4 Weeks of Reading New Queer & Trans Lit as Writers

“Milks is the BOMB! They gave me really helpful and encouraging feedback and I felt like it helped both my writing and my confidence.”

“The best teacher I have had in my educational experience. I can truly walk away from the class saying I have actually learned something. My writing has improved and so has my ability to think critically. It is all thanks to the intelligence and constructive criticism of the professor and how perfectly structured the class was.”

“Amazing at organizing and igniting discussions. I don't have enough words to describe how amazing this class and professor were!”

“Charismatic and astute … always thought-provoking.”

“Megan made the class environment a place where we could ask questions, take risks, and have enjoyable conversations. They gave in-depth feedback and seemed invested in my growth as a student. Thank you for making this class a fantastic experience.”

“…my favourite thing about this collection is its interest in a particular kind of adolescent girlhood in which other girls are all that matters and where aspiration, desire and the urge to wound are all tangled together. … This is an area of popular culture which literature rarely draws upon — possibly because of its association with young girls, whose tastes are always particularly open for mockery. That Milks sees it as important would be itself be enough to make me love her work. That the collection deals with it in this way — smart, queer, perverse, inter-textual—means even more. The stories in KILL MARGUERITE are unsettling and often unpleasant but they feel like a gift.”

“Some … stories are intertextual puzzles in the best sense, intensely creative in imagining possibilities beyond a heterosexual, able-bodied, white, and affluent vision of life and thus serious about what it intends to interrogate: heterocentric romance narratives, compulsory heterosexuality and its attendant forms of femininity, aspects of affluent white teen girlhood.”

“It’s … surprising, given the vast range of modes on display, how very well Kill Marguerite maintains itself as a unified work; tracing the veins that run from piece to piece is part of the fun. The consistently disciplined prose does nearly as much to this end as the shared themes, sometimes calling to mind the similarly wry and precise Lydia Davis. This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of [their] macabre but humane imagination.”

“These are genderqueer girl stories of the most awesome kind, taking the basic narrative of boys, youth, sex and identity, scrambling them with their influences (pop music, porn, sexual fantasy, teen magazines and books, even video games), and then destroying them in gory pornographic explosions.”

“The stories in [Megan’s] debut collection KILL MARGUERITE draw influence from cultures both high and low, from Homer and Joyce to video games and teen magazine columns. They never sit quietly, but rather unsettle convention and defy expectation. In fact, the moment you think you know what’s happening, the story opens into an unexpected black hole, thrusting you into a passage that devours and reconfigures expectations.”

“KILL MARGUERITE AND OTHER STORIES mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks’ sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable.”

“The stories in Megan Milks’s KILL MARGUERITE are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure, or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they’re amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say—hot.”

“Megan Milks is the most interesting prose writer working today. There! I said it. Milks smashes fiction and glues the shards back together. Milks destroys boredom! Milks stans fanfic, retells the New Narrative, lights a million candles at the altar of queer & trans experimental literature, sends love letters to Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany and Ovid, hate-reads Sweet Valley High in the sexiest and most disturbing ways. You will never look at Tegan and Sara—or slugs, or tomatoes—in the same way again.”