Torrey Peters went off-grid and came back speaking lumberjack

Sydney Morning Herald

02-05-2025

To most, they're pancakes – but to Torrey Peters, they're monkey blankets. Eggs are cackleberries, chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite, and women are skooches and strumpets.
Peters immersed herself so deeply in woodcutter slang while writing her remarkable new novella Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, that after a day of writing, she'd amuse (and/or annoy) her family and friends by slipping into her lumberjack voice.
And she doesn't just talk the talk. Peters can walk the walk, or in this case, fell the trees. The story was inspired by the time she spent living in her off-grid, 12-by-12, log cabin in rugged Vermont, in the New England region. There's no running water, just a stream for bathing. There's an outdoor kitchen and outhouse; a wood stove heats a sauna.
'I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do,' Peters says, now safely ensconced in her Brooklyn apartment, flashing mint green nails as she talks. 'It's a real 1880s lifestyle out there, which means that I'll go there for a week at a time, but I think some part of my mind would break if I were there super long.'
As she worked, Peters wondered about the people who lived such hard and isolated lives, and the experience of the self while alone in the woods, with only the trees to affirm, challenge or question you.
'I'm from the Midwest, and I was raised a boy. If you told my 17-year-old self that when you turn 40, you're going to be in the woods with a chainsaw struggling to build something but feeling grimly pleased with your proficiency, I would have been like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense',' Peters says.
'I never would have thought I'd have transitioned, but I would have been like, that's a masculine model of being. Well, what does it mean that I did transition and I ended up exactly where my 17-year-old self expected?'
She had no answer, but those questions laid the first axe-blow for a novel set in a logging camp. During her research, Peters discovered a historical tradition in American frontier camps where dances were held, and some loggers would attend as women. To signify their role, they would attach an inverted brown triangle of fabric over their crotch – a practice that becomes a central motif in Stag Dance.
The story follows Babe Bunyan, a large, rugged lumberjack who decides to attend the camp's stag dance as a woman, placing him in a rivalry with the younger, more feminine Lisen. Set against the grit and grime of an illegal logging camp, the story evokes the poetic sensibilities of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville.
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The lumberjack vernacular — for which Peters drew on a dictionary of logger slang — allowed her to approach questions of trans identity through the 'side door'. Phrases like gender dysphoria, she says, have had the life sucked out of them through academic, medical, and online discourse. A lumberjack, however, would never have used that phrase in the first place. This forced Peters to think, and write, about how gender dysphoria feels rather than relying on familiar terms. For Babe, it's summed up in the description: 'No mirror has ever befriended me.'
'I had to reinvent a lot of the trans language that, to me, feels ossified,' Peters says. 'It ended up being quite magical for me that I had this new language to find out these things. They became defamilarised and new for me.'
Stag Dance gives its name to Peter's new collection of four stories, each of which deliciously twists familiar genres into unexpected shapes; full of surprises without sacrificing any emotional intensity. The collection also includes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a post-apocalyptic tale where a pandemic renders humans unable to produce sex hormones; the boarding school romance The Chaser; and The Masker, a body horror story set at a cross-dressing convention. Only a few characters are explicitly trans, with Peters more interested in breaking down the binary between trans and cis people, revealing the categories as porous and complex. Peters says the gap between how a person feels in themselves or wants to be seen, and how the world sees them, isn't an experience unique to trans people.
'For me, coming at it with emotions was the point. Coming at it without identity, without heuristics, or this is how we break it down, is how I am interested in writing these days,' Peters says.
'It's not that I am demanding empathy for trans people. It's actually more than I'm demanding that readers have empathy for themselves, and I think in having empathy for themselves – 'Oh yes, I've felt that way before' – they can maybe then start to make maps of what other people are doing, they can make intellectual maps based on those emotions.'
Stag Dance is the final story in Torrey Peters' collection and the only one written after her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, became a bestseller in 2021. That novel – a comedy of manners about a trio who plan to raise a baby together – was described by one critic as 'the first great trans realist novel.'
Its longlisting for the Women's Prize for Fiction made Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. However, the nomination drew scrutiny, including an open letter condemning Torrey's eligibility by a group called the Wild Woman Writing Club. Peters wrote at the time that she had received an 'outpouring of hate' and expressed hope that the next trans woman to be on the list could at least enjoy the experience more.
Peters knows some readers will be disappointed she didn't write another 'trans Sex in the City' in the style of Detransition, Baby – and she started work on a financial thriller set in contemporary Brooklyn. But the weight of the expectation felt restrictive, she found liberation a world away from the contemporary in the minds and language of lumberjacks.
'It's not just unexpected for other people. It's very unexpected for myself. But I think that's like a really good place to write from, when you're surprising yourself,' Peters says.
'Nobody was waiting for this. Nobody was like, 'What we want is a lumberjack novel.' In a lot of ways, that freed me to do whatever I wanted. '
Trans people have increasingly found themselves at the centre of public debate and policymaking in the United States with the Trump administration targeting trans people with executive orders.
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These include an order that the United States will recognise only a person's sex assigned at birth, and new restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts, targeting efforts to promote diversity and so-called 'gender ideology'. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Peters described how under the Trump administration, her passport would be changed from 'F' to 'M' and the consequences that would have when she travelled to Colombia, where she owns an apartment.
These policies, Peters says, are designed to intimidate and silence. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the hostility, but over time, she has become more resolute.
'I'm meant to be scared. I'm meant to say home. I am meant not to go anywhere, and the M is meant to stop me from doing that sort of stuff,' Peters says.
'And in response to that, I have to be like f---k that. I'm going to go to many more places. I'm going to Australia. I'm going to talk about this. I'm not going to be intimidated and more over, I am going to divest from the idea that these people have the authority, and that what they say in any way should be taken seriously.'