Jeremy P. Bushnell: On Playing With Tropes Around Valor and Gender

Jeremy P. Bushnell teaches writing at Northeastern University in Boston, and lives in Dedham, Massachusetts. He is also the cofounder of Nonmachinable, a distributor of optically interesting zines and artists' books. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

In this post, Bushnell discusses his latest novel, including how it was inspired by the idea of valor and gender indentity.

Name: Jeremy P. Bushnell
Literary agent: Gary Heidt
Book title: Relentless Melt
Publisher: Melville House
Release date: June 6, 2023
Genre/category: Urban Fantasy / Historical Literature
Previous titles: The Weirdness (2016); The Insides (2018)
Elevator pitch for the book: In 1909, teen detective Artie Quick begins unraveling an unsolved crime and soon winds up ensnared in a supernatural mystery that runs through even the highest corridors of power. Armed only with wits and a pocket watch, our genderbent Nancy Drew descends into Boston’s forgotten mass transit tunnels to square off a horror beyond imagination.

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About a decade ago, I started thinking about the trait of “valor” and how that is embodied in literature and especially genre literature. (Lest this sound too lofty, I should be clear that I was thinking about it on Twitter and my actual public utterance on the topic was me tweeting “we don’t tweet enough about valor.”)

During this process, I attempted to imagine a character who could serve as an archetypal embodiment of “valor”: This attempt reflexively yielded the image of a young boy with a sword. As I am wont to do, however, I began picking at the edges of this—right away I questioned why I was so quick to arrive at a gendered image. “I see so much valorious behavior among women in my life,” I noted (still on Twitter, mind you), “[I] would like to see that represented more in fiction.”

My second book, The Insides, could be said to be an attempt to write a “young woman with a sword”-type novel, but that didn’t quite stop me from grappling with the problem of the way that valor is culturally gendered. I shifted gears, began considering the image of the “girl detective” instead—still valorous, but also feminine. This is a strong image, with a rich literary history, but there was still something disquieting about the whole enterprise of thinking about the gender roles baked into these tropes, still something that I knew was worth worrying away at.

The combination of meditation on the trope but also, to some degree, problematizing the trope together serve as the prompt that fueled the book.

The idea continued to evolve over the course of that decade, especially as my thinking on gender continued to get deeper and more complex. Not just gendered tropes in literature, but gender as a cultural construct itself.

At the time I began drafting this novel I was spending a lot of time with nonbinary, agender, and gender-questioning people and I was learning much more about transgender history, including quite a bit about the efforts to understand historical cross-dressing as early instances in the historical record of people living trans or gender-questioning lives.

I knew, by then, that I wanted to write a historical novel, and that I wanted it to be an homage to “girl detective stories;” but it also was important to me that the protagonist be gender non-conforming, both in terms of their gender expression (their style of dress, for instance) and in terms of their gender identity.

One of my favorite moments of surprise in the publishing process is seeing the cover. I’ve long admired the hard work and creative brilliance of the Melville House design team and it is always a pleasure to see their visual interpretation of the contents of a manuscript.

Writing a book always contains within moments of surprise and delight, doubly so when you are writing a book that requires a lot of historical research. The past is a deeply weird place, and I learned a lot of strange facts, some of which ended up in the book and some of which just ended up as random trivia that I can tell people at parties.

Did you know that an early magazine for automotive enthusiasts was called The Horseless Age? Or that the origins of the “hook” used to yank bombing acts off stage can be traced to a specific New York turn-of-the-century theater? (For this last detail I am indebted to Lucy Sante’s indispensable Low Life: The Lures and Snares of Old New York.)

The book is a mystery, so I hope readers will take some pleasure out of trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. And it’s also a cosmic horror story, so I hope that when the final pieces fall into place, the revelation will be so appalling to the faculties of human reason that the reader’s very mind will recoil, clenching shut against a terrible, dawning comprehension. That would give readers their $17.99’s worth!

By the time someone is identifying as a writer, they are already making their own path, and I’m not sure they really want nor need any advice I could give in a limited space such as this. I’d rather offer advice to the people who don’t yet think of themselves as writers, who are here at Writer’s Digest because they think they might have something to say, but are afraid to begin, either because they are in a marginalized position or just because it’s just plain scary for everyone.

And my advice would be simply: write something. Someone out there wants to read it; someone out there is actively looking for it. Write something, even if it’s bad. And then try it again.

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