Storytelling, Identity, and Queer Self-Expression

In the Den this week, Sara and special guest Garrett Garland talk about what it means to create in queer joy and not just survival. They discuss the importance of visibility, the responsibility of queer creatives in shaping culture, and how parents, allies, and communities can better support LGBTQ+ youth in finding their voice and claiming space. This isn’t just a conversation about art — it’s a conversation about power, authenticity, and what happens when we give queer kids the permission and the tools to imagine big.

Special Guest: Garrett Garland

Garrett Garland is a California Bay Area resident who studied at the University of Santa Cruz and Sciences Po. in Paris. Drawing from his extensive travels abroad this is his first novel. He currently resides with his husband Sam next to the sea in Half Moon Bay. Their long walks on the beach and their love of the ocean are where he draws most of his inspiration. The ocean is home but Paris is Garrett’s home town.

Links from the Show: 

• Garrett’s website: https://www.garrettgarland.com/ 
• To Never See Heaven audiobook: https://www.garrettgarland.com/audiobooks 
• To Never See Heaven in print: https://www.garrettgarland.com/store 
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Hello, Mama Dragons. Today, we are thrilled to welcome a guest whose work lives at the intersection of storytelling, identity, and bold self-expression. Garrett Garland is a queer author who recently published his first novel, To Never See Heaven. This novel follows the protagonist, Antony Shrader, as the novel opens agonizing over his decision to write a commencement speech that is traditionally given by his husband. But this year is different. His lover is dying. In order to bring himself to do this speech, Antony must look back at the pages of his own life that have brought him to this moment. And the book takes all kinds of interesting twists and turns from there. So we’ll get into some of that together.

But we’re also going to talk about what it means to create in queer joy, not just for survival. But to talk about ideas of visibility and the responsibility of queer creatives in shaping culture, and how, we, parents, allies, and communities can better support LGBTQ+ youth in finding their voice and claiming their space.

Garrett Garland, welcome it In The Den. It is so great to have you with us.

GARRETT: Hello. It’s nice to be here. My name’s Garrett Garland. I wrote the book, To Never See Heaven. And I’m very happy to be here.

SARA: So before we dive into your novel itself, I want to start a little bit with your story. I’m hoping you’ll tell us just a little bit more about yourself and how writing became a part of your life?

GARRETT: Right. So I’ve always been, and still am, sort of a perpetual student. So I thought since the age of seven, I was going to be a history professor. I studied French for six, seven years. I studied French intellectual history. I moved to Paris and I was doing research in The Bibliothèque nationale de France. And, at some point, I realized that I became completely disillusioned by the fact that I could be an academic and work down in the archives and stuff. And I still like doing that sort of thing. But I became disillusioned, came back home, and finished out my final gap year. And I decided I was going to write instead. Soon after I met my now husband and I sort of started writing. Started writing, actually, on my computer and for some reason could not get into it because it felt like homework because I’d spent my whole life typing. And so I decided to write it by hand – not that I’m Quenton Tarantino or anything. And my husband, God bless him, transcribed all of the journals. And then after many edits, rewrites, it turned into the novel. I started writing it, actually, in 2013. And I’ve had every other job in between. But I never took my eye off of that. And then I finished it almost to the day of the pandemic. So that was a great time to finish because people were obviously buying books – no they were not – ones that were already published. In terms of new work, no one was buying new work unless Chelsea Handler was coming out with a new one, then they know it's a bestseller. But no one’s taking chances on a new author. So that was another six months or a year trying to get an agent, trying to get a publisher. And low-and-behold, I got a voicemail on my phone. “If you have not published, we’d love to talk to you. If you have, God bless. And I hope everything goes well.” And of course, I called back and then it’s another nine months to a year before it actually hits the shelf.

SARA: So, wait. I want to go back for a minute because there’s a lot of amazing things that you just said here. You wrote this novel entirely by hand in journals with a pen.

GARRETT: Yeah. In twelve journals. In cursive, with a fountain pen.

SARA: Wow. Okay. Unbelievable. And then your husband transcribed it, bless his heart.

GARRETT: Yes.

SARA: And, it sounds like it took you a good seven years from start to finish.

GARRETT: Yeah. And then probably another two, so almost a decade because I started late 2013 and it came out April Fools Day, 2023.

SARA: Amazing.

GARRETT: So joke’s on me for taking so long. It’s funny. My second book didn’t take me nearly as long. It only took me two years. But this was like on and off, on and off, and then you think you’re never going to finish it. Because everyone has the first chapters of a novel in a desk somewhere. And I would tell anybody, I would rather have been a dancer or a singer or an actor because at least you get to go into the room and they tell you if you suck. Do you know what I mean? You get feedback. “You’re fat. We don’t like you. You’re absolute big cankles.” Whatever the reason is, they tell you. You submit a manuscript and you get a very generic letter, usually it has very little feedback. Sometimes they’re personalized, like, but you never know why. At least in your audition you get to go in the room and see what the problems are or maybe what you’re not getting. But I would say writing is the hardest because you don’t really get to know why it’s not working. I changed the title about two or three times because the first title, it was something in Latin. I was all hyperfallutin’. Writers are all “Oh, iIt’s so important!” But Steven King has a quote in his own writing book that says, “Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.” Which, you may love a section of a book, but everyone else who reads it, you’re dragging everybody down. Or maybe, don’t kill them at the ending, maybe make them live. You have to be open to feedback.

SARA: So let’s talk about the title for a moment. It’s interesting to hear you say you changed it a few times, pretty common experience for a lot of authors I know. But “To Never See Heaven”, is a pretty evocative title. Can you tell us a little bit about what does heaven represent there? What inspired that final title?

GARRETT: So, To Never See Heaven, it’s more like a question. Like “To never see heaven . . .” To never see heaven, what does it mean for you? What does it mean for I? And even on the cover itself, the clouds and everything and it’s two oil canvases that are pushed together. It’s the exact reflection that’s reflected in the eye at the bottom to scale. And there’s a line from Candide that the character uses and it says, “We’ll build our house. We’ll chop our wood. And we’ll make our garden grow. And we’ll carve out a piece of heaven for ourselves in this world.” So you really have to create your own heaven and what does it look like for you and never stop pursuing i,t because things for the character could’ve gone much differently and ended quite badly.

SARA: That’s beautiful. So tell us, then, let’s get into the story a little bit. Can you share a little bit about the narrative, the central characters? And I’m curious for our audience in particular, how queerness shapes the world of your novel. I know your protagonist, Antony, is queer. Why was that important to you?

GARRETT: I think it was important because, and it’s not placed in any particular time. In fact, there’s no reference – I mean, people drive cars, they answer a telephone. But no one sends a text, no one sends an email. There’s very few references that happen in – like nobody’s going to see an Avengers movie. So you know it happens post telephone and car, and possibly before 1980. But other than that, you don’t really know when the timeline is. However, born into this little nucleus of privilege, he goes to this all-boys private school. And even though everyone’s sort of aware, on the face of where the gay boys are. But until his parents find out, upon which he’s excommunicated from the school and kicked out of his family, it shows that it can also happen in any given timeline. Also, partially why they want to take him out of school if he doesn’t recant or go away to an institution at the risk of losing his family and all his money, they seem to know that he must have suffered, and does suffer, from a sexual trauma that occurred when he was much younger. And so he has to reconcile that in addition with becoming emancipated, independent, and having to really start from scratch. He was destined to go to all these Ivy Leagues and everything. A lot of these people, if you grow up in a certain eshalance of society, they’re groomed for this. And now he has to go to a public university. Oh my God. Obviously things could be a lot worse. But still, he has to do things, like he’s never – like what’s a FAFSA? and applying for scholarships? – never occurred to him. But in terms of the queer element, exploring sexual abuse at the hands of a male. And also, too, because if you are assaulted prior to adolescent maturity, if you are gay and you’re born that way, if you have consensual sex later as a young person or an adult and you’re gay, then that’s fine. But if you are sexually assaulted prior to sexual maturity, you will always have a nagging question – maybe not for everybody – but you always have the nagging question, “Well, could I have turned out differently?” And that tortures the character a lot. And he has to reconcile that because he’s like, “No. Maybe I wouldn’t be this way and I wouldn’t be losing everything if this one thing hadn’t happened to me.” Which is, of course, not true. But it’s something the character has to deal with. And he hates himself for it. And then, of course, some people who suffer from sexual abuse – not giving away everything in the book – they sometimes go back to their abusers. So we also explore that.

SARA: Interesting. There’s so many different themes in the novel.

GARRETT: And that’s why it’s 400 pages and took me 10 years!

SARA: So, including what you mentioned, you also cover themes of addiction. But you have some paranormal themes and motifs in the novel as well. Can you tell us a little bit about those aspects of the story?

GARRETT: Oh, in terms of him thinking he’s reincarnated?

SARA: Yes.

GARRETT: Alright. So, the character, sometimes like myself – I mean, when I first moved to Paris, I kind of already knew where everything was, having never been there. I thought to myself, I must’ve walked here before in a past life or something. I don’t believe that heavily in past lives or anything. But it was, and I’ve always wanted to throw down a couple hundred and ask a psychic to tell me who I was in a past life. Also, the first time I ever went on a ship, I knew where everything was, naturally, instinctively. So maybe I was a sailor. But also, two things happen to the character. He’s sort of out of place in terms of, they call him an “Old Soul” And he talks sort of in Shakespearean soliloquies. And so he’s out of place in that element. He’s queer. He’s also a minority out of his place in that element. He sort of sticks out. As opposed to his other friend who is gay, but he’s sort of passing as you will. And then, also, he wonders what past life he must’ve suffered in order to incur what is happening now. And so part of that gives him strength to not want to basically kill himself because he’s like, “Maybe I’m going through this because the other person did not survive this.” And it sort of has this starve so I’ll never be hungry again thing, where it’s like, “No. They’re not going to beat me. They’re not. And I’m going to live through this. And when it’s all over, everyone can go straight to Hell.” And I think he says, there’s a priest and a psychiatrist and parents and they’re like, “We’re going to put you in this institution and they’ll cure.” And he goes – and I know it's in the bible but I forget where it’s from – but he goes, “May no weapon forged against me shall prosper.” And then he walks out, never looks back. And so that’s part of the incarnation. And every time he really wants to give up, and when he’s trying to go forward, the demons are creeping back, addiction comes into play because he’s trying to numb the thing on the outside, kill the thing that tortures him on the inside. And so even if he's living independently and everything, that’s nagging and weighing him down. And he has to be like, “No. I have to survive for this past person or persons.” And maybe for the collective queer community because they ask him, too, “Are there other boys like you at school? What are their names?” And he won’t give them to them. And so he’s like, “You guys stay here, function, and become people in the rooms that can change things. I will take the bullet and go out and be the martyr. You guys stay here and go into those Ivy League institutions and be at the right hands of power and change.” And that’s how he leaves private school. So I give very long-winded answers. So you’ll have to cut me off sometimes.

SARA: That’s alright. There’s an often used mantra among writers in the world of writing, to write what you know.

GARRETT: Aw, I love this question.

SARA: So how much of your own experience and knowing – and I’m trying to separate that from your own exact personal story but your own experience and knowing – where’s that intersection for you in your writing?

GARRETT: Alright. So everything that I write is what I know. I don’t write about anything I don’t know. I think that’s the first mistake people are like “I want to be a writer” and they love mystery novels so they write mysteries. And then they fail. Agatha Christie wrote like a thousand titles. Each one is so complex. I never get who the killer is. Sometimes I’ve gotten close, but never. Then there’s a jewel thief and a burglary and a murder. There’s 18 things going on in her books at all times. I could never do that. So write what you know. I mean, write in your style. And certainly don’t try a genre that you have no business going into in the first place. But also write what you know as you intimate it. It doesn’t mean memoir. It doesn’t mean biography. Also, you never want to be sued. Keep names and people and places out of it. You don’t want to be like the guy who wrote A Million Little Pieces and then got banished from the planet by Oprah because he lied about getting his teeth taken out with no morphine. And then the place he went to was like, “We do not take people's teeth out with no anesthetic.” He embellished. That’s not good. So it’s like, if you want to be truthful, tell the truth but change the names, places, and things. Also, write what you know, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings and he wasn’t an elf. And he wasn’t fighting with bows and arrows. But he was in the trenches of World War I and he took his war experiences and his Welsh upbringing – a lot of the names in the shire are basically his Welsh and little Welsh towns surrounding him like the shire – you can see that he wrote what he knew, he did it through the lens of fantasy. But he wrote what he knew. So I would say the first time you write what you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a biography but certainly be, like, very versed in the topic whether it’s if you’ve been abused, if you’ve been in foster care, if you’ve traveled the world, write about the first thing should probably what you’re the most familiar with. And for me, it was academia, Paris, bit of crazy family, and sort of go from there. Also, all of my friends are very smart, but they’re all very crazy and very eccentric. And so I had so many rich people, rich sources of material to draw from just in my surrounding people. I mean, one of the characters, Cecilia, is almost verbatim one of my best friends. Some of her lines are, “Oh, that’s what Kathy would say. That’s what she would say.” It wasn’t hard to write. At least the dialogue wasn’t because some of those people were exactly the way they were. Also, the best thing to write what you know, most writers – if you’re not, or you want to be a writer – be observant. I’m the worst eavesdropper. I’ll be at dinner with my husband and I will completely stop listening and be over there at the other conversation. The best thing also if it’s French tourists. Usually they’re talking about the crap that they did during the day. It’s not that interesting. But sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I hear French.” And then I’ll just listen and usually people who are foreign, they’ll talk louder because they think no one can understand them. And then Americans are loud. So you have so many places auditory and visual to pull from as a writer. And, like I said, even if you write what you know, don’t be afraid to cut things out.

SARA: So did your own queer identity really push you into that understanding that your protagonist should be queer? Was that important to you from the onset?

GARRETT: Yeah. Because, also, I remember going to gay pride when I was a freshman in college. And gay marriage wasn’t legal yet. And then I remember going to gay pride after it was. So from the time I was writing it to the time I finished, I’d gone through different moments of queer history. And also I didn’t want to write solely a romance. And I didn’t want it to be also – sometimes gay characters can all be kind of tragic – and I wanted everyone who deserved it in the book to have a happy ending. And like we said about the title, To Never See Heaven, it’s like, “If you never saw heaven, what a sadness it would be.” So to really end it on a note of hope and sort of elevate the genre in the way that I particularly write, which is the characters, the conversations they have and the way they speak, it’s almost very Shakespearean. And some of them have these long monologue speeches with the character. And you really get a sense of why they behave the way they do. You really understand the motivations of everyone.

SARA: I’m curious, then, when you were growing up and finding your own authentic self and your own identity, were there any books that felt important to you that felt like important life-lines?

GARRETT: Yes. Oscar Wilde, he writes in – I don’t want to say like me, or I write like him – but he writes these beautiful, lofty, wonderful prose. But there’s a lot of sadness and a lot of tragedy. And so I wanted to do it like that, and it’s sort of how I speak and how I think and I love movies and books like E. M. Forster’s Maurice. And that has a bit of a happy ending. But the main character, one of them stays closeted married barrister. And the other one, they go off to be lovers, but they have to hide. For the rest of their lives they’re going to have to be in Victorian England, they’re going to have to be shh, quiet, quiet. So I wanted to do it where they are able to live this nice, long, beautiful journey together. I really wanted it to inject hope into the genre, but also raise it in the more of a lofty prose. Not that my characters are perfect at all because they’re well-bred, but they’re quite ill-mannered and sometimes uneducated because of the privilege, and sort of take advantage of that and there’s some drug use and experimentation. But then also, there is a big thing with sex and drug use in the gay community and I also wanted to show, I don’t know a person who hasn’t experimented or taken drugs, but to show the toxic nature of using drugs and engaging in risky sexual behavior and the consequences and what it takes away from your soul, and particularly the character’s, because it’s not actually making him feel better. But he’s engaging in it thinking it’s going to. It gives you 15 minutes of forgetfulness and release. But then you’re miserable and you’re going to ruin the one thing and the one person that loves you. And also, everyone else around you, you’re going to drive them away because of your selfishness and your addiction and all those sorts of things.

SARA: I really appreciate hearing how holding hopefulness was important to you as you were writing the story and the character so that it wasn’t complete descending into darkness and madness and the awful things of life. So that’s a beautiful complexity and kind of what it is to be human. But also a lot of reflecting what the queer experience is like. And queer art I think often wrestles with these opposing themes of shame and transcendence and hopefulness. And it sounds like those very much show up in your novel.

GARRETT: Also too, particularly there was one opportunity where the character of the mother has a chance to reconcile with her son. And also it still happens today, all stripes of the LGBTQ flag, there are members who have been kicked out of their houses, have been hurt financially, cut out of wills. And not only to show the consequences of that – because while he suffers a sexual trauma, the fact that he’s then excommunicated for something he had no control over and that “must be to blame for why he is the way he is,” just compounds it be a million. And also to show in the modern lens, this still happens which is why I didn’t want to set it in a particular time. Because if I set it at a time, people are like, “Well, people don’t do that anymore.” You’re just like, “No. They still do.” So that was also my intention of making it timeless. So people who get cut off from their families, give them hope. But then the people who do the cutting off, there is an arch where there is a chance for redemption and closer at least from one of the relatives for like, “Basically we’re sorry we did that and I see you for who you are and forgive me please.” Because that means everything in the world, I think, to a person. You asked me a while about my own personal experience. I was like, “No one told me.” I don’t even like watching home movies, because when I look at me when I was four, I’m like, “That kid is queer.” But no one told me. I didn’t come out until I was 17 or something. So no one told me. And then everyone, at least my parents, they were shocked. I was like, “Really?”

SARA: So can you share a little bit about your own coming out journey? What was that like for you?

GARRETT: Well, I was really terrified. We grew up also in a bit of a nucleus, gated community. There were like five gay people in my high school. So you always ran into somebody. You couldn’t go anywhere without running into somebody. That’s why going to university was so great for me. But my parents were shocked and it took them a while to be like – a lot of “Are you sure?” And I’m like, “Aw!” But I think that once I actually graduated and I went across that stage and then I was going to go away to Paris and just seeing all that I accomplished, well clearly you’re thriving as you are. And so, clearly, how could it be wrong. I couldn’t speak for them, but that’s what I think. Because once I was done with academia and then I was pursuing this career, even after my book came out, my father said – It was really one of the nicest compliments he ever gave me – he’s like, “You’ve always done exactly whatever you wanted to do.”

SARA: That’s great.

GARRETT: Which is, if you never gave me a compliment in my life, which he has. But if he never did, that’s the nicest thing that anyone ever could’ve said. “You’ve always done exactly what you wanted to do.” And then my third book that I’m working on, I write everything by hand. And one Christmas they gave me a journal and I was writing from a different journal that I had purchased when I went back to Paris in 2019, finished that one and then I was like, “Well, I need another one because I haven’t finished the third one so I need another the next journal to start.” And I picked up the one they gave me for Christmas and they had written in it, “Hope your next novel goes in this one.” So that was nice.

SARA: That’s lovely. That is lovely.

GARRETT: And I was like, “I’m so glad.” And I’m really proud of the way the third one is turning out.

SARA: So when you think about your growing up and you think about the challenges facing young queer folks today, what did you need most from the adults in your life that maybe you didn’t get?

GARRETT: Drugs. No.

SARA: Try again.

GARRETT: I honestly think, I do have ADHD and so – my mum, if we had a fever she was always like, okay one Tylenol. That was how we grew up. You didn’t not go to school unless you were dying. So now I take ADHD medication. And I was a very high-strung child. I wish, I’m serious, I wish my parents were more believing because when ADHD was finally being accepted, I think there was a lot of people like, “Oh, you’re just giving your kid drugs because you don’t want to deal with your kid.” Right? And my parents were definitely in that school. They were like, “Now they just make a pill for everything.” That was exactly the way they thought. But I was very high-achieving, very intelligent, could not organize a freakin’ thing. My backpack always looked like an explosion at Staples. No organization. I could always get a 4 or 5 on that AP test, perfect SAT score, but could not for the life of me be organized. And I wish someone had also told me, so once I wish I had a diagnosis they believed me. Because I was like, “I think I do.” And I only have been able to really deal with it since the book was published and actually get the right medication and get the right amount. So I wish I would’ve been told to “Slow down, you don’t need to punish yourself.” Because I would be like, “I’m going to fail. I’m going to fail. I’m going to fail.” Of course I wasn’t. Instead of just being like, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

SARA: So I’m curious, then, as I’m listening to you talk about this, do you think that having that diagnosis and treatment and support helped you be able to finish writing a novel even if it took ten years?

GARRETT: Um. Sometimes procrastination is still a failure. But sometimes it’s something called procrastination paralysis where the task seems so daunting you wind up doing nothing. Those people who get up at 8:00, they write until 5:00, they take breaks, they do it like it’s a 9-to-5 job. I definitely am more of a night owl. I do a lot of my work at night and then also I did a lot of writing at coffee shops, always near water. I always need to be by a body of water. I don’t know why. That’s why I love living in Half Moon Bay because I can go to the ocean and find a nice little table by the water and do a lot of writing there. Much like Steinbeck, a lot of his things take place in Monterey because he’s very inspired by this area and whatnot. I also go through spurts of creativity. That’s one advantage of writing by hand, too, because if you’re in a really good scene – I’m left handed – you have tension in the pen and your hand hurt but you’re like, “Gotta keep going. Gotta keep going.” If I’m getting tired, I can feel where in my writing and the wording gets sloppy. I’m like, “Stop. You’re writing crap.” I don’t write every day. And I’m not always inspired. And I don’t always know the answer. The first chapter was actually the one I wrote last. The whole novel wasn’t going to be a retrospective. It only became a retrospective at the very end.

SARA: Well, of course. That makes a lot of sense.

GARRETT: And then I had to do a bit of splicing in where I would check back into the present of him standing over his husband. But it didn’t become a retrospective until the very end. So sometimes I don’t have the answer until the very end. So that’s part of my writing process and also, now that I realize how I work, I can be more productive throughout the day and less ADHD paralysis. But I wouldn’t have changed the way it came out because I don’t think I would have finished if I hadn’t met my husband. If I had to transcribe it myself, I don’t think I ever would’ve finished it. Now that it’s out, I can’t imagine me finishing it. It probably would’ve taken me 20 years, honestly. It took me ten years to write it by hand. You think transcribing it would’ve been any easier? I probably would’ve given up. So having a good emotional support is very important.

SARA: I think that’s important for so many things and so many projects and also especially important for queer folks and queer young people in particular. If you can’t find it in your family.

GARRETT: Yes, exactly.

SARA: Yeah. If you don’t have it in your immediate world, where can you find that for yourself, that emotional support, the supportive people, the healthy relationships? I think that’s a really beautiful point. I think that helps humans be more successful humans.

GARRETT: Yeah. And also too, I think – in the vein of topic but slightly off topic – I think a lot of people stay in toxic relationships for way too long. Certainly the character, for part of the novel, does. Has emotionally toxic and also physically toxic relationships. And I don’t know where my 20’s went. Time goes so fast, and the only refund we don’t get in this life is on time. And to stay a single hour or minute any longer in a toxic relationship longer than you have to will also keep you from reaching your true potential, your goals. And I think sometimes because certainly whether it is through oppression or abuse, I think queer people sometimes have a really hard time finding successful, healthy relationships. I think, partially, it has to do with emotional maturity. I mean, when do people come out? It’s sort of like being born again. You’re sort of starting over. So the later you come out in life, if you come out when you’re 36, you’re kind of coming out as an emotional 18-year-old in a way. Because you’re like, “Who am I attracted to? What am I attracted to?” So you don’t know how to build a fulfilling relationship with a same-sex person because it’s always been sort of like a fly-by-night thing, never holding hands in the daytime. And so you don’t know how you’re attractive or how to behave in a relationship. So I’ve tried to approach all my relationships with a grain of grace. Maybe they were kicked out of the house. Maybe their mom still hopes they’ll marry a woman one day. And so sometimes we’re all coming with different stresses. Feeling secure in a secure relationship or finding a secure relationship because we have come with baggage and insecurities as queer persons because – unless, God bless the 5-year-old who knows they’re gay when they’re five and they have that wonderful amazing parent who wants to take them to drag library hour – that was not my upbringing.

SARA: Even for that lucky 5-year-old, our culture and the world still has a lot of painful messages.

GARRETT: Oh, right. They’re saying everything’s wrong with you. Right. This is child abuse, they went and brought their kid to school on Halloween because the kids wanted to wear a Snow White outfit. Making the kid feel, “This is great.” We’re going to punish the kid and the parents are just trying to be supportive. And then people are accusing the mother on Fox News that she’s abusing her child. Parents are saying they don’t want the kid to be in the same classroom as them. I would say, obviously, the transgender community is probably the most under attack right now.

SARA: For sure. So if a queer teen or queer young adult were to read To Never See Heaven, what do you hope they’d walk away feeling?

GARRETT: Oh, well, definitely I would hope that they would feel a great sense of hope. And would sort of feel an aspiration to think in the lofty aspirational ways that Antony sees the world and the way he describes the richness of everything, from purchasing this silver tipped fountain pen and walking the cobblestones of Paris, to this great sense of beauty and wonder that he finds within the love of this person while they’re making love in the middle of a field in a small town outside of Toulouse. My life and the love I could have are so much greater than even myself and my current existence. Just like, “Oh my God. Life should be Shakespeare. It should be like a magnificent play.” That’s what I think.

SARA: I love that. That’s wonderful. That’s what I think. That’s why I read.

GARRETT: It’s just like, “Oh wow. What a beautiful world.” And even one of my greatest joys too, not just in the writing the book was also – God bless my husband – recording the audiobook and him helping me. Also they get to not only hear the voice of Antony Schrader, which is a little bit different than mine. But also have the other characters, the way they talk, it very has the Shakespearean, Faulkner, very lofty way. You watch Masterpiece Theater and you’re like, “Why don’t people talk like that anymore?” Well, guess what? They talk like this in my book. So they get to hear. Because everyone has a version of what a character looks and sounds like. And so at least you get to hear what all the characters sound like because I did all the voices of the different characters.

SARA: Oh, how great. I love that about audiobooks.

GARRETT: Yeah. So I don’t just read it in my own voice. And so To Never See Heaven is on Amazon and at bookstores. But you can also, on Spotify, Audible, Apple Books. I was able to release it on where all audiobooks are sold. And I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from it because people are like, “I always wanted to know what Antony sounds like.” Or they’d be like, “Oh that’s exactly what he would sound like.” Because just the way your character goes on, he would sound like that. Sort of like an I don’t know, like a John Barrowman or Leslie Howard. Just like an old timeless era of speaking.

SARA: Yes. Do you have advice that you would give to folks, particularly queer folks, who want to write, who maybe imagined themselves as writers or have that partially-started novel or memoir in the drawer and don’t quite feel like they have the confidence to follow through? What advice do you have for folks?

GARRETT: Finish it. Finish it. You won’t know you have crap until you finish it.

SARA: Until it’s done.

GARRETT: I mean, my husband was a good sounding board, but I had – in the dedication I write all the people that I thank – and my one friend who I majored in philosophy with, Sara, She’s very, very, very smart. And she helped me a lot with editing. Have really smart people around you, you can sound off too. And I ramble. I have one sentence that goes on for an entire page.

SARA: That’s very 19th century.

GARRETT: Right. Right. Right. But it has to be good. It has to have a point. What’s his face that wrote the Scarlet Letter, sometimes you’d be like, “Get on with it.” And he never does. Even though it’s a classic, he really talks a lot.

SARA: And we don’t read like that anymore. It’s difficult for a contemporary audience. So if you’re going to do a monologue, it better be the best damn monologue. Or sometimes you do have to break it up. Not everyone is going to read this in a single breath. So we need some punctuation. And then, sometimes too, not every page has to be a full sentence. It’s okay to break it up. You have to help your audience along. Going back, what advice I would give: Finish it, but have smart people you can sound it off to. Like, how does this sound? Even when I wasn’t finished with it, there were chunks that I would give to this one particular person, including my husband, and she’d be like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about here.” Or “Wait, I got really confused at this part.” So getting feedback as you’re doing it. And if you’re having doubts, then that’s definitely a good time to go to somebody or then change something. Why am I getting tired, maybe that’s not your passion project anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to it and fix it, but I did write a book when I was 17. I just never published it. It was based off a short story I wrote in the 8th grade. And it was a historical fiction about a girl in the American Revolution. And I’ve always wanted to go back to it. It’s in a drawer somewhere. But every time I pick it up, it’s just not where my passion is right now. And, obviously, this was way more important to me. And my next book that’s coming out has to do with gender dysphoria and a little bit of with Jack the Ripper. I can’t say everything. But anyway, it’s going to be good.

SARA: Ooo, interesting.

GARRETT: Gender dysphoria and Jack the Ripper, how do the two combine? You’ll see.

SARA: I’ve heard a couple of really well-known authors – I think I heard and interview with Ann Patchett who talked about this very thing of, if I have this idea for a story and I get working on it and there’s something like the magic just fizzles out and I’m not inspired anymore, that’s not the story for me in this moment.

GARRETT: And sometimes it’ll zap your brain like way later. Like, now I know how to finish it because my third book that I’m currently finishing – the second one’s finished, it’s being edited – the third one I’m working on now, I started it and I got to the first couple of chapters. But I couldn’t move forward because this character that I’d added to it, I didn’t know who she was. I knew I wanted her to be there. I didn’t know who she was. And then my friend said something like, “I can’t picture her.” So I did a separate, here’s her biography. And then I knew who she was. Because in my first book, a lot of those people were drawn from life. It was very easy to write them. But if you’re making somebody up, maybe you need to introduce her to yourself because you haven’t met her, actually.

SARA: That is a great tactic.

GARRETT: Actors have done that too. Actors will create back stories of their characters.

SARA: Oh, yes.

GARRETT: I think, Harry Potter, when they were doing it, to act like Hermione would, she wrote a 19-page about her character. Harry Potter turned in two or three pages. And then Rupert, Ron, he didn’t turn one in. And they said, “Why didn’t you turn one in?” and Ron said, “My character wouldn’t turn one in.”

SARA: There you go.

GARRETT: Right. Now we have the character.

SARA: That’s fantastic.

GARRETT: Yeah. Exactly. So it’s like you have to introduce yourself to your character. Do a deep dive. Do a bit of method acting with your writing.

SARA: That’s correct. As one who went to acting school, I have written a number of those in my lifetime. And they’re actually very helpful. They really help inform.

GARRETT: Improv classes are really helpful. I took improv in college and I did a play about Oedipus. It was a musical and we were in drag, dressed as women police officers and flight attendants as the Greek chorus in the background. A very interesting production, very UC Santa Cruz.

SARA: Oh, yes.

GARRETT: Acting classes, I think, also help with writing. I do, I really think so.

SARA: Yeah. I would say so. So our listeners are mostly parents and caregivers of LGBTQ+ kids. And I wonder what you might want them to know about the inner life of a queer teen, especially one who might be quietly struggling.

GARRETT: I mean, is there anyone who’s not quietly struggling? It’s really hard. Everything at that age feels like the end of the world. Everything really does. Every decision that you make, I think, especially if you have a high-achieving child, they are going to be their own worst critic. You cannot punish them more than they do not already punish themselves. Like I said, I didn’t go to some liberal arts high school. Everyone comes from different economic scales. I mean, if you can set your kids up in a school where they might, artistic temperaments could be more curtailed, then I would say write that check and do that. Otherwise, your public high school, if it’s a very, very good one, that’s great. But for me, I would either try to get them into the programs where they can thrive and they can find their place. I mean, choir and theater were great places for me. Speech and debate was a great place for me because everywhere else – it’s so funny. All those things take place inside and they were very safe and very nucleus. I didn’t eat my lunch outside. I was always picked on. So being inside with my people. And then we had tons – like I said, there’s only five gay kids in the whole high school, well, that we know of – so I was hanging out with all the straight guys. All the boys who were in choir and theater, they didn’t give a damn. So it was fine. It was never an issue. And also, I was so insecure about my physical looks. I was doing lots of theater and I didn’t know anything about skin care. I just broke out. I had to go on accutane. I was getting acne scars, tragically. I know, now I’m gorgeous. But I was tragically insecure. So I would just realize anything you can do to help them. On the outside I was begging my mother, “Please take me to the Dermatologist, please take me to the dermatologist for Christmas. Make that my Christmas gift. Don’t get me presents, just take me to the dermatologist.” Got some drugs, did a few chemical peels, I would say really find out where their strengths are and curtail them to as many of those things. They could be into science, send them to science camp. I mean, let them find their people as queer persons.

SARA: I love that. That’s beautiful advice, really, really nurture what it is that . . .

GARRETT: Makes them thrive.

SARA: . . . brings them a spark.

GARRETT: I mean, my husband is a super video game nerd. Send him to as many Comicons and geek camps as you possibly can. You know what I mean?

SARA: Yeah. That’s great advice. This has been a delightful conversation. I want to invite our readers to find your book. And we have a Mama Dragons bookstore where you can search and purchase books . . .

GARRETT: Fantastic.

SARA: That have been featured on this show and other books as well, and perhaps even a plug to listen to the novel, To Never See Heaven by Garret Garland. As you can hear all the beautiful voices of all of those interesting fabolous characters come to life in the audiobook. But, Garrett, I have a couple of questions that I like to ask my guests at the end of every episode.

GARRETT: Oh, I love these.

SARA: But I ask the guests the same two questions. And the first has to do with the Mama Dragons name which was created out of this sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our kids.

GARRETT: I’ve got that.

SARA: I can see that. But I’m going to ask you, what is it that you are fierce about?

GARRETT: Oh, stupidity. I don’t have time for it. Ignorance, I cut that stuff down. I don’t necessarily go out of my way, like if I heard something being totally obnoxious about something next to me at dinner. Someone was just this crazy Trump supporter, I don’t go out of my way to insert myself in someone else’s sphere. But definitely, I have a sense of justice and I don’t have any tolerance for BS at all.

SARA: Great. That is an answer I haven’t heard yet. And my final question to you is what is bringing you joy right now, especially in these times when we need to cultivate and experience all the joy we possibly can?

GARRETT: Oh, what is bringing me joy? There’s a few things. Cooking, food is bringing me joy. I know the price of food is probably hurting people. But I have been doing nothing but just, whether it’s Ina Garten, Martha Stewart or my own mother – who is kind of Martha Stewart in her own right. My mom really was like that type of June Cleaver, Martha Stewart Mom. She made dinner every night for a family of five from scratch. There was no Taco Bell, ever. So just creating beautiful food. I would say travel actually does make me happy. I have a bunch of trips coming up. Having things to look forward to, that makes me really happy because it means I know where I am going. And there is a place that I’m going that is going to be better. And currently, right now, exercise. Long walks. I like reading things. And this is probably obvious, 15 minutes you get better blood sugar. 30 minutes, your cortisol comes down. After an hour, you start burning fat. After 60 minutes, mood elevates, dopamine releases. All these things. So I’ve been doing five to nine miles as often as I can. Minimally, I want to hit the hour mark. But that’s really been making me, because then you come down, you really feel that sort of high in relation of not only accomplishment but just decompression. So I’m walking. You don’t need a gym. You just need a really good pair of leggings and the pavement.

SARA: Love it. I love it. Thank you so much, Garrett. Beautiful answers. Thank you so much for your time and your energy. And I wish you all of the best on your upcoming book.

GARRETT: No, this was a pleasure.

SARA: Wonderful.

GARRETT: And I really would do this again. This is fantastic and you’re a wonderful host.

SARA: Gender Dysphoria and Jack the Ripper, you know that could work maybe.

GARRETT: All ends well. All ends well in my books.

SARA: Okay. Good. Good. Good. Well, Thank you so much, Garrett. I appreciate it.

GARRETT: You’re welcome.

SARA: Thank you so much for joining us here In The Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at Mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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