interview with Jessica Austin

Jessica Austin is a queer, trans writer living in Washington, D.C. She has attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Tin House Winter Workshop as a 2025 Winter Scholar. Her work has been published in Lilac Peril, the citizen trans* {project}, and the 2025 DC Pride Poem-a-Day.

Jessica Austin writes with a razor-bright clarity that refuses simplification. Her voice is wry, unsentimental, and piercingly self-aware, moving effortlessly between intimacy and indictment without losing its pulse. She exposes how identity is shaped, surveilled, and commodified, how private experience is never fully separate from public language, and how power seeps into even the smallest negotiations of the self. There is no tidy arc toward redemption in her work, only the embodied, repetitive truth of becoming in a culture eager to define and confine. The result is prose that does not ask to be understood or forgiven; it insists on its own authority, making erasure feel not just cruel, but impossible.

We interviewed Jessica about her piece, North Woods, published in The Palisades Review. Read that story here and read her interview below.

TPR: We were very struck by the line “You could only be so unnatural in nature.” It carries a lot of tension. What were you interested in unpacking with that paradox?

Jessica: When transphobes argue that transition is “unnatural,” they’re implying, first, that there’s a natural way for people to exist; and, second, that nature is inherently good. In other words, trans people are bad for defying nature. In response, many trans people counter that trans people have existed forever, implying that transness is a naturally occurring phenomenon. 

In my view, both can be true. Transition is, in some ways, unnatural, and that’s neither good nor bad. Many trans people want to change their bodies via hormones and surgeries, and that’s okay. There is no reason, a priori, that nature is “good.” At the same time, nature is a human concept—in fact, it’s only because we, as a society, decide what is and isn’t natural that transphobes and trans people alike can invoke it to make diametrically opposing arguments. If that’s the case, we are free to interpret nature to our own ends. We could argue, for instance, that it’s natural for humans to change the world around them, and that includes their own bodies. 

In the early stages of my transition, I felt this dichotomy on a visceral level. In society—that is, the mostly-trans-inclusive liberal arts college I was attending at the time—I felt freakish. I didn’t pass in any meaningful way, and I could sense how the people around me were responding to the dissonance between my body, my voice, my presentation, and my proclaimed gender. To escape that, I tried walking in the woods; those negative feelings, I thought, only existed in relation with other people, and there wouldn’t be many people in the woods to judge me (hence the quote you reference here). But the issue is, our interactions with others inform our relationship with ourselves. And early on, it was hard not to feel like I was making a ridiculous ask, to expect others to see me how I saw myself before it was really self-evident. So nature didn’t solve those issues; it only muted them.

TPR: The essay resists offering resolution, especially in the final section with scream therapy. What did you want the ending to leave unsettled?

Jessica: The theory behind scream therapy is simple: we can release negative emotions by giving into our “primal urges.” Within this modality—which, as an aside, isn’t a scientifically-validated form of therapy—screaming is a “natural” impulse that can free us of our trauma and neuroses. Except, in my experience, it didn’t work, in part, because I wasn’t willing to let go in that way. Even when I was completely alone, completely removed from society, I still thought, what if, when I scream, I still sound like a man? 

Obviously, there’s a term for that: internalized transphobia. But to paraphrase Torrey Peters, when we use terminology like that, it emotionally neuters the experience (castration pun intended). And in her eyes, it can make otherwise sympathetic readers bristle if they feel like the author is imposing an ideology or a set of values on them. It’s more impactful, then, for the reader to experience the emotion and feel like they came to the terminology on their own. 

So at the end of my piece, I’m forcing the reader to sit in that emotion. What if you let others convince you that you’re a freak, and what if you let that perception worm its way into your psyche so deeply that your only means of releasing it was, instead, a confirmation of the feeling? And more broadly, I think a lot of us harbor this fantasy that we can rid ourselves of these intense, negative emotions with a single act of catharsis, if only we could find the right one, but that’s not how real life works.

TPR: The piece is segmented, but the movement between sections feels associative rather than chronological. How did you decide where to break and where to let moments echo across time?

Jessica: On one hand, the breaks were dictated by my memory, and on the other, by my desire to keep the language compressed. But on the whole, I wanted there to be movement—between pre- and post-transition, between self and others—that doesn’t exactly move anywhere, emotionally speaking. Because, at the time, I was stuck in place, even as I was changing quite dramatically. I was still trying to fit myself into a shape that didn’t, and couldn’t, exist, and I was doing that whether I was alone or with others.

TPR: This piece engages with public curiosity around private grief. How did you navigate writing about trauma without re-centering the violence itself?

Kristi: In addition to my work as a creative nonfiction writer, I have a secondary interest in archival studies, which has informed how I work with archival materials related to the murder. I am really interested in what’s known as postcustodial archiving, which sort of decenters the traditional “powerholder” who might “own” a record. This process, in contrast to traditional archiving where an archivist may be seen as a gatekeeper, allows for a kind of repair work to take place. In the process of writing my book, I have worked directly with a variety of artifacts from the crime: police records, interrogations, newspaper articles, even the autopsy report—records I had never seen before, and some I now wish I’d never seen at all. Some of those are referenced in this piece. At first, having these records in my home–”owning” them, so to speak–was really hard for me. In these pages, my grandmother’s humanity, my humanity, my brother’s humanity–it’s almost completely erased. The records are cold and their only concern is describing the violence. Describing the blood. Describing “the scene.” My task as a writer is to call attention to and restore that humanity. I love that little moment in the piece where someone talks about the way my grandmother spoke–she was a 68-year-old poker dealer who swore more than anyone I’ve ever met. She was so unique and memorable to people in our community. It’s like, in the midst of all this actual horror, there was once a fully dimensional human being who has been reduced to a headline. That happens to murder victims a lot. I really want to push back against that with my work. To go back to the archive, no one gets to “own” my grandmother, the murder victim. No one gets to “own” my brother and me, the witnesses. We don’t just exist in those records. The story is ours.

TPR: Do you tend to write toward understanding, or do you write from within uncertainty and let the thinking happen on the page?

Jessica: Historically, I struggled a lot with memoir. In college, when I was much more focused on personal essay, I never felt like my memories coalesced into a cohesive narrative; my writing felt fragmented and confined, in part, because I was beholden to The Truth and the limits of my memory (which, generally speaking, isn’t great with details). 

With this piece, I had an idea of what I was writing and the ideas I was wrestling with, but it was only through the writing that I came to any conclusions. In my experience, writing isn’t any fun—and certainly not very interesting to read—if you come to it with too many things figured out, whether that’s the plot, the structure, or the ending. I always let the narrative lead the way to some extent. 

TPR: How does revision work for you with essays like this? Are you refining language, structure, or your own sense of what the piece is asking?

Jessica: In something this short, I want every word, every sentence, every break to count, the way it would in a poem. The language needs to be layered—to mean something, and often multiple things—so that it accomplishes more than the simple act of description.

In terms of the structure, I started with the raw memories—all of the things I could remember about North Woods and my transition, in the order that I remembered them. So naturally, when I sent this piece to some friends for feedback, there was a three- or four-person debate raging in the Google Doc comments about where each section should go, and the order changed quite a few times. 

In an earlier draft, I ended the first section by answering my own question: “the joke is that cis women don’t know what they’re capable of.” But after a few people went back and forth about that line, and I thought about why I included it, I realized it was distracting from the deeper question: what is the natural, expected dynamic between a man and a woman on a date, and how does transition unsettle that?

Likewise, everyone told me that the original ending was too on the nose. It went something like this: one night, I went for a run through the woods, it got too dark to see, I went off trail, and I didn’t have my phone. As I contemplated sleeping in the woods and waiting for morning light to find my way out, I stumbled onto a path I recognized and emerged into the artificially-lit parking lot. I thought I was ending on a triumphant note—“It turns out you could only ever get so far from society in those woods”—but really, I was hitting the reader over the head with the themes. And even worse, I was hiding from the real emotion of the piece.

Jessica Austin