How to Inject by Kate O’Connor is the debut offering from new London-based publisher Ssnake Press. It’s a hand-bound booklet containing a single essay, continuing O’Connor’s idiosyncratic exploration of gay/trans life, politics and history.
“‘In hard, sharp, allusive, and arrestingly open-ended prose, Kate O’Connor’s unnerving missive flickers between courage and fear, wrath and vigilance. Her sentences keep doing the last—and the smartest—thing you’d expect.”
– Rob Doyle, author of Here Are the Young Men and Threshold
Blurb
The pressure we’re under. Most people would break under the stress of injecting themselves with grey market hormones, and that’s the least of our worries. We find that part easy.
K is receiving visitors at her Glasgow apartment. They come to her for hormones procured online, and to learn how to inject them. K wants these friends of friends to embrace the danger that comes with all genuine freedom and rebellion. “The future is made of harm,” she counsels, “best learn to make with it.” But most of them are a type of “morally earnest queer” whose demands K is starting to find exhausting. In her own words: “You want to be fucked by your doctor, I think, and have settled to be mothered by me.” This playful, bitter and mysterious text puts its finger on the sore spot of gay liberation’s failure and pushes, enough to hurt, but in a good way.
Extract from How to Inject
Before you arrive, I place what is needed on the table: 25G 16 mm needles, 1ml syringes, alcohol wipes, a vial of testosterone. I pull up a copy of an injection guide on my phone, wanting to quickly refresh the memory of ignorance. I slide over the pages covering intramuscular injections and find, in the pages that illustrate safe zones for injecting into body fat, the cloud of unknowing. Acting, especially to put confidence in another, is a matter not just of what I know, the hundreds of times I have injected myself in the stomach, but of touching the boundaries of that knowledge, because I will go beyond what I know when you arrive, because I do not know you.
—-I clean and sit down in the great chair that I bought because it reminds me of the chair my great-grandmother sat in. This is where you will sit, and I want a sense of what you will be able to see of the room. “Little granny,” “big granny,” and “P,” the selflessness of their appellations, like a nest placing its eggs in another bird. I decide to drop the cautionary story of when I once, proceeding without the care and attention of another, messed up an intramuscular injection: the needle came out of my thigh and blood went fountainous, practically a Roman miniature of public wealth. I fainted, of course, and came to having fallen flat on the bathroom floor, convinced I was talking to someone about John Calvin, distracted from that interesting conversation by the feeling of the glass of my glasses pressing on my eye socket. The bathroom tiles were like heaven above.
—-I look at the vial next to me, and realise I have not removed the core of the metal cap. I remove it in the kitchen with a knife, as it ruins nails. You’re outside. I press the building’s buzzer, admitting you, and I hold on in the hallway for a minute or so, even as I hear you coming, hovering by the door, uncertain as to whether you’ll knock. I need a second to put on the face of someone who cares, which you will almost certainly take to be the face of a teacher. That mistake is on you.
—-In you come, looking just like I expect, or not. I can never make up my mind as to whom I expect: annoying, guarded, over-eager… You are a friend of a friend, so I try not to judge. And what do you see? I hate to think about that. You sit down, accept an offer of water, and tell me how you’ve been on x/y/z waiting list for three, five, or seven years, maybe your mother disowned you, or you’ve been couch surfing for months, or you’re worried I’m tricking you. I look a little conservative. In the supermarket in Stoke Newington, I admired the women in long skirts and flats, their makeup and hair simple, identical. I made a note to tell F: they’re doing modesty in London. It was only doubling back for potatoes, following J’s steps closely, that I realised the women around me were Orthodox Jews, the whole neighbourhood was Orthodox. Okay, I thought, I am the werewolf of London.
—-I tell you, taken over by a sincerity that possesses me in these moments of potential exposure, that I have heard it all and worse. I tell you that only the other day someone in the NHS told me about an encounter with a gay doctor—homosexuals and their love of a mild career. It was at a social mixer, and this doctor was interested in him, wanted to impress him. This doctor whispered to my friend that he was a “cool doctor,” that he was into drugs, loved how ketamine slowed down his senses. He did not remember the nasty way he spoke to my friend months before, when he refused him care, refused to prescribe him testosterone, refused to monitor his hormone levels, refused him blood tests, health screenings, refused him like a leper of old. And now he wanted to fuck with bells on. Doctors, I tell you, are a bunch of fascists. I explain to you the concept of “fascism’s penumbra,” the almost shadow of authority, the illuminated shadow in which we make our lives, between the light of knowledge accepted and the dark of a knowledge rejected, what we can tolerate to know of “fascism,” and what we must refuse to understand. We should put these cowardly gay doctors under the wheels. None of this settles you. I am making things worse.
How to Inject mood board
Heaven’s Gate “Exit Statements”
[the section referred to in the essay starts at 1:06:30]
Ashley Tisdale, “Kiss the Girl”
Phoenix Lights
Lee Miller
Injection guide (for real)
https://fenwayhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/MG-6_TransHealth_InjectionGuide.pdf
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The second publication from Ssnake Press is Stag Do/Fantasy Horn, released on 1 September 2025. It’s another handmade booklet, this time containing a condensed gut-punch of a short story, in which fans of Anna Walsh will recognise their trademark blend of raw feeling and high style.
“Anna Walsh has written the perfect mythic miniature about the slide-rule of masculinity as a never-ending creation story. Stag Do/Fantasy Horn is a dream-drunk bestiary narrated by a horned and horny stag at a roving bachelor’s party. The hours tick with pints, spirits, and drugs, turning the nervy celebration into a time-tripped rutting season. Jumpy with longing and disgust, our narrator’s roughhousing mind churns memories of perfect specimens, messy breakups, and abject nights. Told with dark humor and frank strangeness, it’s touching in every sense. Powerful too.”
—Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book and Ripcord
Blurb
He, when I was nineteen, told me that all a lad needs to fall in love is a girl who will be nice to him and have sex with him. Well, I had sex with him, but I couldn’t be nice, or be a girl.
This new short story by Irish writer Anna Walsh follows an unnamed transmasculine narrator on a stag night with a group of straight men from their hometown. As the drink flows, our horned-up hero lusts ambivalently after men past and present, all the while looking back and licking the wounds of their chaotic, closeted youth.
Extract from Stag Do/Fantasy Horn
I am directed to the pub by the group chat, where we will gather for floods of beer and incessant shouting. I am checking my phone constantly to ensure I arrive at the correct time, not too early or late. I need to steady myself before going in because: I want to fuck.
—-The horns are heavy at this time of year. Typically a stag loses his horns in late autumn, a process which leaves bones scattered throughout the forest, painless red wounds forming where the horns have fallen off. Sometimes I rub myself so hard, off a tree or with my hand, that the site swells. Though I have always longed to be addressed as such I am not and never was a young buck – mine extend laterally and I have at the moment eight points. Not a huge amount but still I am obsessed with them. I measure them each morning and night to see how they’ve grown so I will not be driven away from the other men.
—-I walk slowly through the town, down by the canal and through a carpark. The carpark used to be grimy but is now shining with large people carriers and the tin box where the ticket attendant used to work is empty and perennially closed. While in use it was repainted every summer, the dark green paint rolling in globules down the sides. I used to love touching the bumps of a bad paint job, still soft and slightly liquid on a hot day.
—-It is hot today. It is the evening, still too early to arrive and so I roll another cigarette and sit on a low concrete wall. Concrete, badly varnished wood, the unbearably hot pleather of a car seat, their smells and stings of pain always turn me on, I must try to calm down. I smudge an ant on the wall, run my palm lightly along the rough surface. I cannot calm down so I throw the fag butt away and click my heels, ready to drink 1000 pints.
—-Five of the lads are there already and they are subdued. I automatically compare horns: some are weathered, others enormous, as many as fourteen points. The best man is my mother’s youngest cousin and has a particular charisma, one I have been trying to ape since I was very young. It is bizarre to grow up in thrall to someone like him, someone whom I would kill to impress but barely ever see. He is the only one with over fourteen points.
—-My antlers are something grown stolen and beautiful and with them I wish to pierce. I remember the laughs everyone in my family had when they found out our family motto is Transfixus sed non mortuus. Pierced but not dead.
I have been pierced and it has killed me, many times, but I have always come back to life.
—-The best man greets me with a well cuz and claps me on the back, all hearty. He is nice, and I feel bad for resenting him and his seemingly effortless charm. I am bitter as a lemon. The other lads nod at me and the ones I don’t know reach across and shake my hand. We all know the groom from our childhoods bar these two; there is a wariness about them. Colleagues, probably, older, both married. Uncomfortable about the pending chaos. Three more arrive with the groom in tow and we sit in a line across from the bar.
—-I am packed in between one of the colleagues and an old school friend of his, who I haven’t seen in years. Nobody has seen me since I left town at eighteen, and I don’t know how I’ve ended up back here.
—-Family, pain, unemployment. Being insane. Perhaps this is why.
Stag Do/Fantasy Horn mood board
The Irish Mob
Sam Rockwell in Charlie’s Angels
The Killers, “The Man”
Old YouTube screenshot?
George Michael
The Age of Innocence with skeleton postcard
This and subsequent photos taken by Anna Walsh at the exhibition “Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature” at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Correspondence between writers Kate O’Connor and Anna Walsh, and Ssnake Press editor James Bennett (August 2025)
JB
I seem to be attracted to panic. It’s a genre of interacting with the world that’s in my blood. So when I see stories about how kids can’t read anymore, or parents can’t read to their kids, a part of me relishes that. The horror! And also, the satisfaction of seeing a shitty reality processed and somewhat explained. Say what you want about pearl-clutching hyperbole, but the truth is it is hard to get people to care about books, and to sell them in quantities that allow people who aren’t rich to devote their lives to writing. Is there a reader deficit? Reading makes demands on the body and mind. Stillness, slowness, concentration, reverie… These things feel endangered to me. And yet, everybody knows this. Maybe that’s a starting point for living by doing: a way to bypass the anxious money-making vibrations of discursive panic.
AW
I have been thinking about writing and money constantly since 2013 or so when I worked two jobs to do a master’s in Creative Writing. I was 21 and incredibly fucked up and could feel myself listing towards doom if I didn’t somehow find my way back to reading and writing and THINKING COHERENTLY. I also had such a furious class-based inferiority complex that I believed I could only learn to write by doing a degree. Stupid! So I spent a load of money to be treated like an adult for the first time in my life, basically. And frustratingly I don’t know if I could have learned the self confidence to say I didn’t need to do the master’s without having done the master’s.
—-I can’t engage with our current writing landscape without imagining how it could be so much better: writing and literature could be practised by everyone, nobody and everyone is a genius, people’s needs are fulfilled by collective ownership of production and so art becomes free to all and can mean so much more. Call me naive but one must believe in something or go mad. The panic over reading comprehension and AI is happening in tandem with a surge of interest from the professional class in writing books. I recently read short stories for a competition and was struck by the bios of some people: doctor, financial analyst, successful lawyer, and how they all, either implicitly or explicitly, included an observation that they would have loved to write earlier in life but they couldn’t find the time. Again: I believe financial constraint and time poverty is one of the biggest things preventing writers from growing/writing at all. BUT the doctor, the analyst. I may be paranoid or inclined to self-hatred but I feel a sting of reprimand in their comments, a pinch that asserts their inherent expertise, their talent waiting to be discovered, the luxury I have had of dedicating my time to writing. Never mind the years I have spent making it the centre of my life; the years applying for grants so I could spend time working on my books; the terrible willingness I have to sacrifice potential security, both financial and domestic, etc. etc. in the name of it. Living at or below poverty levels for years at a time. All of this to learn to read and write in a conscious and ever-transforming way to try and make sense of life. I like to imagine telling a surgeon or an electrician that I would have loved to give someone a boob job or wire a house but didn’t have the time. They would rightly say (I hope), Make the time, bitch, or get out of my face! Commit yourself to a life of this work and then we can talk!
KOC
I think there’s a general collapse of ecosystems. It’s in politics as in reading as in the environment. There’s a symbolic-cum-ideological facade, like in a movie lot: revolution, smash the patriarchy, etc. But step beyond the facade, leave the protest, and there’s no deeper movement. You don’t have the needed diversity of actions (people doing the grinding and unglamorous work) and the trust or common understanding (people are trapped in private fantasies of persecution and of the immorality of others). John D’Emilio writes about how capitalist transformation weakens the family and opens the door to gay life. Well the family’s now so weak that there is a flowering of middle-class transsexuals, just like there was of homosexuals. But the family’s weak and there’s no money. So everyone wants to rush right to the top: the billionaire, the writer, the revolutionary. There’s no life to be had in all the other loamy roles: readers, publishers, envelope lickers and the like. Literacy is mandatory, that is you have to be reading in some sense, looking at some of all the symbols all of the time. For the same reason, the reading self is too wasteful to maintain.
—-I was reading Cesar Vallejo’s “The Duel between Two Literatures” recently: “No one says anything to anybody. Communication between man and men is broken off. The individual’s term for collectivity has been mutilated in the individual mouth. In the midst of our incomprehensible wordiness, we are speechless.” The main rule is you can’t go backwards. So it is no good hoping that there will again be what there was. We don’t even know that much about what there was. Just a lot of impressions and desperation. The problem is never a lack of will. So you can’t work your way back to a whole body, which means you might have to find the whole bodies that exist beyond the mutilations. So like Anna writes, “learn to read and write in a conscious and ever-transforming way to try and make sense of life” (and pay the price for it). Which means to me, find a means of going from the rush of all the things I can think to something I think. A lot of the reactionary slur-loving pseudo-conservative politics of the present moment is just an attempt to synthesize an I from out of condemnation. Imagining that if I am condemned for thinking it, it must be a real thought. Ironically then, against Vallejo, figuring out what subjectivity is after it has been split apart by the tremendous ethical discoveries of the last century (racism, sexism, homophobia in their relationship to class) may be relevant to finding a language we can share and speak.
—-My girlfriend and I watched Whit Stillman’s Barcelona recently, and a character making a life in sales says, “You know how at parties, everyone talks about marketing?” Sometimes being yourself means being incredibly and locally naive. It’s naivety that has kept me going, and talking to you two of course.
JB
Anna writes that the “panic over reading comprehension and AI is happening in tandem with a surge of interest from the professional class in writing books.” I too sometimes read submissions to literary magazines and have been struck by the amount of doctors and lawyers, usually from the United States, who harbour literary ambitions. It seems that no-one will ever find them clever enough. Some of them have multiple PhDs… so naturally they must proceed to the next frontier: being “smart enough” or “good enough” to make people feel something. All this makes sense when your competitive side is overdeveloped, which is another way of saying you’re not sure you really exist.
—-If AI does take off like we’re being primed to believe it will, and there’s a massive devaluing of analytic intelligence, it’s possible that the “emotionally intelligent” “storyteller” could become a powerful figure, perhaps even a simulacrum of the divine. I’d argue this is already happening with Ocean Vuong’s public persona in the PR campaign for his latest novel. On millions of social media feeds, his image makes breathy pronouncements about life’s mysteries like a being from another world.
—-This is where I want to start shouting at the general reading public. A person we call a “writer” is not smarter than you. They do not know more about life than you do, or feel more deeply than you, by virtue of being a writer. What they know more about than non-writers is how language works, and how to make things with it. That’s all. But people are so used to being beaten, intimidated and tricked with language that it’s easy to feed them shit.
—-Maybe the flowering of advanced mass literacy post-WW2 was a historical blip, and we’re going back to a world where reading and writing are the pursuits of a tiny elite. If that’s the case, I want to be in it. I confess I was sceptical of Anna’s vision of a world where “literature could be practised by everyone.” My faith in democracy has been weakened by this last decade. But on reflection, maybe the operative word is “could” rather than “everyone.” If it’s about holding a door open for those who want to find it, count me in.
—-Parsing the logic of the attention-time-money economy under which we live, Kate says the “reading self is too wasteful to maintain.” She’s right. That’s why I want to publish wasteful writing, writing that proceeds from our besieged loving instincts rather than the desire to be clever or to publicly feel the right things the most deeply.
AW
I agree, I definitely think the writer has the potential to/has already become an almost mystic figure, forcing profundity and really seeming to believe in their own “breathy pronouncements” as James says. The myth of writing has been reinforced over the past 150 years by financial obscurement and cult of personality and an insidious glamour—the force of “the writer as writer” sometimes rendering the work itself inconsequential. The way people are directed by multiple platforms to read total crap reminds me of what Eric Auerbach discusses re: the Bible. He talks about the style being flat and vague and so when people read it they are forced to pull from and ascribe their own meaning to the scenes and stories. What we are working with is like that but not: there are no meanings to pull from so much contemporary writing because it’s just poorly chosen words on the page, published for the sake of publishing. And so we have a broken landscape of atomised people who have to work extremely hard to: 1) navigate all the glamourising shit and 2) break it down in order to build their own sustainable practice—if it can be called sustainable in terms of being a pay check you can depend on for longer than a few months.
—-I was reading the recently published Memories That Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz with a foreword by Vuong and an intro by X the publisher. It was incredibly depressing to me because David died two months after the book was originally published, and there is a description of him seeing the original book, unable to really speak or move but expressing what seemed to the publisher a kind of satisfaction. I am really afraid, or not afraid but pre-emptively angry at the thought that my work could become valuable or interesting only after I pass, or once it is too late for the work to make my life somewhat better. I don’t want the crap of my life, our lives, all our “wasteful” reading and writing selves to acquire meaning once it is all dust. So much of my writing practice already is writing letters to the dead.
KOC
Anna’s comment about writing letters to the dead reminds me of two models of (gay) writing: Jack Spicer’s writing to an elect, in the Calvinist sense. Those who do well are good; rather than those who do good are well. Those who read and write do so because they are the elect, the readers and writers. If you find yourself in the poem, wrestling with Jack, he finds you, and you and and he are the audience. Then there’s Robert Duncan’s model: the canon expanded by the unconscious and the magical, not a canon maintained by academics and critics, but a universal human culture out of which the reader, writer and everyone are spun in the manner of metempsychosis.
—-In writing to the elect, we are wasteful and do write to the dead: predestination, we get whatever readers we are meant to have, and find in them exactly the audience we need. In Duncan’s metempsychosis is the root of new narrative and auto-fiction: our lives are significant because they reincarnate all other lives, and we can find in them echoes of all the meanings and stories that there are. Just by understanding our own lives, we understand very generally (think of Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe or Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker). And these two are just good examples, I think, of the options you have when the public isn’t available, either because it is hostile (homophobic, fascist) or because it has been dismantled. Spicer and Duncan were dealing, post-war, with arguably a thriving American public that was hostile: hated gays, reds, women and so on. We are dealing with a public that has been dismantled. So everyone is forced to get in on minority life etc. Consider today’s anxiety about trans women: it is no longer possible to tell if people are transitioning because of some illness, some disorder that forces them or because they want to. And this upsets people, evidently.
—-What we want is a thriving public that isn’t hostile: that’s I think what everyone means by “wokeism,” particularly as a generational phenomenon (associated with millennials). Those who were forced into minority life by circumstance during the twentieth-century’s heyday (such as all manner of queers) or who embraced minority life before it was cool/mandatory (the “outsider” artists and “punks”) find this censorious part of millennial politics baffling, because they either remember a much more aggressively homophobic time that precluded longing for a public (public life always involves harm, castigation) or they conflate minority status with edge, creativity, whatev., and so assume the goal is to be and remain marginal (cool, different, whatev.). That’s what makes Anna’s comment so necessary and so off-putting: demanding respect and remuneration for writing as a practice feels like asking for the moon. But as Slim Whitman warbles, “I’m casting my lasso way up towards the sky, hoping my loop lands on a star.”
—-James you write about our “besieged loving instincts.” I really like this description of what we’ve been doing, the three of us, by writing and talking to one another over this past decade. I think the partial answer to your anxiety is that now everyone is minor, and everyone speaks out against their own silence. Everyone’s gay, the homosexualization of the world, to borrow a phrase from Denis Altman. Here’s Duncan quoting Porphyries, “there’s no such thing as the start and finish of the whole circumference of a circle.” So we go ahead to 1944, when Duncan writes that we must go beyond the homosexual cult to seek the liberation of all humankind. We recognise the mutation of minority life into a general condition of society, where even the heterosexual male considers himself to be marginalized, and we detect in the germ of the gay life we have—thank God—inherited from others the means of bringing this now general condition to an end.
JB
We are grappling with the question of readership. Who will read me, but also, how many? What does it mean to want more readers, and why would you want them? I think we need to put money aside. Very few good writers these days make their living solely from writing. It’s an important fact, but it can also become a distraction. Sometimes you need to put a pin in being poor and start thinking like an aristocrat.
—-Kate, you raise the question of publics. This ties in with another question that’s been on my mind: that of number or scale. A problem of information-age humanism is that it asks individuals to be vaguely aware of the fortunes of billions of other people and to feel connected to them in some way. Racism has been one of the more effective forms of managing this apparent conundrum.
—-But great multitudes do not just inspire anxiety, they can also turn people on—the erotic thrill of letting your body or mind meld into a crowd: dissolution, ecstasy, the beast with a billion backs. Big numbers can allay fear, too. When you hold your phone you are plugged into a web of language, image and sound that claims to be the aggregate symbolic output of billions of minds, many of them belonging to people like you. That can feel reassuring to people who are terrified of being alone in the (seemingly) big empty rooms that are their heads, which is a lot of people a lot of the time. The problem is that: 1) these numbers seem to be addictive (why connect with ten people when you can “connect” with a million, ten million, a billion?) and 2) the technologies that facilitate these connections are manipulative and completely profit-driven—they are implicitly invested in destroying your attention span and your aesthetic sense. Look at how we’re grappling with the concept of “slop” right now.
—-But consider the printed book. As a transaction it’s more honest. You pay for it once and then it’s yours. It doesn’t change while you read it. It isn’t watching you and tailoring itself to the shape of your mind in order to take more and more of your attention and squeeze the maximum profit from your interaction with it. Nobody is monitoring you while you read it. No-one needs to know if you don’t want them to. The book says what it says. It can never defend itself. It lays there before you, still, and you have to be still too, and silent, and slow down, and follow the lines one after the other. And then you go out in the world and talk to people about it. Reading is not a solipsistic activity. It’s an aid to life, a technology. When reality, via your imagination, troubles you, you can graft things onto the wound, plug into new assemblages that allow you to go on living.
—-I’m not saying books are the supreme tool for doing this, but they’re a very good one. And it would be disastrous to suppose that millions of fleeting, surveilled, symbolic connections are a worthy substitute.
—-We as three have said more wonderful things to each other than any millions have said to me. And maybe with these books we can make a good assemblage of, say, a hundred. God knows we’ve talked about it long enough!
AW
It’s funny, this question of readership and the context of what makes our writing/thinking sustaining via our friendships and conversations. James asks ‘”Who will read me, but also, how many? What does it mean to want more readers, and why would you want them?” For me, it is all connection, communication, a reader reading my work and understanding that I am more than what I appear to be. That I am more than flesh and inarticulate speech. Over the past few years I have dedicated myself to trying to build up my writing “career” and I have found that using this word in the UK is wholly acceptable and for a great many reasons, often supersedes and becomes the entire writing practice for the writer. This is obvious from the publishing landscape, what is read and what is not, who is networking whom (or, who is hustling whom: yes I watched The Hustler last night), and the increased professionalisation of every aspect of creativity and writing.
—-When I use the words “career” or “networking” around Irish writers (by which I mean the Irish writing “scene” in Ireland), they by and large tend to baulk, or to react with disgust. How dare I say this thing we do is anything but a sacred calling, one we do for the love of it? I don’t want to think about careers and making money but I see them as a means to an end, one I will ruthlessly pursue: if I am to have any shot at writing for my entire life I have to think of money. Currently I live off disability grants, Universal Credit, a few days a month in a bookshop and freelance editing. I can no longer work with my body so my mind is my only option and even that is not in great nick. I have built up the confidence and conviction to be paid for my writing and in this sense yes, I am all for thinking aristocratically: I believe I deserve to live somewhat off my work if only for the fact that I and my work exist. Irish people, Irish writers, perform this shame and disgust around money that obscures the fact that someone else is making it possible for them to write, be that a partner, familial wealth, the Irish government etc. Kate says it is “necessary and so off-putting: demanding respect and remuneration for writing as a practice feels like asking for the moon.” Why off-putting? We have escaped generations of laundries and poverty and unbelievably repulsive repression at the hands of the Catholic Church and the Irish state. Our entire gay lives have been dedicated to asking for the moon. Why stop at using what we can to enable that which is genuinely meaningful and nourishing, protecting our “besieged loving instincts”? I do not want to, like Spicer, die aged 40 in a poverty ward. The New Narrative writers lived in a time of relatively stable employment and rent control. It is too easy to give up on the rest of your life in the name of art, because it is an easy out when you fail to build the thing you desire. Impoverished geniuses cannot live on talent alone and would produce far more works if they did not die prematurely due to hunger, stress and preventable illness. I think it is much harder, in 2025, to spend every living day choosing to do the shit boring hard things in the name of longevity of practice.
—-I have gone off on a tangent. I started writing about this because I was reflecting on the past 5 years of “career-building,” applying for grants, sending books out on submission and hearing nothing back, bla bla bla. Nothing about the industry of writing sustains readership. It is only in the small corners where capital has not yet exhausted us that readership can maybe, if not flower, burst up like a weed from the concrete. I am talking about this: Ssnake Press and our pamphlets and a culmination of the years we have spent trying so hard to make a mark, do something, BE WRITERS WITH SOMETHING TO SAY. It is this private cool corner, where I have been understood and have understood you, that makes everything worth it. In the techno-saturated era we live in, as James says, we are tuned into millions of people, billions of facts and anecdotes and viscera of history and politics and hubris. Quality over quantity, it is easy to say, but what I mean is: inviting someone to live in your mind for a certain amount of time and engaging with them across time and space and pages and ink. Readership is like life: I am trying to make an impression and spend time with those I love, and I will do whatever it takes to allow that to happen. Everything I write I write with love or fury for whoever is willing to engage. How to then go about asking people to engage in an age of endless demand is something else altogether; how to find readers and invite them in when you are still building the thing you are inviting them into? Do we have to make everything up from the ground again? Reading groups, writing groups, all of these small entities are harder and harder to sustain. And yet again it is small pockets of time and focus like these that foster deep and willing reading. So yes perhaps readership is a question of scale: “We as three have said more wonderful things to each other than any millions have said to me. And maybe with these books we can make a good assemblage of, say, a hundred.” If indeed scale and quality are parts of the answer, I think we are off to a good start.
KOC
I’m writing back to you both with a thumping headache, a real brutal one like my father gets; and he takes injections to ease them. James you write about what books are good for, and Anna you write about what writers/readers are good for. When I was still trying to be an academic, before I transitioned, I was “studying” the Cratylus, an early Platonic dialogue about language. Some people who read it think it is a joke. Some take it seriously. Others think it is a kind of poor first attempt by Plato to work out problems that he only solves in a more mature work, the Sophist. It has a very long etymological section, which sort of anticipates the genealogical and archaeological methods of Nietzsche and Foucault (or alternatively mocks them two thousand years ahead of time). Since then I’ve been into names. I want to properly read Dionysius the Areopagite’s treatise on divine names. Did you know that he is sometimes simply called Denis the Areopagite? What’s in a name? How’s it going, Denis?
—-One way to read the Cratylus is that it proposes that names are artifactual objects made of phonemes through the exercise of a craft. The original name-giver, the nomothetes (sometimes translated as law-giver), made the names, and she made them perfectly to refer or, to start using a sort of early Wittgensteinian language, to show reality is such and such a way. Over time they were corrupted, leading to the plague of falsity, confusion, lies that we live under, and even back then they were living under. What I like about the Cratylus is that it is a mess. It resembles the resolute reading of the Tractatus: the text actually is incoherent, but what we learn from it is that particular knot of incoherency or confusion we get into, when we attempt to “picture” to ourselves an original time of naming, a pristine time when it was possible to first represent the things of the world in the names that we would then come to know them under.
—-If we do think of language this way, however misguided, then there’s a craft of speaking that’s much simpler than rhetoric, a craft of making chains of sounds, a craft more of the mouth. And we don’t think much about it, because we’re focused on what this craft makes possible. Now I am thinking of birdsong and voice training, and the anxiety of trying to craft a new voice for yourself that must sound natural even if a work. And all of this is to say that “reading” and “writing” are on the surface of all this other work that we continue, are pulled into without choice. The vastness of the work that we can tap into so easily, even before AI or Google etc. Simply using the name “Plato” allows me to summon up the real sense of reference to someone long dead, to continue a chain of reference to him, to imagine I can reconstruct his mind, that it is meaningful for me to talk about what Plato said, what Plato meant etc.
—-So James you talk about grafting things onto the wound, to go on living; and Anna you talk about doing whatever it takes to make impressions on and be with those you love; and I talk about what lies beyond the mutilations. We were already lost to speaking and writing as we were to being gay a long time ago and in ways we can’t recollect or examine. Reading and writing are nomothetic fantasies of these ineffable moments. Reading and writing aren’t living, or doing what it takes, or cutting a way to a more interesting truth. But reading and writing are names for these things. And we won’t give up on the names, now that we’ve got our mouths around them. We can’t.
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How to Inject and Stag Do/Fantasy Horn are available to purchase online at ssnakepress.com. For the next week, readers of DC’s can get a 20% discount on purchases by entering the code DCBLOG.
Also, there will be a double launch party in Glasgow on 11 September (7pm @ Mount Florida Books). All are welcome. Follow @ssnakepress on Instagram for more details.
Ssnake Press is an independent publisher based in London, dedicated to ambitious and adventurous writing, and to nurturing readership in ways that sidestep the frantic and myopic attention economy. You can make contact by emailing: info at ssnakepress dot com. Submissions are welcome at the same address. If you can, please buy a book and read it before sending work.
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p.s. Hey. ** This weekend the blog, which I suppose means me in other words, is especially happy to unroll itself into a red carpet to help welcome the birth of an amazing new press, Ssnake, masterminded by the blog’s very own James Bennett. Ssnake’s life begins with the two fascinating books you see up above, and now you have all the evidence you should need to welcome them into your reading life. Explore and enjoy and thank you, and of course hugest thanks to James. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I certainly would imagine so. Oh, love is just dealing with some stressful stuff right now, but he’s trying to sort it out. He’s ok. Isn’t there a lot of fanfic that’s just massively romantic and gauzy and stuff? Although I guess that wouldn’t preclude dom/sub dynamics. Has love had any luck? Love learning for the first time that cats only meow when they’re with humans, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, he and Anger went way back. That was news to me. ** politekid, Hello there, sir! Luck galore with the deadline purgatory. And come on back when you’re free. Yes, that is the correct coordinate for me. Thank you! So curious. xo. ** Tosh Berman, Very cool you met him, but of course you would have. Thank you for inadvertently giving my blog a proper space age home. ** jay, Hi. Cool that the film snagged you. I sort of figured they’d be into the serious stuff. Nice. I’ve had some unexpectedly great conversations about Mann for some reason. And you can update their lit knowledge. Totally understood about that disentangling. Parents are snake pits, god love them. I actually haven’t read Hesse since I was in high school, and I’m not sure I would trust the opinion I had of him way back then. He was super trendy among the young in those days, so it was hard not to feel like ‘what’s the big deal’ as I recall. If I were to reenter him, where should I? I will scour the weekend’s molecules seeking that excess positivity, thank you! Love back to you! ** Dan Carroll, Hi, Dan. I think Peter is still in Chicago? It’s been been a while since we interacted. I should alert him to our film screening, although I can’t imagine he would come. Or like the film, haha. Enjoy the printers lit fest. That sounds super fun. I love such things. And I hope the eyes of whoever you handed your cards to widened. ** Carsten, That’s where it happens alight. All I know about Kenneth Kendall is that he was an early openly gay artist who did a lot of homoerotic sculptures and I think maybe paintings? If I’m home on my usual routine, I got to sleep around 10 pm and wake up somewhere between 6 and 6:30 am. ** Steve, Inflammation makes sense, of course. I need to make myself listen to Morgan Wallen so I’ll know what he/it is. This weekend is mostly film stuff, as always, and lining up the Chicago/Toronto trip logistically, I think. Oh, and I’m going to the Paris premiere of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s new film ‘Le tour de glace’ at the L’Etrange Festival. No, I forgot to go shopping at Bandcamp yesterday, oops. ** DonW, Hey. Yeah, I think too many people know quicksand is a myth now, so you couldn’t get away with depicting it unironically. Sad. 47k words, nice. That’s a lot in my book. No, when the last line edit of a novel or whatever is done with the editor, it’s forever frozen for me. But I totally get the difficulty of giving up on the fiddling. Oh, Hugo linked you to my mid-year book faves list, so maybe that’ll help on the suggestion front? ** HaRpEr //, So great to be obsessed with what you’re writing. I envy you there. With me, I was always angling towards writing the Cycle. I published fiction before I wrote it, but I knew those earlier pieces were just steps along the way and that they weren’t what I really wanted to write. But I was working towards the Cycle at the same time in the background. The only earlier fiction piece of mine where I felt more was this story called ‘Wrong’ because I realised I had found in it the basic form of what I wanted ‘Closer’ to be like. And it was the last short fiction piece I published before I started the Cycle. ‘Night Tide’ is really special, yeah. It seems weird to me that I didn’t pick up on the connection to Anger when I originally saw it. It’s all there. ** Hugo, Hi, Hugo. There’s some really fun stuff in there. The submitting ritual is a complete drag, but then it eventually pays off, and all the rejections vanish like, haha, tears in the rain. I’ll need to think about photography book suggestions. I don’t really have many, I don’t know why. I like photography, of course, but I’m more geared to sculpture and installation and video and stuff. Or artists who use photography in their work as a material like Baldessari. May your weekend hold considerable wonder. ** Steeqhen, Gotcha. That was the eternal optimist in me speaking. Your friend will be accessible at least. It sucks having close friends who are almost halfway around the world like many of mine. That whole pop star/singer world and work is mostly just a sparkling surface on the periphery to me. I think it’s too vast at this point to make me want to try to know it well enough to actually know it. ** Mari, Hi! There’s still time. Billionaires are everywhere, it seems. I never saw the original Japanese ‘The Ring’. ‘Ringu’, I think it’s called? Or read the book, no. I’ve heard about ‘House of Usher’. I don’t watch TV or series. I’m worried it will eat me up. I only watch TV/series a little when I’m in LA because my roommate there is into them. I had sort of things to do with the first three Cycle novel covers in the sense that they wanted to use the work of the artist Robert Flynt on them, and I okayed that, but I didn’t have much to say otherwise. I hated the cover of ‘Try’, so, after, that I insisted that they give me some control over the covers, and after that they were more of my doing. Otherwise, sometimes I have a little control over the covers, but mostly I just have to go along. The pickle on the cover ‘Ugly Man’ was certainly not my idea, for instance. Gosh, I hope the resin fix works. I would have thought a whole windshield would cost more than $300. Enjoy the show on Monday. Like I told Steve, my weekend will mostly be film work, planning out my US trip and seeing the premiere of a new film by a filmmaker friend of mine. The weather’s lovely though, so who knows. I’ll try to look down while I’m walking so I don’t miss that $20 bill. I hope you find a €20 bill on the ground, which I think is worth even more? 🎰 🎸 🎲 ❤️ ** Okay. Back you go into the dawning world of the mighty Ssnake and its treasure-like wares. See you on Monday.
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