Sex and Death at the Trans Summer Camp for Revelatory Hallucinations (CJ Scruton on Suite for Hallucinated Voices)
Half Mystic Press’ latest poetry collection, Suite for Hallucinated Voices by CJ Scruton, comes out on October 18. CJ is a trans writer from the South who splits their time between Milwaukee and Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and her sound installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. They teach poetry and horror fiction and are usually spending too much time hunting for ghost stories they haven't yet heard. To celebrate Suite for Hallucinated Voices, CJ joins us on the Half Mystic blog for a guest essay on the creation process of the book.
I’ve been thinking about Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. From a writer-director with a penchant for lyrical trans allegories, it’s a texturally rich, heartfelt flash of concentric boxes, of narratives bursting from a container that can’t hold. It’s a film that honours the myriad ways memories and media make our reality, a reality that can be disorientingly and gorgeously remade.
I saw it in an East Side Milwaukee theatre with the first love of my life, the same love whose bed I sat on years ago, watching Schoenbrun’s earlier film I Saw the TV Glow. Shoulders touching, we savoured a movie that seemed personally designed for us—the affection for ‘80s slashers and teen-centred TV shows, the lush and brutal visuals, the queerness and transness of the storyline—and as the credits played, we let the film soundtrack our circling thoughts about the love we both knew would soon need to end or change shape.
Both Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw the TV Glow peer through the same doors I’ve been knocking at my whole creative life. My debut poetry collection Suite for Hallucinated Voices was a long time coming. I’d tried repeatedly to write about mental health and hallucinations, but always hit dead ends. Suite, then, hurricaned into existence in just a couple of years, almost—cliché as it feels to say—without my conscious knowledge of the images and feelings that were stitching themselves together on the page. This project took root where earlier attempts had fallen short: in the multivoicedness, the emotionality that felt at once trapped and isolated and raw-nerve-exposed, the way its stacked and conflicting symbols said more about my honest experience of the world than most coherent narratives. That’s what it felt like to live through the periods when my hallucinations were their worst, and to crack open and finally speak with those voices.
So it caught me off guard when, at the end of a year-long editorial process, I noticed that the word hallucination doesn’t appear in a poem in Suite for Hallucinated Voices until the final movement. Around the same time, it occurred to me that Suite is my least obviously queer work (though, what’s more queer than writing a book dedicated to your ex-partner?). The themes most self-evident in my general body of work were less than obvious in these poems—which invited the question of why, then, the book felt so emotionally, impressionistically accurate?
What I think cis people often don’t understand about transness is how monumentally disorienting it can be to realise—or even just to feel, without fully realising—that you aren’t living in the same reality other people see you living in. Add to this confusion the fact that my ears have been occasionally populated by voices who weren’t really there since years before I knew I was trans. I avoided telling anyone about hallucinating for a long time, perhaps because I was afraid of what it might ‘prove’ about me and my already wobbly sense of self. Multiple times I’ve described my trans awakening, which never truly landed until my early 20s, and people have earnestly said to me, That’s crazy. I don’t see how you could just… not know.
I think these responses are well-intentioned. It serves allies to assert that trans people are bringing our singularly ‘correct’ bodies and identities into reality, that there’s a final form within us waiting to be birthed. Any less can feel like ammunition for transphobia: if you weren’t purely, uncomplicatedly, and always this way, how can you convince a bigot that your identity is real? You don’t simply choose to be trans, right? And if you point out that trans people have to wish our own realities into existence before those realities are reflected in the outside world, doesn’t that make us sound delusional and confused, living outside of objective truth, just as transphobes say we are?
It feels politically dangerous to be a trans person and suggest that perception is malleable—and especially to admit that you’re prone to spells of delusional thinking—when the prevailing transphobic worldview is that all of us are already disturbed, indoctrinated, deluded. But, as Schoenbrun’s films demonstrate, when you’re shoved into a reality that doesn’t have space for you, eventually you’ll explode out of it. Whether you want to or not, you’ll have to throw your weight against a newer, bigger reality. Whether others want you to or not. And when you reach it, there will be even more difficult choices to make.
Without understanding it at first, I wrote Suite for Hallucinated Voices as a collage of those realities, an estuary of images across past and present lives, a crossroads of branching paths both real and imagined. It’s a book that descends into multiple layers of reality and perception, that implores the reader to trust its narrative even as it warns how much of life and love are more complicated than an easy truth-fiction binary. The question is not always: is this real? Maybe the better question, and the one Suite left me with, is: am I brave enough to believe my story anyway?
CJ Scruton’s Suite for Hallucinated Voices is a book of revelations for a life that refuses to end. Written as a fully performable musical score, this poetry collection holds a microphone to unspeakable violences from within and without, and to the sweetnesses that at once feed us and render us prey to what we love. CJ moves beyond deconstructing illusion and reaches toward the task of interpretation—examining the messages she’s received, near and far, deciding which false-speaking idols can be torn down and where her own song belongs in the cacophony. Using music as both metaphor and practice, Suite for Hallucinated Voices walks like a prophet through the desert, parsing the noise of the heavens without shutting the voices out. The book is out next Sunday.