and books by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Kai Cheng Thom and Vivek Shraya.

·         Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) was a meditation on grief for a friend who died that included faux encyclopedic entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island. Similarly, Any Other City features an unusual conceit: it is the “two-sided” faux memoir ofTracy St. Cyr, leader of the beloved (fictional) indie rock band Static Saints; Side A is set in 1993 when she is 20, and Side B in 2019 when she is 46. The “memoir” is a portrait of a powerful and complicated trans woman artist who transmutes trauma through art making and queer sex. 

·        The novel is a sex-positive testament to trans survival―how the experience of trauma can mutate over the course of a life, and how that harmful experience can be ameliorated by art and community.

·        In the author’s own words: “I wanted to try to represent a life across time, like a palimpsest, with traces of the past visible in the present. The same is true of the city Tracy finds herself in: you can see what used to be there before, peeking through. The novel also represents Tracy writing over her past via the memoir she’s writing, with motifs recurring (phrases and images) across the years, like musical phrases. I wanted to show her in the act of creating and how that act can soften recent and distant trauma and how it can even change the past. I wanted the book to be a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself. And I wanted to show trans characters experiencing deep pleasure through their bodies and building community, sometimes at the same time.”

·        Hazel Jane is a musician herself who releases music under the name lo-fi lioness. She has already recorded a number of the songs referenced in the book, which will be used in the publicity around the book.

·         And advance blurb by Megan Milks (Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body) is in. Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby) has also agreed to blurb the book.

·        Publicity by Nectar Literary.

By the author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian): the fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician that reveals how the act of creation can heal trauma and even change the past.

Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.

Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.

Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex—a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Sujets

• LGBTQ
• World Literature
• Literary
• LGBTQ+
• Women
• Canadá
• Transgender
• Literature
• Woman
• 21st Century
• The Women
• Canada
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781551529127
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

More praise for Any Other City
“I wanted to luxuriate and soak in Hazel Jane Plante’s trans demimonde, bubbling over with queer desire, scented with longing. A hall of mirrors refracting space and time, Any Other City interweaves heartbreak, art-making, guitars and drums, all with electric aplomb and vigour.”
—BISHAKH SOM, AUTHOR OF APSARA ENGINE
“Hazel Jane Plante’s Any Other City is absorbing, funny, hot, tender, and punk AF. Her characters are so vividly rendered that it feels like Plante has actually manifested her novel’s conceit: a musician who is a DIY punk icon and a trans woman invites a fictionalized version of Plante to collaboratively write a hybridized, experimental memoir. Both Plantes deliver, and the writing is wise and raw, joyful and subversive, messy and real. Heartbreak and pain drive some of the plot, but Plante also ensures that pleasure and creativity and creation are given equal space. Gloriously visceral sex scenes abound, provocative art installations are genuinely immersive and thrilling, and there’s tangible exhilaration and exhaustion in the fits and stops of songwriting (and finding ways back to ourselves through our art). Any Other City will get inside your head and your heart, and it will change you in the best possible ways.”
— ANDREA WARNER, AUTHOR OF BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY AND WE OUGHTA KNOW: HOW FOUR WOMEN RULED THE '90S AND CHANGED CANADIAN MUSIC
ANY OTHER CITY
Copyright © 2023 by Hazel Jane Plante
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Parallels
Words and music by Adrianne Lenker
Copyright © 2016 Domino Publishing Company Limited
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Motion Sickness
Words and music by Phoebe Bridgers and Marshall Vore
Copyright © 2017 Whatever Mom and Pizza Money Publishing
All rights administered worldwide by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Back cover photography by Daniel Olah via Unsplash
Edited by Catharine Chen
Proofread by Alison Strobel
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title: Any other city : a novel / Hazel Jane Plante.
Names: Plante, Hazel Jane, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220412499 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220412502 | ISBN 9781551529110 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551529127 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8631.L345 A79 2023 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
for Onjana
ANY OTHER CITY
A Memoir
TRACY ST. CYR
with
HAZEL JANE PLANTE
Foreword to Side A, or A Dose of Vinyl Hiss Before the First Song Starts
by Hazel Jane Plante
YOU’RE ABOUT TO READ ANY OTHER CITY , Tracy St. Cyr’s avidly anticipated memoir. Perhaps you’re reading this book because you adore her band, Static Saints. Perhaps you were transfixed by her infamous appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert . Perhaps you were intrigued by this book’s tantalizing cover. I’m listed as the person Tracy wrote her memoir “with,” so perhaps I should share how it came into being before you shake off your sandals and wade into its waters.
I met Tracy shortly after my debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) , was published. Thanks to my cunning and tireless publicist, I was invited to chat with a musician of my choice for an episode of the Talkhouse podcast, which pairs artists for conversations about their work. I chose to talk to Tracy St. Cyr. I’ve been a fan of Static Saints since their stellar third album, Esperanto A-Go-Go , and I’d watched Tracy publicly transition while I was in the crux of my own gender crisis. We had a wonderful freewheeling chat that centred on shared artistic obsessions, including genius musician Rowland S. Howard and iconoclastic artist Sadie Tang.
Tracy and I became fast friends, and I wrote liner notes for the Static Saints album Dress Rehearsals . At some point, Tracy confided that she’d signed a contract to write a memoir. It happened during her transition-related media whirlwind. One week, she was profiled in The New Yorker ; the next week, she was on Good Morning America . During that dizzying wave of wooze and schmooze, Tracy signed a publishing contract. Out of the blue, I awoke to an avalanche of text messages from Tracy imploring me to collaborate on her memoir, her last text (at 2:15 a.m.) being, Help me, Hazy-Wan Kenobi—you’re my only hope .
We met for coffee and talked about what she’d written so far, what she was trying to do with her memoir, and what it might look like if I got involved. She’d delayed the delivery date for the manuscript a couple of times and was on the hook to write the book because she’d already accepted and spent a substantial advance. She unzipped a black leather duffle bag on the empty chair beside her and gave me a quick spiel on the contents. They included most of the remnants of her past that she’d been consulting while working on the book. “My brain is fucked,” she said. “Everything feels super foggy. And this book feels like a jigsaw puzzle with too many missing pieces. Maybe you can help me solve it.”
I took some time off work and sifted through the contents of the duffle bag, which was crammed with notebooks, diaries, photographs, and demos. I sorted the items into piles on the hardwood floor of my apartment. I filled coloured index cards and sticky notes with dozens of discrete details, trying to divine patterns within the chaos. Sure, Tracy could write a linear memoir, but that would be like building a Vancouver Special home. She told me she wanted her memoir to be “architecturally interesting,” which was why she wanted to work with me. (Tracy, you had me at “Hazy-Wan Kenobi.”)
I’d been chatting and texting with Tracy while delving into her past, and our brains converged on the idea of a two-story structure. One story would be a snapshot of her life at twenty, when she flew overseas and unexpectedly fell in with a clutch of trans women. The second story would be from a year earlier, when she flew to the same city, this time to weather a traumatic event. I created a shared document, and we started to populate it with moments from her life at the ages of twenty and forty-six. Before long, we started noticing reverberations. Perhaps we could show how it feels to travel through time with a complicated gender, including the ways our past selves ripple into our present selves.
At some point, Tracy sent me the demos for the next Static Saints album. I was knocked out and soon became fixated on the song “Useful and Beautiful.” It will likely be heard as an ode to sexual debasement, but I think it’s also an invitation to root your life and your art in utility and beauty. I’ve found myself returning endlessly to this question: How can we make Tracy’s memoir more useful and more beautiful? I love that her song enacts what it extols: it reminds us that we can revel in sexual pleasure and perversity (“I’ve got uses / I’ve got bruises”) while also opening up to become more expansive, more useful, and more beautiful (“Oh, let me be a crashing wave / Oh, let me be a secret cave”). The aesthetic and architectural decisions animating this book stem from the desire to make it as useful and as beautiful as humanly possible.
Tracy and I spoke many times about the voices we let into our heads, particularly the people we have imaginary conversations with, who often are our lovers. As a result, Tracy decided in her memoir to write directly to two women who deeply affected her life. In Side A, she writes to her first girlfriend. In Side B, she speaks to a lover who shattered her world.
I’ve seen sources claim that I’m the “ghostwriter” of this memoir. I want to dispel this notion. Tracy is this book’s architect; I’m just someone who chatted with her about the two-story building she wanted to construct and provided some feedback on her blueprints and architectural models. The Side A / Side B structure is a case in point—that comes from Tracy. I was just along for the ride as a pedantic passenger, a light-fingered creative conspirator.
For what it’s worth, I suggest reading Any Other City in several smaller sips rather than one long gulp. It’s a slow work to metabolize and has lingering notes of leather, smoke, and licorice. While reading, please don’t forget to keep hydrated and caffeinated. I don’t think I helped Tracy “solve” her personal jigsaw puzzle, but I’m so glad she trusted me to help her identify and rearrange the pieces into a useful and beautiful shape that feels something like a life.
July 8, 2021

And you will lose yourself in the city (You will unravel your riddle) And you will find yourself in the city (You will secrete all your secrets)
COSTUMES BY EDITH HEAD, “SECRET GIRLS”
WHEN I WAS SMALL , I dreamt of becoming friends with a peregrine falcon