A debut essay collection that upends our notions of loneliness, wilderness, and liberation
Transanything reveals a world in metamorphosis. A hermit crab retires its shell, lovers drift apart, and seasons churn, all amid Ever Jones’s own narrative of midlife gender transition.
Jones takes up a tradition of writing—about the American landscape, solitude, wilderness, and the West—long intertwined with colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and makes it wholly their own. A self-proclaimed “nature essay” misbehaves, wandering away from the hummingbird outside Jones’s window. In their chronicle of a week in Yellowstone, Jones navigates trails frequented by grizzlies and a campground where their identity is regarded as equally dangerous. Elk, bison, and bark spiders roam this book’s pages, but it is the gray wolf—the embattled apex predator of the American West, narrow survivor of settler colonial violence, and vessel for American myths of independence—who emerges as Jones’s shapeshifting coprotagonist.
Taking on a global web of colonial systems that seek to divide us, Jones disrupts loneliness and forges space for queerness and transness to be aliveness—to be transanything.
Preface
Transanything
Unraveling I
In the Stance of Someone Just Departing
Lonely Species
Paperclip: A Story of Invasive Species
Unraveling II
Snap the Whip
Unraveling III
Paper Cranes
Unraveling IV
On Senses: A Nature Essay
Restoration of Wolves
Unraveling V
Grammar of Gender
The Uninvited
Unraveling VI
Origin of Love
Dragon
Wolf Tone
Unraveling VIII
She Used to be Mine: An Afterword
Acknowledgments
References
