It feels appropriate that I have an addition to our Plural Tarot project, from last year, to share with you at this time. Back then we ended the Plural Tarot zines with the final card in the major arcana – The World – which showed me, Fox, heading out into the world to re-engage after our seven years of crisis and collapse, and our five years of deep retreat. The other plural selves in our system were very much in the background of that card, as that’s how I experienced them at the time. I wondered whether it would just be me, with Ara’s support, going forward, given that we hadn’t been able to connect with the others vividly – in the way we used to – for a whole year.

Turns out that – thankfully – this wasn’t the case. We head into 2026 feeling deeply connected as all seven of us (having had several years of just five, and one year of just two). I’m particularly spending a lot of time with our ‘critic’ (Morgan) and fearful one (Jonathan) helping them to know what essentional members of the team they are. It still seems to be me, Fox, who needs to engage with the outer world, but my ‘council of four’ are close by, informing all that I do, and I feel James and Ara holding us all. Here’s the new card which is the best depiction I can manage of how it feels inside Team MJ at the moment…

I’ve updated our Plural Tarot Companion, and Plural Tarot, zines on this website to include the new World card. All of this bodes well to finally writing the book we’ve been hoping to write in 2026: a book sharing the learnings from our plural path, expanding on the zines we’ve already written and exploring how this kind of work/play relates to mental health, relationships with others, social justice, and spirituality.

However, creating this new card also reminds us of how things can – and do – change and change again. Perhaps we’ll need to make further ‘World’ cards in future to represent new selves configurations. Being open to what unfolds – rather than resisting it – is certainly one of our biggest learnings. And, relatedly, this may not be the year for that book. We have a strong sense that we’ll need to be in a certain place, ourselves, before writing it, even if that won’t ever be any kind of end point. There’s a draw to various fiction projects too, as well as to writing about writing, and we’ll hopefully be making a third Queer Creative Health zine with QueerCircle as well.

In more certain news – for those who want to read our writings! – there will be new editions of two of our old books out in 2026. Routledge asked me to do a second edition of The Psychology of Sex, as they are relaunching their Psychology of Everything series. Managing that project back in Autumn gave me the confidence to revisit Rewriting the Rules (the book this website is named for): also for Routledge. That felt like a much greater challenge as the book is so personally meaningful to us, being the first self-help style book that we (or rather Max) wrote, and a book that sets out one of our most pivotal philosophies (that it’s important to rewrite our rules, the other ones being that ‘life isn’t binary‘ and that we’re all ‘incorrigibly plural‘ – the title of our next book!)

So watch this space for updates on those two new editions. The second edition of The Psychology of Sex includes a whole new long chapter about un/conscious sex and trauma, as well as updates about sex and tech, and queer/intersectional sexualities. The third edition of Rewriting the Rules includes a foreword addressing recent and current crises, new afterwords where I reflect on each chapter from where we’ve got to now, and a new afterword to the whole book about the importance of Rewriting our Rules (plural) at the level of ourselves, our relationships, our culture, and our ecosystems.

The Psychology of Sex is already available for pre-order, and I’ll update here as soon as Rewriting the Rules is available too. A few chapters in edited collections on love studies, neuroqueerness, and madzines should also come out this year…

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The JKP Writing Prize is a competition for aspiring writers from underrepresented backgrounds. The theme this year is: Everyday Disability and Chronic Illness: Stories of Joy, Resistance, and Anti-Ableism. 

The voices of disabled and chronically ill people remain vastly underrepresented across many sectors, including the publishing industry. JKP are looking for a short 3,000-word submission and the winners will get their work published in an anthology and receive a £150 winners fee.

Please do share on and/or consider entering. You can find all the information you need here.

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The exhibition runs from 14th March to 14th September 2025 and looks at how zines have been used to share experiences of disability and disabled identity. The Zine Maker zine will be near the start of the exhibition, as part of an introduction to what zines are and why they are particularly relevant to themes of disability (as well as madness/trauma, queerness, and marginalisation more broadly).

The Zines Forever! exhibition is curated by Dr Lea Cooper (artist and zinemaker), and Adam Rose (Assistant Curator, Wellcome Collection).

If you can’t make the exhibition, you can access the Zine Maker zine here. It introduces  zines and zine culture, and takes you through a workshop style session to make and plan your own zines.

As well as accessing our zines through this website, you can now find most of them in the Wellcome Collection, along with some of our other resources.

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While I was away, I was included in an interview about the Out on the Page and Audible Pride List of Queer Storytelling. I was one of the nominators for this amazing list of queer stories and storytellers. It’s a brilliant resource if you’re looking to expand your queer reading.

Attitude magazine interviewed me, along with Shivani Dave and Juliet Jacques about our own relationships to queer storytelling. This was particularly exciting, for me. All my published books to date have been non-fiction, but I do attempt to tell queer stories through these books, particularly the graphic guides. Also I’m increasingly creating more fictional and comic/zine stories alongside that work, and exploring queer creativity specifically. It’s affirming to be thought of as a queer storyteller.

You can read the interview with me, Shiv and Juliet here, and read my answers in full below.

How has the writing process aided you in your gender journey?

In so many ways. I’ve been fortunate to be paid to write about gender for a general audience. Writing Gender: A Graphic Guide with Jules Scheele enabled me to learn all about gender, weaving together history, psychology, sociology, biology, cultural theory and more to come to my best attempt at making sense of how it all works. Writing How To Understand Your Gender with Alex Iantaffi helped me to reflect – again – on my own gender and to write the book I wish I’d had as a young person.

Nowadays I write fiction to further explore the multiple gendered parts of myself and to bring them into better communication with each other, as well as journaling in dialogue between them – both for myself and on my blog.

Who would you say is the most influential gender-diverse writer in history? 

I’m going to say all the gender diverse writers who never got to write and who we’ve therefore never had the chance to read. Thanks to the rigid white Western binary model of gender, and the way it’s been enforced around the world, so many voices have been silenced. Even now – as writers like Travis Alabanza and Juliet Jacques have pointed out – we only hear particular narratives of gender diversity: those that fit the dominant culture’s narrow sense of allowable transness. This severely closes down the options of how we can understand, experience and express our gender diversity and creativity.

I would point people towards Kit Heyam’s wonderful history book Before We Were Trans which tells the stories of gender diverse people across time and place, including those who have been silenced or written out of history in various ways.

Who are the most influential gender-diverse characters? 

Anna Madrigal from Tales of the City was the first gender diverse character I remember reading as a late teenager. Armisted Maupin’s books had a huge impact on me way before I realised my own transness, and on so many other people I know.

The depiction of a wise, kind, older trans woman was radical for the time when – as the Disclosure documentary shows – gender diverse people were generally depicted as objects of ridicule, dangerous perpetrators, or disposable victims, if they were depicted at all. Maupin’s later books – and the TV shows based on them – include many other great depictions of various forms of gender diversity. 

What text exploring gender-diversity is most important to you?

I picked Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater for the Pride list because it depicts a plural experience of gender diversity – someone who has several different selves, or spirits, of different genders – as well as exploring how gender and spirituality can be interwoven. This was huge for me as there are so few books that depict plurality as part of life – outside of mental health memoirs. 

I also picked Becky Chambers because she writes so affirmatively about many types of gender, sexual, and relationship diversity, and about relating kindly across difference. Her most recent series has a non-binary lead character without that being a big deal or central to the plot.

What are some of the most common obstacles faced by gender-diverse writers and how do we change them?

Juliet Jacques, Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, Shon Faye, CN Lester and others have written eloquently about the ways in which only certain stories of gender diversity are welcomed, such as stories that centre our transness (and often white middle class transness), that focus on medical transition, that draw on the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, and that present us as poster children for trans by being normative in every other way.

They have also highlighted the fraught cultural moment that we are writing into – where we are still often assumed to be deluded and/or dangerous – and how incredibly hard it is to write honestly about the complexities of gender, and about our experience, when we know how people are likely to misrepresent us and attack us.

We need everyone’s support to shift the current toxic culture around gender diversity so that it becomes safer to tell diverse stories of gender, and so that people can find the stories they need to help them on their own journeys.

How can the literary community better support gender-diverse writers?

I was very struck by an answer Juno Roche gave at a book launch event where they were talking with H Howitt. A cis person asked Juno how they could best write trans characters. I think we were all expecting Juno to say something like ‘don’t’ or ‘educate yourself and talk to lots of trans people’, but what they actually said was along the lines of ‘find the trans person in you and speak from them’. 

Personally I love this challenging of the trans/cis binary. I think the most helpful thing that people in wider communities – including the literary community – can do is to undertake deep reflective work around their own gender diversity, their own gender transitions, and the ways the rigid gender binary has hurt them. Then it won’t just be trans people who have to write about this stuff, and we can work for change in the gender system – and other intersecting systems of oppression – in solidarity.

What is the best way to respond to the rise of book banning in schools and libraries?

I couldn’t say that I know the best way to respond. I guess I would say it’s important to do our best to make sure that there are as many places as possible – on and offline – where people, including young people, can access stories and supportive resources around gender diversity. It’s also great to encourage young people to create their own stories and resources in ways that are safe enough in the current climate.

What books from Audible and Out on the Page’s collaboration have you read and added to your reading lists?

There were so many books on the list I haven’t read! I suppose I’d want to reassure people that that’s ok. We can so easily get the sense that we should have read all the things, or even that we’re not queer enough unless we have an encyclopaedic knowledge of queer literature. I believe it is fine to focus on the stories and voices that speak to you, even returning to them time and again as trusted friends, rather than forcing yourself to read everything. 

We also need to challenge any sense that certain kinds of writing are superior or inferior. It’s so fine to be into genre fiction or comic books, for example, and some of the best queer writing I’ve read is in online fanfic communities. 

When we expand our understanding of queer to include being neuroqueer we have to acknowledge that people take in information and stories in very different ways, which is part of why having books available in audio format, as well as diverse kinds of fiction, non-fiction, graphic books and poetry, on a list like this is so important.

That said, hopefully a list like this can give you a flavour of the kinds of amazing books that are out there, and why people love them so much, so you might flick through some of them and pursue them if they grab you. 

Personally it was lovely to see how many other people chose my old favourites like Alison Bechdel (who Shivani Dave and others mentioned), Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, and Mary Oliver, and to get some pointers on other authors I might like to read. Particularly I came away wanting to read some of James Baldwin’s fiction (having only read essays by him). Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward really appeals because it uses multiple genres in one book. I definitely want to read Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu, which several people nominated. Two of the books that Juliet Jacques recommended grabbed me in her descriptions: Lote by Shola von Reinhold and Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt which plays with haunted houses and explores cultural transphobia. As a comic fan I also fancy The Pride Omnibus by Joe Glass which Alex Bertie says is like the Avengers but queer.

Why are campaigns such as this important to you and the rest of the LGBTQ community?

For me what stood out was the way it celebrated diverse writing forms, genres, authors, and stories, from around the world and across time. For me there’s far more to queer storytelling than representing LGBTQ people, it’s about representing diversity within queerness and raising more marginalised voices. It’s also about telling stories that challenge normative narratives of what it is to be a person, to love, or to have a successful life, for example. Hopefully the list will inspire others to read these books and to explore their own creativity in different ways as well.

What is your advice to an aspiring writer who is gender-diverse?

When I was asked about this by JKP I said: go where it is live and juicy and vulnerable-as-hell and write from there. My experience is that writing from that place really speaks to others, and that’s far more important than how good your vocabulary or grammar or any of that stuff is. All of that can be fixed up after.

We have to learn to create in the ways that feel nourishing for us, not the ways we feel we should do it, or the ways the world expects us to do it. Finding what that is for us is hugely important. As gender diverse people we’re already treated non-consensually enough. It’s vital that we treat ourselves consensually when it comes to our creativity, and what we put out there and when. It’s fine to create just for ourselves, or to share only with trusted others. It’s absolutely okay to not write at all. The best writing comes from a radical acceptance of not writing.

My nominations

Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild Built

Becky Chambers is my favourite novelist. Her sci-fi books are filled with tender characters doing their best to relate across difference. A Psalm for the Wild Built is the first in her Monk and Robot series, which features a non-binary lead character as well as imagining beautifully queer, sustainable forms of loving, living, and community building. Becky’s stories are just the kind of gentle, warm, hopeful read so many of us need right now.

Travis Alabanza – None of the Above

None of the Above is a beautiful, profound, and heart-breaking memoir by Travis Alabanza in which they time travel back through their life via various comments people have made which stayed with them. The book raises vital questions about why it is the non-binary person – rather than the white western capitalist gender binary system – who is called upon to explain themselves. I love Travis’s embracing of paradox, complexity and liminality, as well as how they question all of the binaries imposed on us in order to determine who is valued and who is not.

Akwaeke Emezi – Freshwater

Freshwater is non-binary novelist Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical book about a girl growing up containing ogbanje (Igbo spirits). It’s a stunning book, and a wonderful literary depiction of multiplicity, which meant a lot to me as someone who experiences themselves as plural. I love the way that Akwaeke questions the spirit/body binary as well as the gender binary through their writing, and how they write across multiple genres rather than restricting themselves to one.

More on Queer Writing…

• What is Queer Writing?
• Queer Comics
• Queer Creativity
• Advice for Queer Writers
• Free Book On Writing

The post Queer Storytelling appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In 2021 I published free books on Plurality, Trauma, and Consent – the main themes which I’d been blogging about during the pandemic. The new free books go back further in time to cover the themes I’ve been writing about since I began blogging, particularly gender, sex,  relationships, and mental health.

As with my latest zine (which I made five years on from making the first Plural Selves zine) these free books mark an imporant anniversary for me. It’s a decade on from 2012: the year when I published the first edition of Rewriting the Rules (my first self-help style book) and started blogging.

It feels helpful, somehow, to bring all the material from this vital period of my life together, and – perhaps – to draw a line there, marking a turning point towards what I might create in the future. Whatever that is will be deeply shaped by this time of external and internal emergency/transformation/paradigm shift, and my learnings from that experience, and from others who are writing on such themes.

Caveat

I begin each of the new free books with a caveat that some of the earlier pieces may not represent (all of) my current thoughts and feelings on these topics. I’ve learned so much more from my own experiences, and from engaging with other people’s work, in the last ten years.

I hope – as with my older published books – that people will read these free books mindful of the time and context in which some of the content was written, and with compassion for the places where the language or ideas are limited and/or have now been replaced with something more inclusive, nuanced, or helpful.

The Books

Here’s a list of the new free books, and what you can expect to find in them:

Relationships

This book contains all my writing on love and relationships. It goes back furthest because these topics were the focus of most of my first blog posts after Rewriting the Rules was published. It also includes some of my most recent writing on slow relating and break-ups.

The book is divided into sections on love (mostly the impact of cultural love norms or amatonormativity), crushes and new relationship energy, slow relating, monogamy and non-monogamy, conflict and communication, and break-ups.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published books Rewriting the Rules, The Secrets of Enduring Love (with Jaqui Gabb), and How To Understand Your Relationships (which Alex and I will hopefully be writing next year).

Download here.

Sex

This book contains all my writing about sex. It’s divided into sections on sex ed, sex advice, sex in relationships (particularly sexual incompatibility), sexual desires, sexual practices, and BDSM/kink (the theme of by far my most popular blog posts for some reason!)

This book, and the relationships and feelings ones, contain versions of several of my summary posts from The Meg-John & Justin podcast, (with links to where you can listen to the audio episodes) as well as posts from this website and elsewhere.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published book with Justin, Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To) as well as to the next free book – and published books – on sexuality.

Download here.

Sexuality

This book starts with a general section which covers figuring out your sexuality, coming out, and the diversity and fluidity of sexuality. Then we have sections on heteronormativity and heterosexuality, bisexuality and pansexuality, queer issues (like nature/nurture and same-sex relationship recognition), further sexualities (like kink and sapiosexuality), and porn.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guides on Queer and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele), as well as Alex and my How to Understand Your Sexuality.

Download here.

Gender

Like sexuality, this book starts with a general section which deals with gender diversity and fluidity, my vision for gender affirmative and inclusive therapy, and the future of gender. Then we have sections on trans (including pieces on the trans moral panic, trans time and space, and trans sex) and on non-binary genders (including my post coming out as non-binary in 2015!) The book ends with a couple of older pieces about understanding masculinities and femininities.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guide to Gender (with Jules Scheele) as well as to Alex and my How to Understand Your Gender, Life Isn’t Binary, and the edited collection Non-Binary Lives.

Download here.

Mental Health

This book includes most of my writing about madness and mental health which isn’t specific to trauma (which has its own full book).

The mental health book starts with a number of general articles covering my thoughts on mental health, mostly focused on why we need to understand it at a sociocultural and sociopolitical level, as well as at the level of individual experience, and why we need to challenge mad/sane and ill/well binaries. After this, the book includes sections on mental health and relationships, self-help, mindfulness, and depression.

I also included a section on new year resolutions towards the end of this book because I’ve written so many pieces about this over the years, and because I wasn’t sure where else to put them! My critiques of new year resolutions are quite similar to my critiques of self-help and self-improvement more broadly. This book ends with a short piece on therapy, and a couple of pieces that touch on plurality and madness – another topic that has its own free books.

These books, and the next one, are hopefully good companions to Alex and my book Hell Yeah Self-Care!, my book on Mindfulness, and Jules and my forthcoming graphic guide on trauma and mental health (hopefully arriving 2024).

Download here.

Feelings

Linked to the mental health book, the free book on feelings covers emotional struggles and emotional experiences more broadly. It starts with a couple of earlier pieces about being with feelings, which eventually lead to my Staying With Feelings and Welcome Monster Feelings zines. Then there are a number of posts about happiness and why we might be suspicious of approaches that encourage us to strive for happiness.

After this there’s a section about other feelings include anger, failure, gratitude and more. Several of these posts are more personal reflections on my own experiences, as are the three ‘memorial’ posts on themes of loss and grief that follow. This book ends with another short piece about therapy, including ideas and practices from some of the main therapy approaches.

Download here.

Writing

The shortest free book is on writing – something that I plan to write plenty more about. But I was able to find 50 pages which seemed enough for a brief book (the others are mostly around 100 pages long).

This book starts with my essay about queer writing and writing queerly (for anyone, not just for queers!) and includes a few other pieces about how I write and my advice for people who want to start writing. In this book I’ve also included some material about journalling and zining, as well as a piece I wrote about purpose and integrity.

Download here.

You can find links to all of the free books here.

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Last week I was invited to Cardiff to facilitate a workshop on zine-making. I thought I’d get meta and make a zine for the workshop about zine-making. I figured it’d be a nice thing for people to take away, as well as giving an opportunity for anyone who couldn’t make the workshop to work/play through it in their own time.

What’s in the zine

The Zine-Maker zine introduces you to the idea of zines and where they come from. It helps you to figure out whether zine-making might be for you and – if so – what kinds of zines, or – if not – what alternative kinds of creativity might be a better fit. Then it takes you through a couple of quick warm-ups for your word-making and image-making (as well as a bunch of alternatives if these things aren’t for you). Finally, it gives you practices for making three zines/zine fragments/zine plans.

You can take a few hours alone – or with friends – to work/play through the zine as a workshop. Or you can just read it through, or dip into it, whatever works for you.

Who inspired the zine

In preparing this zine I read more of Lea Cooper’s wonderful series about zines, In the Zine House (and Carmen Maria Machado’s amazing book In the Dream House, which inspired Lea’s title). Lea’s words particularly helped me to understand the mad, crip, queer potential of zining.

I also read Stephen Duncombe’s excellent analysis of zines and art activism, Notes from Underground. I was fascinated to find out more about the roots of zine-making in both sci-fi fandom (which resonates hard as I’m currently watching everything Star Trek) and in the punk scene.

As well as embracing the DIY ethos of zine-making, both fandom and punk encourage their audiences to break down the hierarchies between creators and audiences by writing their own stories and/or making their own music.

Personally, slashers and other fan-fic authors take mainstream media into their own hands, often making fiction that is queerer that mainstream media is able to produce. Punk and Riot Grrrl resist the capitalist music industry by insisting that everyone can make their own music.

Politically, sci-fi and punk also both challenge the normative status quo, imagining futures where things are done radically differently, particularly in terms of the hierarchies that a drawn between what/who is considered valuable and what/who is not.

In the Zine-Maker zine, I bring Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry into dialogue with zines. Both authors present a radical alternative to conventional advice about words (Natalie) and images (Lynda). They suggest that we should dismantle normative ideas about what makes good, successful writing or pictures, and instead return to our ‘beginner’s mind’ or the child parts of us who knew/know how to play with words and images.

Finally, I love these words from Yarrow Magdalena which I include at the end of the zine.

I love thinking of zines as spells that can travel throughout the world to tell stories and share skills and knowledge … You can hide inside them when things get tough and you can experience another person’s world intimately or escape into some place brighter than your own. Zines give us a chance to shift the narratives we’re exposing ourselves to and to water the kinds of creative eco systems that are more aligned with our values than mainstream media. – Rituals, Yarrow Magdalena

The gift of zine

If you’d like to give the gift of zine, or of zine-making, feel free to download and share the Zine-Maker zine here.

The post Zine-Maker: The Gift of Zines appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It takes the form of an interview between the part of me who created it – Fox – and another part – James. If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our Plural Selves zine, and our free book about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.
Food: Halloumi tomato pesto sandwich, OJ.

James: It’s my great pleasure, today, to be conducting an interview with the artist behind the new zine Welcome Monster Feelings. Thankyou for taking the time to speak with me today Fox.

Fox: You’re welcome.

James: Would you like to begin by telling the readers a little bit about who you are?

Fox: Nope.

James: Well this is getting off to a great start.

Fox: I think it’d be more fun if you say who I am and I’ll say who you are.

James: Oh go on then. How best to describe you?

Fox: It better be good.

James: No pressure then.

Fox: *giggle*

James: I would say that you’re the youngest child part of our plural system. Or rather we tend to think of you as who we might have been without all the rules we learnt about who it was okay and not okay to be in the world – without our developmental trauma. You are the most able of all of us to just be in the moment, to find delight and wonder in things, to move through the feelings you have rather than getting stuck in them. How am I doing?

Fox: Why do we call me Fox?

James: Because you often feel more like a creature than a human: a wild little thing.

Fox: Heh I like that. Okay I’ll do you.

James: I’m not sure it’s regular to introduce the interviewer.

Fox: I’m gonna anyway. You’re our James. We call you lots of other names like Old Man and Saint James and Captain Admin and ruder ones.

James: Captain Admin is pretty rude. I don’t just do admin.

Fox: That’s why it’s funny. You are the one of us who does most of the everyday life stuff, particular the bits that the rest of us find boring or scary like emails *shudder* But you’re also the main one who looks after the child parts of us: me, Morgan (aka Beastie), and Robin (aka Tony). You’re really good at that.

James: I’m not sure how Morgan would feel about being called a child part.

Fox: She’s not here!

James: I mean technically, given that we share a body…

Fox: If she was properly here we wouldn’t be doing this interview coz it’s not easy for her to do this kind of thing. But we’ll get to that.

James: Is that enough introductions then? Am I allowed to start the interview proper?

Fox: It’s about time!

The aims of the zine

James: *shakes head* Okay then. First question. What were you hoping to achieve with this work Welcome Monster Feelings?

Fox: Two things I think. The main one was I wanted to help the other members of our system – particularly Robin and Morgan who carry most of our trauma – to find a way to be with their most painful feelings. We’ve been in this big trauma period for the last few years, so our feelings can be very overwhelming at times, especially for those two. 

The other thing I wanted to do was to find a way back to drawing. We made quite a few zines and comics a few years back, but it was something we found much harder to do during the trauma time.

James: Why d’you think that is?

Fox: Well Morgan’s trauma often comes out as being an inner critic – so it’s very hard for her to let us draw without feeling it’s not good enough, or comparing it to what other people do, even though she also really wants us to be creative. Robin’s trauma comes out as fear and shame so it’s scary for him to put stuff out there in the world, in case people are mean about it. Also it’s just generally pretty hard to sit down and draw – or do anything much – when you’re feeling that bad. 

James: I think it was a genius move to find a project that we could do even when we felt rotten, in fact tough feelings were kind of a bonus.

Fox: I know right? And – as we say in the companion zine Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – the practice of making the monsters often helps overwhelming feelings to calm down a bit. So you gradually get this knowing in your body that making a monster will make you feel better, which makes it easier to do it the next time you feel rough.

James: Positive reinforcement.

Fox: Right, and I love that it showed Robin and Morgan that they were vital – to the project and to us. They can both so easily feel that they are ‘bad parts’, or ruin things for the rest of us, and that they should be cast out again – as they both were for so much of our lives. But I couldn’t have done this project without them. It was their feelings I was drawing most of the time. 

Also when we showed our friends, and they found it helpful and said they felt similar things, that helped Robin and Morgan to feel seen, and less alone, and like they were being helpful to others.

A plural project

James: Just brilliant! So it sounds like you see this as a plural collaboration, even though you were definitely the one leading on it.

Fox: Absolutely. Robin and Morgan mostly had the feelings, and told me about them, and then I found the way to draw them that felt most right. But we also got everyone else’s feelings in there somewhere.

James: I particularly like the holding and hearing monster towards the end…

Fox: That’s you! And he looks a bit like Sully from Monsters Inc because that character reminds us of you, and his full name is James P. Sullivan.

James: I also helped as Captain Admin right?

Fox: Yes! You did all the scanning and the making it a pdf, and learning how to make a pdf small so people can download it, and putting it on our website, and all kinds of things that I find an-noy-ing!

James: And conducting this interview of course.

Fox: Of course. Next question.

Feelings, art and monsters

James: Well I was interested in exploring with you the links in our life between feelings, art, and monsters. I know you’ve been reflecting on that.

Fox: I have. It feels like we’ve been trying to do this project our whole life, and it involves going back towards these three things that were all kind of crushed in us.

James: Do go on.

Fox: Well we’ve written before about how we weren’t allowed ‘difficult’ feelings as a kid. People at home and school tried to train us out of them with punishments for unacceptable emotions, and rewards when we made it through the day or week without crying. That’s part of the reason that Robin and Morgan got disowned. They held all the least acceptable feelings: fear and anger, but also loneliness, sadness, jealousy, pride. All sorts.

James: Right. Our feelings get so unbearable during the years in our life when PTSD hits because we’re feeling all the things that were locked inside Robin and Morgan.

Fox: Feeling the feelings they held for us our whole life. That’s it. 

Another thing that got pushed out of us in a similar way when we were small was art. We LOVED drawing. We drew all of the time. Our bedroom wall was full of our pictures.  But gradually people around us tried to make us draw the kinds of things they wanted, and to draw in the ways they wanted us to.

James: For example?

Fox: Like being asked to draw pictures as a present for people’s birthdays. And they generally wanted things like landscapes or still lifes or whatever, which isn’t what we enjoyed drawing. Also when we did art at high school we were shocked because we had to draw things from real life rather than out of our imagination – as we’d always done before.

James: What did we enjoy drawing?

Fox: Mostly people and imaginary creatures. And we drew to tell stories from our fantasy life, or to get down feelings that we couldn’t talk about or express in other ways. But eventually we learnt that wasn’t how you were meant to do art.

James: So, not only were both feelings and artistic pursuits suppressed, but those two suppressions were also related. Losing the ability to draw from our imagination and feelings denied us an important outlet for emotions we weren’t supposed to have. How do monsters fit in?

Fox: Monsters feel like the third leg of the stool somehow. 

We were always fascinated by monsters. Our favourite TV shows as a kid were Rentaghost and Dramarama. Our favourite books were pop up ghost books. Later we read true haunting books over and over and over. We were addicted to Ghostbusters – one of the first movies we saw at the cinema. When we got to choose our own topic to do a project on at school we did dinosaurs every time.

James: We had a huge collection of plastic dinos too didn’t we?

Fox: Yes! Dimetrodon was my favourite dinosaur, but they don’t think Dimetrodon was a dinosaur any more!

James: This may be a tangent.

Fox: Heh. 

James: How did monsters relate to art and to feelings?

Fox: Well they relate to art because a lot of what we wanted to draw was mythical creatures like dragons. 

They relate to feelings because, when we reached double figures and things got really bad, we started reading authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert. We thought that reading horror books would help us to be less scared in our real life – like maybe we could get used to facing frightening things by reading those books, and become braver.

James: And did our monster love get suppressed too?

Fox: I think so. We once tried to do a book review of a horror book in school and they didn’t like that. It wasn’t a proper book like the ones you were meant to read. When we studied psychology at university – and afterwards – we were always drawn to monster-y topics, like the paranormal, and why people do evil things, and the meaning of fairy tales. But those things were always looked down on as not proper, so we wound up doing our projects on other stuff – somehow making it acceptable.

James: And yet our PhD was on loneliness, our first paper was about goths and Pagans, and the first conference we organised was about vampires. We kept finding our way back to feelings and monsters didn’t we?

Fox: All the way through. Like we did the A levels that people said we should do, instead of the ones we really wanted to do (drawing and stories!) But we spent the whole summer after we finished those exams painting our room with a giant dragon, even though we were just about to move out of there. Then after our PhD we started writing fiction. We were going to do a whole collection of alternative fairy tales and take a creative writing course, but we didn’t get accepted. For a long time we’ve had an idea for a book called Everyday Horrors: a mash up of horror fic and self-help.

James: It seems like we’ve been trying to make Welcome Monster Feelings our whole life, and finally, we’re making it, now that we’re nearly fifty.

Fox: Speak for yourself old man!

James: *Grin* 

Reclaiming lost things

Fox: It’s like reclaiming isn’t it? By reclaiming art, and reclaiming monsters, we’re also reclaiming those feelings and the parts who hold them. No part gets left behind.

James: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And I suspect that many people have a similar history – at least with feelings and with art. The world, and the people around them, tell them that they mustn’t show their feelings, and that they ‘can’t draw’.

Fox: That’s why we love Lynda Barry, who we mention in the zines. She says that most kids just naturally tell stories with pictures, but then they get taught proper writing and proper drawing, and they lose all that. Her books and resources are all about getting it back, by playing with it, using wax crayons, drawing quickly, colouring in, that kind of thing. And lots of drawing from the imagination!

James: I notice that when we can allow you – Fox – to just draw from the feeling (with the odd bit of help from Google images to see what certain things look like) it just comes out looking right.

Fox: It’s amazing. Morgan is often sure there’s no way it’ll come out looking like we feel it, but it really does. It’s all about keeping it simple, not trying too hard, just getting the feeling down.

James: I think Lynda Barry is helping people get back to the child part of themselves who can draw that way, and tell stories too. The part like you that perhaps everyone has somewhere inside.

An early attempt to welcome monster feelings?

Fox: More questions please!

Inspirations

James: Well you’ve mentioned Lynda Barry. Can you say something about your other inspirations for this project?

Fox: I guess there are two kinds of inspirations: other people who’ve used monsters as a way of exploring feelings, and other people who have come up with practices for welcoming feelings. 

For the first one we’re super inspired by Pixar movies. They are something we watch a lot of because they are so gentle, and we generally need that in the evenings. Inside Out and Monsters Inc are the obvious ones, but lots of the Pixar shorts explore trauma and plurality too. Far From the Tree and Twenty Something are great examples.

We also recently watched the movie A Monster Calls, which is all about monsters and fairy tales as ways of dealing with huge tough feelings. Hannah Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, is about that too.

We really love this Zen Pencils comic version of Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, by Gavin Aung Than. That poem captures the whole idea of welcoming feelings better than anything else, which is why we included it at the start of the zine.

James: What about the practices for welcoming feelings?

Fox: We wrote about focusing and Pema’s F.E.A.R. practices in our Staying With Feelings zine. Those are about feeling feelings in the body. Our therapist helped us towards the idea of visualising feelings. She suggested imagining the feeling you’re having as just one cell of the body, and picturing it outside of yourself, describing what it looks like: its colour, texture, that kind of thing. That helps it be more manageable – it’s not all of you, just one cell, and it’s outside of you so you can approach it curiously.

James: Externalising the feeling, so it doesn’t feel like all that you are and all that you’ll ever be, as traumatic feelings often feel.

Fox: Right. But cells aren’t much fun. I think that imagining feelings as monsters makes it more playful. And you can do with a bit of lightness and humour when you’re dealing with something that hard.

James: Agreed. And that makes it a bit more like the Tibetan demon feeding practice that we’ve written about before.

Fox: Except in that practice you don’t tend to draw the feelings. Lynda Barry adapts a Zen practice where you draw your demons in her comic One! Hundred! Demons!

James: It’s so cool that you’re now part of this group of comic and animation creators who’ve explored monsters in this kind of way.

Fox: I know, I love that. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

James: We found our long, slow way towards art, monsters, and feelings, didn’t we?

Fox: We sure did!

Monster feeling practice

James: I know that you’ve also made a companion zine called Welcoming Your Monster Feelings. Do you want to say something about that?

Fox: Yes. We wanted to find a way to share our practice with people, in case they might find making monsters about their feelings helpful too. We were going to finish the Welcome Monster Feelings zine with a few pages about how to do it. But our friend H said they thought we shouldn’t do that, because it should stand on its own as art!

James: What did you think about that?

Fox: I think they were right. Because we still struggle to see ourselves as someone who can legitimately draw pictures or tell stories, we often want to wrap those things up in a kind of self-help project, like we used to do with academic projects. Publishing Welcome Monster Feelings as a standalone book of our art felt really important. But we did still want to share the practice, so I made an extra little zine about that.

James: And do you describe your process in that zine?

Fox: Not exactly, because I know that not everybody will work the way that we do. The zine explores all kinds of different ways people might access their feelings and turn them into monsters, and the different reasons they might find that helpful.

James: Can you share a bit more about your process here then. That’s something people often want to know about artists.

Fox: Heh that still sounds funny – artist. What I do is I sit down, usually with Robin or Morgan. That means that we’re… what is it?

James: Co-conscious. That’s the word for when two parts of a plural system are foregrounded at the same time, like you and I are right now.

Fox: Cool. So the other part really tunes into their feeling, and kind of shows me and tells me what it’s like. Sometimes we feel it inside our body, and sometimes we have an image. Like that last feeling in the book from Morgan – we got a strong image of that classic Peanuts comic where Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown.

After they’ve shared the feeling, I find a way to turn it into a monster picture. And I draw, with a mechanical pencil, whatever comes out. I like to draw in this sketch book we got from WHSmiths, it has a hard cover so it looks like a proper book. And that means you can’t just rip out pages if you don’t like it. It feels important that we keep them all – however they come out. That’s part of the welcoming.

Once it feels like I’ve got the sketch right I go over the pencil lines with drawing pens. I like the ones that have several different sizes. Then I rub out the pencil lines, and we do the colouring in. That’s very soothing and often we do it together. I like these felt-tips which have a brush end and a fibre tip end. It feels good to use felt-tips because that’s more child-like than pastels or pencil crayons or paints I think. And I like the bright colours.

James: We might need to get you some more of those felt tips for your birthday. We’re close to using some of them up.

Fox: I’d like a bigger set because there’s only one grey and it doesn’t come out great on the scanner. There is a really big set you can get, just saying.

James: Heh, that is a whole lot of felt-tips. 

Trauma, shame and monster feeling practice

Fox: Can I ask you a question?

James: Unconventional, but fire ahead.

Fox: Well you’ve written a graphic guide about trauma and mental health, which goes pretty well with my zine, right?

James: I guess I was the main author of that one – on behalf of the whole system and what we’ve just been through. It’s like the grown up version of your zine in some ways – except not that grown up because it’s still a comic with lots of superhero references. Hopefully Jules will be illustrating that one this year and it’ll be out in 2023.

Fox: Grown up books take a lot longer it seems.

James: *grin* I do think they go well together though, you’re right. What was the question?

Fox: I wondered why you think monster feeling practice is so helpful, given all the stuff you’ve learnt about trauma.

James: Ah yes, I do have a few thoughts about that. One thing that we explore in the graphic guide is how trauma is often the result of violence combined with silence: painful things that happen to someone which aren’t heard or held by anyone around them. We realised that many of the things that help with mental health struggles – like meditation, therapy, or activism around social injustice – are about the opposite of violence and silence – they are about kindness and honesty. Make sense?

Fox: Kindness is the opposite of violence, and honesty is the opposite of silence.

James: Right. And drawing monster feelings is all about being more honest with ourselves about what our feelings actually are, and more kind around them – that gentle process of drawing them and colouring them in, and the whole idea of welcoming them rather than trying to eradicate them. 

Sharing those feelings with ourselves is also a great way to connect more with the different parts of us – to really hear what it’s like for them and to hold them in their tough places. 

Fox: The holding and hearing monster! Kind holding and hearing the truth.

James: Yes! The zine also helps us to connect with other people when they resonate with your drawings. That’s a way of healing the disconnection (with self, others, and the world) which lies at the heart of so much trauma.

Fox: But why is it so important for us to be able to feel the monster feelings? 

James: Ara and I explored this a bit last year in our Staying with the Big Feels blog post. One reason is that it’s hard for a person to be authentic – to be real about who and how they are – without all of their feelings. And it’s hard to have real intimacy – or good relationships – with other people too if you’re still hiding some of your feelings from yourself and/or from them. Being able to be yourself, and having good relationships, are both vital for mental and physical health.

Another thing is that the feelings that many people, including us, most often avoid or repress are the most vital for self-protection and for caring for others. Robin has held much of our fear, and Morgan much of our anger. We’ve realised recently how those feelings are so important for keeping ourselves safe-enough and for acting with integrity.

Fox: The integri-tree!

James: That’s right, you drew a few pictures relating to this. Robin’s fear of shame – when it isn’t unbearably intense – helps to guide us in what we take on, and what we don’t, recognising when other people are trying to pull us or push us into things, or when it’s coming from a dodgy motivation inside us. Morgan’s anger – when it isn’t twisted into confusion – helps us to state our needs and boundaries, as well as seeing other people more clearly. Your anger sunshine picture captured this beautifully.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: There’s lots more I could say about this, but the point is that without access to some of the supposedly ‘negative’ feelings, it’s very hard to empathise with others, to recognise danger, and to value ourselves equally with other people, rather than seeing ourselves as worse-than, or better-than.

Fox: For us it’s often worse-than. That’s why a lot of our pictures are about shame.

James: Mm, and it’s very common for shame to be at the heart of people’s tough feelings as Brené Brown has pointed out. We’ve been reading a lot about shame since we did a workshop on the topic last year, linked to the shame and medicine project. 

The book we’re reading right now says that it’s very hard to express shame verbally because it’s often non-conscious and not available to the language parts of the brain. So perhaps you’ve really hit on something with these drawings – giving us a way to communicate feelings that would be impossible to express in any other way.

Fox: Wow.

James: I know right? And it’s vital because so much of what people do that hurts them and others is an attempt to avoid painful feelings – particularly shame and the fear of shame. If we were able to get to a point where we were okay with all those feelings – where we could weather them, if not actively welcome them – then potentially we wouldn’t do those hurtful things. It’s a lifelong journey though, as Pema would say.

Fox: Life long, and many books of monster feelings!

Where next?

James: That’s a great segue to the final question I have for you. Where are you hoping to go next in your creative pursuits, now that you’ve got us here.

Fox: Well I’ve already started Welcome More Monster Feelings, so that we’ll keep going. Most of the monsters in the first book were Robin’s ones, partly because he was foregrounded for a lot of the time we were making it, and partly because Morgan initially didn’t want to do her feelings because she struggles so much not to be critical of them.

James: She really didn’t like the volcano drawing you made of her rage.

Fox: I knew that would happen! It’s the only one where the colours ran, and you can’t see the face very well. But then I did the one of her snake-eating-its-tail, and the sunshine anger, and she loved those, so I think she’s on board now. She has quite a few more monsters to share.

James: Anything else you want to do, or is it all monsters all of the time?

Fox: I would like to make more plural zines now that we all know each other better. I’ve started one about how people can learn to love their different parts, and there’s another one to do about how they can communicate better between them. 

But I also want to listen to H and do some more stuff that’s just about our own experiences – not trying to be a self-help thing. Maybe I could do more plural comics like the Chalk Board one. Also I think Morgan would love to write about our journey of embracing our inner critic, perhaps with fairy tales!

James: It would be great if she could feel free enough to create herself. She has such a powerful and tender voice when she can find it through all the horrors she’s experienced.

Fox: Totally.

James: Okay. Well thank-you very much for sharing some of your precious time with me today Fox, and for joining me at the keyboard instead of the sketchpad for once.

Fox: You are very welcome. I expect extra cuddles later.

James: You got it. And I hear there’s a new Ghostbusters movie…

Find out more

• For more on this topic check out our monsters and feelings zines, and our workbook with Alex Iantaffi, Hell Yeah Self Care.
• Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support our Patreon.
• Plural tag: This post was by Fox and James.

The post On monsters, emotions, and drawing: An interview with the artist behind the zine ‘Welcome Monster Feelings’ appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The idea with all these books is to be a gentle, friendly guide to how gender, sexuality, and relationships work, and how to understand your own relationship with these aspects of ourselves. So this time we cover:

• What sexuality is and the different relationships people can have with it, encompassing diverse forms of asexuality and allosexuality
• How the world around us generally understands sexuality, and the impact that has on us
• Our experiences of sexuality growing up
• Our experiences of sexuality now
• How we can live our sexualities, in terms of identifying, expressing and practicing them
• How we navigate our sexualities in relationships of various kinds
• Finding support and community around our sexualities, if we want to

In this book, in particular, we recognise that our sexuality or asexuality can take us towards delight, pleasure, belonging, and freedom, and it can also be a place where we experience trauma, shame, isolation, and restriction. For most of us there will be elements of both, especially given the stigma around diverse sexualities, and the commonality of non-consensual sex. Hopefully one of the strengths of the book is that it encompasses how all of these things impact our relationship to our sexualities, and how we can engage with them.

We were very pleased to have Jules Scheele contribute a wonderful cover, and several drawings, to the book again. And this time another wonderful comic creator, Erika Moen, contributed a lovely forward. We hope you enjoy it

The post New book out today! How to Understand Your Sexuality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Plurality

The first free book is all about plurality. This is the idea that we can usefully conceptualise ourselves as systems made up of interrelated parts, rather than as a singular whole ‘individual’.

The book is mostly made up of written conversations between my own parts about the concept of plurality, and how it relates to trauma, mental health, mindfulness, attachment, and more. Hopefully, along with my zine about plurality, this would be a useful introduction to people who want to engage with these ideas, or who are wondering about how to explore their own plurality. I – or rather we – are currently working on a follow-up zine about plurality as a way towards self (selves) love. Plurality and systems will also be major themes in the next graphic guide on mental health.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

The post Free book 1: Plurality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.