Genevieve Pfister, Staff Writer—
Jordy Rosenberg, author of the acclaimed queer historical fiction novel Confessions of the Fox and associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was the latest writer brought to campus through Denison’s Beck Visiting Writers Series.
Rosenberg spent the first half of the evening reading excerpts from his new, unpublished work, which he explains started as a trans memoir. However, he realized early in the writing process that he was not interested in writing a traditional memoir. Instead, he wrote and read from a piece told from the perspective of a character modeled after his transphobic mother whose child was transgender, in which the mother is on OxyContin and is convinced her child is holding her hostage and turning into a bird.
After reading the excerpts, Rosenberg opened the floor up for audience Q&A, where students and faculty in attendance asked questions about his writing process and stylistic choices, including his t inspiration behind Confessions of the Fox, which uses the framework of an archival manuscript to imagine the story of Jack Shepherd, a real life Victorian-Era English thief and folk hero, as transgender. Rosenberg explains that the idea for the story was sparked in part by his archival work, and the literature he found on Shepherd’s life, some of which he said “represented Jack in a way that we would maybe now understand [as] gender non-conforming.”
He said that there is no definitive evidence that Shepherd was trans or understood himself as queer, and that as far as historians and scholars are aware, he was a cis man.
Rosenberg was simply interested in exploring the idea of Shepherd being queer in fiction “I was most interested in . . the way in which . . . mythologies of resistance to capitalism, to prisons, to oppression, intersected with mythologies of gender nonconformity.”
Rosenberg’s visit marks the final event of the Beck Series for the Spring 2023 season.