Not to be rude, but why do so many people talk about your “City of Bears” series? Yes, it was good, but it seemed to be just as good as the rest of your awesome works.

This isn’t rude; don’t worry. In fact, it’s a question I’ve wondered myself from time to time, because, in all honesty, I’ve never thought that the writing in my City of Bears stories was particularly masterful or good–mostly because those stories were all experiments for me in one sense or another. 

The initial run, Big Bears on Campus, was my first attempt at vignettes. The next chunk, Bear Boutique, was–at the time–the longest story I had completed, and while I enjoyed it, it’s a bit…rough in a few places. Part of what has always appealed to me about going back and writing a new take on the series was that I could finally take everything I’d learned over the course of writing the stories the first time, go back, and make everything better–closer to what I’d envisioned them being, but didn’t have the skill to manifest.

But they captured the imagination somehow. There’s something really…powerful for queers, I think, to imagine what a world would be like where we aren’t just dominant, but where the entire fabric of reality has twisted to accommodate our zeitgeist. It goes beyond normalcy–where you could be a bear, walk down the street, no no one would look at you twice–and becomes structural–where if you walk down the street and you *aren’t* a bear, you get stared at. A world where your own desires are reflected everywhere you look. It’s something cis het white men (and cis het white women to a lesser extent) get to experience all the time and take for granted, and it’s hard to resist the pull of wanting to know what that’s like.

At least, that was the appeal to me when I was writing it–it’s a power trip, to take the structures of the straight world and contort them until they only make sense from a queer perspective. But as you write in that context, you find out just how very deep the assumptions and structures of straightness go, and just how much you have to revise in order for the world to make sense. It’s both freeing, but also terrifying, trying to imagine what sort of society could exist in that fashion, and what it would look like, because it would be so alien to anything we could live in as we currently exist.

That’s the best way I can explain it, I think, but I’m sure other readers had different experiences with it. It’s hard to get enough distance away from something when you’re the author, to properly analyze it.