03 Feb / Manywhere by Morgan Thomas [in Shelf Awareness]
Morgan Thomas’s profound debut, Manywhere, is partly dedicated to “anyone who’s gone looking for themself in the archives.” In nine remarkable stories, Thomas adamantly and sublimely commits four centuries of the genderqueer/trans existence to the page. In “The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue,” a contemporary Jamestown reenactor plans to purchase a colonial intersex servant’s letters. Thomas brilliantly shuttles readers between the 17th and 21st centuries, inspired by real-life Thomas/ine Hall’s 1629 court transcripts that evoke the former century and 2018 e-mails that present the latter. In “Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man,” Thomas integrates 1908 newspaper coverage of Frank Woodhull, an immigrant born Mary Johnson who arrives at Ellis Island, with a teen’s examination of trans identity. The name in this story’s title (perhaps coincidentally) also belongs to award-winning trans poet Taylor Johnson. Thomas once again overlaps past and present in “The Expectation of Cooper Hill,” conflating late-1920s Alabama midwifery with a woman’s attempt to understand the disappearance of her great-great-grandmother.
In addition to their talents with historical adaptation, Thomas excels in displays of surprising (re)invention. In “That Drowning Place,” one sibling assumes the identity of another after a fatal accident. In “Transit,” an expelled patient from an eating disorder facility convinces a stranger that they are a vampire. In “Bump,” a trans woman, whose married lover has abruptly entered fatherhood, dons a pregnancy prosthesis after a colleague’s incorrect assumption. In the poignant “Manywhere,” the collection’s most bittersweet story, the protagonist lures a stranger home for their aging father, who longs for his imagined daughter.
Though this is Thomas’s debut collection, eight of these nine stories were previously published in multiple outlets. Theirs is an unpredictable perspective, ready to illuminate and beguile readers.
Discover: Morgan Thomas’s absorbing collection of nine stories promises a surprising, often ingenious, exploration of the genderqueer/trans experience in recent centuries.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, February 1, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022