a guest post by Dawn Reno Langley, author of Analyzing the Prescotts
When the doctoral program advisors from The Union Institute and University interviewed me to see if I would be a good fit for their program, they alerted me ahead of time that my research would need to fit the social-justice premise of the Ph.D. program. I thought about how I would use what I’d already learned during the thesis section of my MFA program and “up my game” for the next step in my educational process: the doctoral dissertation.
During my MFA at Vermont College, I researched women authors and their public and private voices. Women like Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Sand wrote both public works, some fiction and others non-fiction, and they also kept private journals. I’d discovered that their voices were quite different when they wrote for public consumption rather than when they spilled their most private thoughts in a journal. Why not do a similar study for my Ph.D.?
But the idea for studying transgender authors and their voices on the page, pre- and post-transition didn’t immediately come to mind. Instead, the idea came because of a rather silly search for my newly married name: Dawn Langley. As a writer, I wanted to be sure that readers could find my work, which had been previously published under my earlier name, Dawn Reno. What I found surprised me: there was another writer whose name was Dawn Langley Simmons, and she wrote several biographies that fascinated me. What was even more interesting was that she was transgender and had written both before and after her transition to her female self. Better yet, Duke University held Simmons’ personal papers, and since I lived in Durham, I had easy access to some of the most insightful journals I’ve ever read.
That would become my topic. And Dawn Langley Simmons was the tip of the iceberg. Though I was at first skeptical that I would find enough transgender authors to satisfy my doctoral research, what I discovered was a wealth of works written by authors in almost every language in the world. Needless to say, I couldn’t read in all of those languages, so I tightened my research to those books written in English.
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Cotton Barnes, a Raleigh, NC, therapist, leveled by a client’s recent suicide, is struggling to resume her practice when she begins working with the Prescotts, a family fractured when the father comes out as transgender and begins transitioning. They relate their stories in their chosen voices, each family member’s narrative in a different format. Journals, social media, and other nontraditional narratives challenge Dr. Barnes’ therapeutic skills. While each member of the Prescotts dodge land mines behind the closed doors of her therapy office, the Raleigh, North Carolina area is rocked by a series of LGBTQ+ hate crimes. As Cotton finds herself stalking the family, worried that she might not be able to “save them,” her husband slips away, and Cotton is forced to make a decision that will determine whether she saves her own marriage or the Prescotts.
As I conducted research on my list of dozens of authors, I became a linguist, searching for patterns in speech and the ways an author develops their own voice. Over the years of reading works of every kind, I discovered that the author’s voice remained the same, no matter what they wrote, but their subject matter changed once their transition was complete. The author might write novels, but those books were often followed by memoirs. Those memoirs showed me what I’d learned in my research about the private and public works written by women. People shared much more in their memoirs, and that is when I began to think about the creative side of my Ph.D. thesis.
Analyzing the Prescotts began in the latter stages of my Ph.D. program, starting as an outline I meant to follow after I was finished with the dissertation, but after a while, I couldn’t deny the way the story was coming together. I had to write it, so I did, and my dissertation grew by hundreds of pages. The combination of the critical study of the authors themselves and the newly created novel totaled more than 700 pages.
I graduated from the program in 2011, but Analyzing continued to morph. I changed the point of view from Hailey (the trans dad) to Cotton (the therapist), then allowed every member of the Prescott family to have their own voice. It became clearer to me each time I worked on the story that the research I’d done on identity and self–the philosophies of Jacques Lacan, Descartes, Aristotle, and Jacques Derrida—informed the novel almost more than my critical thesis. I leaned on what I’d learned, the transgender authors I’d read, and augmented those factors with a deep dive into narrative therapy techniques.
Finally, I handed the manuscript to my then-agent, who marketed it to the big NYC publishers. But it was too soon. The story needed more work, the public wasn’t ready for such a novel, and I had other books on my plate.
The story continued to burn in my head, and I never gave up on it, happy that when Black Rose Writing read it, they were willing to take a chance on publishing it. Now that readers are sharing moving stories about their own reasons for reading the book, I’m humbled and honored to have brought this story to life. I do hope that everyone who reads it derives both pleasure and knowledge from the Prescotts story.
About the Author
Dawn Reno Langley writes extensively for newspapers and magazines, has published more than 30 books (nonfiction, children’s books, and novels such as The Mourning Parade (Amberjack, 2017)), dozens of award-winning short stories, essays, and poems in journals such as Missouri Review, Hunger Mountain and Superstition Review, as well as hundreds of articles, theater reviews, and blogs. A Fulbright scholar and TedX speaker with an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (concentrations in gender studies and creativity) from The Union Institute and University, she lives on the North Carolina coast. She offers writing retreats for other women and teaches for Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA program. Her latest book, You Are Divine: A Search for the Goddess in All of Us (Llewellyn) was released nationally and internationally in January 2022.ADD AUTHOR BIO
You can follow the author at:
Website: www.dawnrenolangley.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dawnrenolangley/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proflangley/
You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSpOz4n17V06ZGei4SkXww
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