Maya Gittelman is joining us today to talk about their novel, Why on Earth. Here’s the publisher’s description:
What starts as a simple rescue mission for a crew of teen aliens to recover one of their own soon becomes an interstellar encounter no one will forget.
Captain Iona is organizing an impromptu retrieval for her brother, an undercover alien posing as a movie star. But her efforts go awry when a technical malfunction turns her heroic rescue into an unintentional invasion. With tales of disguised extraterrestrials stuck in theme parks, starship engineers hitchhiking to get home, and myth-inspired intergalactic sibling reunions, each story in this multi-author anthology explores the universal desire to be loved and understood, no matter where you come from. After all…aliens are just like us.
Edited by beloved YA author Rosiee Thor and YA talk show host Vania Stoyanova, the anthology crosses genre bounds to bring in tropes from romance and contemporary adventure with stories from Alex Brown, Beth Revis, Emily Lloyd-Jones, Eric Smith, Julian Winters, Laura Pohl, Maya Gittelman, M. K. England, Rebecca Kim Wells, and S. J. Whitby.
What’s Maya’s favorite bit?
I loved every bit of creating this story so much and I’m so proud of how it came out, so grateful I got to put this hope into the world. Which made it very hard to select a “favorite bit,” and ultimately I chose a section that comes from a secret, which you’ll learn in a moment. There are so many details I considered for My Favorite Bit—from the trans meditations on the alien and the alien meditations on transness to the Mean Girls references and the line “You carry yourself like a guy, […] and you don’t carry yourself like you’re lying.” My infatuation with the near-alien resilience of the coast redwoods, the way entire ecosystems form among their branches, pocket-universe-like, which I didn’t get to write nearly enough about. Or the section: “There are always new worlds to discover. Places to start somewhere new, where you can announce yourself as the person you want to be, and the right people will love that version of you into existence.”
So much of this story is about experiencing gender euphoria through how another person makes you feel, which is to say an affirmation of the best version of yourself you hope to be, you long to be—not a perfect person, there’s no such thing on this planet or any other. But a version of yourself that’s content and joyful in its messy entirety, because someone you care about, with a relationship to gender you think is cool, sees you, and gets you, and likes you. There’s a confidence that comes with that vulnerability. A power. And I want marginalized readers to know not only do they deserve that power, but that it’s a beautiful thing to want, and it’s achievable.
So in the end, I want to take this opportunity to share an excerpt that didn’t make it into the final draft: the original “Impact Crater“ ending, an excerpt from Alex’s application to the ranger program he’ll get into. We cut it because as much as we loved it, I desperately needed to cut some word count and much of the content is effectively conveyed elsewhere in the story. That, I think, is what makes it a perfect fit for My Favorite Bit—because it incorporates so much of what I’m writing about, and it gives you a sense of what to expect from the story as a whole.
The secret is, I wrote this first, and the story followed.
My very first notes about this story idea became a version of this very “deleted scene.” Most of these words were scrawled in purple pen in a ”My Neighbor Totoro” notebook in the Hayden Planetarium, where I’d taken myself on a walk for inspiration.
I wrote this excerpt to tell Alex’s story to myself. And then I had to conceive of a character, a backstory, and an alien encounter that justified this being Alex’s takeaway. Eames, the alien medic, was a perfect fit, the puzzle pieces of the story clicking together into something of hope after loss, resilience and healing and two snarky queer boys with queer relationships to boyhood, finding thrill and strangeness and possibility within each other.
So here it is: the germination of my story, the deleted ending, the beginning of Alex’s next chapter. The heart of what I’m trying to put into the world with my contribution to this beautiful book that I’m so proud to be a part of.
Hope you enjoy!
DELETED ENDING FROM EARLY DRAFT
Excerpt from Personal Essay, Conservation Ranger Program, Alexander Richards-Reyes:
Thirteen billion years from the Big Bang to today. All the light we see comes from dead stars. Schrodinger’s constellations. All we have are the stories we tell each other, and ourselves. We make them up.
If you’re trans you know what right feels like. If you’re trans you know the restless hunger to correct, to breathe air that won’t poison you.
If you’re trans you have to believe in the world, even if you don’t see anything right now worth protecting, because you know what you used to look like in the world before you nourished the parts of you you wanted to grow.
You have to believe in the reckless, selfish, selfless hope that this world can expand to fit you as you are, and you have to bring that wherever you go. Otherwise it won’t!
I am angry with love. This world is too beautiful to squander and I refuse to accept its demise as inevitable. Grief never stops expanding but neither does hope, and love. There’s always something new to plant. In the right place, with the right circumstances, it’ll grow.
LINKS:
Bluesky: @mayagittelman.bsky.social
Instagram: @bookshelfbymaya
BIO:
Maya Gittelman (they/she) is an Ignyte nominated nonbinary Fil-Am and Jew-ish writer and critic. She writes on queer trans diaspora belonging, anti–imperialist liberation, joy, grief, and love. Find their media reviews and cultural criticism at Reactor Mag. Find their YA fiction in the anthologies Why on Earth and Night of the Living Queers. Find their adult sff fiction in the anthologies Lofty Mountains and Fiery Deeps. She is a New Yorker, and currently at work on a novel.
