On Queer Conception and Joy: A Review of Lydi Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
Queer joy. Just like there’s no singular queer experience, there’s not one definition of queer joy—its meaning is personal, individual. For many of the characters in Lydi Conklin’s debut story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, queer joy is (re)claiming one’s identity free of the expectations or approval of others. These remarkable stories range in setting with characters of varying identities and sexualities and tend to meet characters when they’re at a crossroads, often dealing with liminal identities, queer conception, and queer joy. Conklin navigates this terrain masterfully in these ten engaging stories. They weave interesting premises with relatable characters and offer an integral pivot that changes how the character will be perceived going forward. The vulnerability is palpable, but despite the risks, most of the characters make choices that affirm themselves, even at the cost of their relationships with others, which has a radical and joyful effect.
The opening story, “Laramie Time,” is about a lesbian couple living in Wyoming who decide to have a child. The narrator is a cartoonist and her comic dealing with lesbian turtles gets syndicated to her surprise because “Turtles are the least popular type of animal, and lesbians are the least popular type of human.” But a conversation with the close friend who’s been enlisted as the sperm donor changes things for the narrator, who must decide if she’ll go along with what her partner wants, or not—and how empowering it is to reject someone else’s needs to (re)claim one’s own.
The second story is one of three that deal with adolescent protagonists circa the late ‘90s. In all three stories, the protagonists are still trying to understand their identities, but they are all on the precipice of claiming something for themselves, whether a shift in power dynamics with friends, the attention of an older woman, or choosing to play the role of an animal rather than a matriarch in a reenactment of the Oregon Trail. The stories capture the bittersweetness of youth—such yearning and confusion.
“Pink Knives” is about a nonbinary writer before their top surgery and the affair they have in the height of COVID. They and their girlfriend recently opened their relationship: “Her choice, my treat.” Like all these stories, what comes is an emotional honesty and depth that offers so much cutting truth: “And since you’ve used my right pronoun, which my girlfriend can’t always quite get, which I can’t always quite get, which confuses and upsets my friends, to what extent they think about me or it at all, which my family won’t know about until they read this story, whatever final form it takes, I assume what you are doing is right.”
Most of the other stories are quite memorable too, such as “Sunny Talks,” about a middle-aged office worker who is struggling with their gender identity and has a nephew who is a trans YouTube sensation. They spend the weekend with their nephew and take him to a trans convention, struggling with coming out to him or not. There’s a story about a sex-addicted librarian trying to stay strong amid a wild street fair in a Midwestern college town and one about a woman who fears telling her “quasi” girlfriend that she lost the girlfriend’s beloved dog. In another, a trans man is sad about the queer feminist book club he participates in coming to an end because of his crush on someone in the group, so he makes a bold move. And the final story details a visiting scholar in Poland who hasn’t talked to their girlfriend about their desire to transition yet, who is taken on a tour of a concentration camp where someone points out, “There’s never any monument of gays.”
The tonal shift of this story, the last in a collection that explores queer joy and liminality, looks toward queer suffering—something also raised in “Laramie Time,” with the historical backdrop and geographical proximity to Matthew Shepard. These stories encapsulate this collection’s pushing back against the trope of queer trauma while still recognizing it. Like any good fiction writer, Conklin depicts the complexities of the world—there’s acknowledgement of suffering, certainly, but these stories reject the notion of queerness defined solely through a lens of death or pain. Despite wrestling with some heavy topics—concentration camps, animal death, sexual assault—the overall tone isn’t one of devastation or despair. There’s humor, there’s a tapestry of emotional deftness, rich layers of the often complicated and conflicting feelings that accompany the journey to understanding ourselves. Many of the characters in this collection are in liminal or uncertain spaces, but there’s an undercurrent of buoyancy. It’s not only that these stories (re)claim identities, but that they also conceive new paradigms against historical tropes; they make space for what they want on their own terms. They declare their lives and happiness matter.
On a purely technical level, the collection has many virtues. The prose is sharp and emotionally intelligent, the stories have compelling plots, and the characters are multifaceted and find themselves in situations fraught with conflict. In other words, like the best fiction, the stories in Rainbow Rainbow mimic life in all its complexities and calamities. Nothing is without problems, prejudice, and predicaments. And yet these characters don’t let the presence of these things rob them of being true to themselves. It’s in their acts of claiming their identities on their own terms, despite loss or risk, that we see a much-needed celebration of queer joy, unapologetic and bursting just below the surface. Rising.
Lydi Conklin (@lydiconklin) has received a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from Emory, MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and The Paris Review. They’ve drawn comics for The New Yorker, The Believer, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. They are currently the Zell Visiting Professor of Fiction at the University of Michigan.
Rachel León (@rachellayown) serves as Fiction Editor for Arcturus and Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. Rachel’s work has appeared in Fiction Writers Review, Necessary Fiction, The Rupture, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere.