Syr Hayati Beker is joining us today to talk about their novella, What a Fish Looks Like. Here’s the publisher’s description:
What are the stories we need to survive?
In ten days, the last spaceship is leaving for a new planet. Some of us will stay on Earth. How do we decide?
#TeamEarth. Once upon a time, the oceans were full of fish and the forests dark with brambles. Seb read about it in a book of fairy tales, and memory means hope.
#TeamShip. Adaptation means knowing when to walk away. Jay is ready. So their ex, Seb, shows up on the dance floor, T-minus-10. What’s the harm in one last dance?
What if the stories themselves are evolving?
Told in margin notes, posters, letters scrawled on napkins, and six retellings of classic fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like gathers the stories of a queer community co-creating one another through the strange landscapes of climate change, wondering who is going to love us when there are not, in fact, plenty of fish in the sea.
And now this book belongs to you
What’s Syr’s favorite bit?
The best part of writing What A Fish Looks Like was gossip, mess, and a single secret punctuation mark I’ve told no one else about, that changed how I feel about the apocalypse.
I used to think anyone writing about climate change, especially apocalyptic eco-horror, was piloting a spaceship with a very bleak dashboard. The story spaceship would be crashing, the dashboard would be blinking emergency, and the only thing on it would be a big red dial labeled DOOM!!. Eco-horror writers, I thought, must spend all their writing time muah-ha-ha ing that dial: let’s bring a wave! How about some invasive vines? Let’s throw in some toxic algae, and now wildfires! How can I get more sharks into this here tornado?
But when I sat down to write about a queer community clinging to life on Earth in a series of apocalypses, what I found instead was my favorite thing: mess, drama, and gossip. My main character Seb wants all the fish back in the ocean, but they also want their ex back. Seb’s ex Jay thinks we should all be prepared to evolve and change, but they want everyone to evolve the same way. The Ocean wants a last tear so the sea levels can rise, but it’s also hungry, and, yes, thirsty for these human beings that come to the water’s edge for comfort; it finds their alone-ness so weird, and maybe even sexy—and don’t even get me started on what the ghost of the polar bear wants.
I learned there are actually infinite dials and knobs on the doom spaceship dashboard: how people care for one another, how much we can change, what small glimmers of joy do people find, who gets to be there? Who are they (or were they, or will they be), these real, messy people who hold one another up at the end of the world and remember what fish looked like? I know the end of the world is a silly heteronormative anthropocentric concept, but if the end of the world were a place, I realized I wanted it to be a place where I, despite having no skills, no six-pack, and no halo, could also belong, and be with all the people I care about.
And I learned this because I wasn’t ever piloting my little doomship alone: so much love was poured into me during the writing of this book, from the queer coffee shop I wrote in, to the support of my found family and friends, to incisive readings and conversation from my wife Kadet, to the art, care, and dedication of Stelliform Press, and Stelliform’s Captain, Selena Middleton. What that love felt like was: there is room in this world for weird stories.
Selena encouraged me to lean into the mess of this community. Where any reasonable editor or press would have said let’s simplify, Selena gave me guidance and permission to get weirder. Thanks to her, my book contains margin notes, letters, flyers, drawings, a madlib, original illustrations by artist and activist Zeph Fishlyn, and somehow Selena brought to life my dream of having a whole page of bathroom wall graffiti that contains clues about the community, and that readers can add to. I want people to write in the margins of this book. I want them to draw hearts, and put their names, and write themselves in, and scribble on the wall.
Beyond the giant DOOM dial of “will we all die” or “will we be ok,” the biggest question I was left with was: can there be hope in our communities, can we evolve one another?
There is a single punctuation mark, a tiny spider, hidden in the pages of this book that answers this question, at least for me, and that changes the ending of one of the stories, and of the book.
It wouldn’t be there at all except for queer spaces and excellent indie presses like Stelliform and people like Selena and you, here in this space, our glittering story community at the end of the world, giving me hope that even if we are in a rickety doomed spaceship, we get to be here together and look at the stars. Thank you so much for having me!
If you find the secret spider, I’d love to know!
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BIO:
Syr Hayati Beker is a writer and immersive experience creator in search of the queer love language of climate change. Their novella in mutated fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like, is out now from Stelliform Press. You can find Syr’s work in theaters, pirate ships, and queer bars near you, as well as at SyrBeker.com, which is definitely not haunted.