Reading and Conversation with M. K. Thekkumkattil and Alice Stoehr

M. K. Thekkumkattil, author of "The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals," joins Alice Stoehr, author of "Again, Harder," for a reading, conversation, and signing at Boneshaker Books on August 22nd, 6:30 pm. RSVP to ensure your spot.

Masks required. ADA accessible except for bathroom; ADA accessible bathroom available next door. Space can seat up to twenty people, most seating is metal folding chairs. All gender bathroom on site.

The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals

A unique, conversation-starting essay collection about critical care work, kink practices, and how one might transform the other.

M. K. Thekkumkattil is an ICU nurse looking for ways to show real care for their patients in the age of COVID. When not working in critical care, they struggle with chronic illness, endure controlling partners, and write letters to former patients that wrestle with the violence of professional nursing. At the same time, their slow gender awakening and the new, kink-informed relationships that accompany it begin to shape a way out of the brutalities the hospital system requires.

In essays that blend memoir and manifesto, The Sexuality of Care builds a convincing new argument for how the present-day medical system fails both its patients and its laboring nurses, as well as how the vision of radical consent found in queer kink practices lets us imagine a future where hospitals are abolished, yet care thrives.

Again, Harder

Cult author Alice Stoehr’s debut short fiction collection about the messy, intersecting lives of a community of Midwestern trans women.

Again, Harder gathers the uncompromising short fiction of Alice Stoehr, which investigates the inner lives, evolving relationships, and often violent marginalization of a community of trans women in a large Midwestern town.

In these stories, a commune of trans separatists seduces a suicidal writer. An obsessive TERF and the trans woman she’s fixated on circle one another with building intensity. Polyamorous triads bloom and wilt, hookup app messages fly, friends sit for post-surgical care, and women fall to the toxic allure of Dorothy Lipko, the worst ex-girlfriend you have ever known.

Among this, there is regret, there is poverty, there is depression and sexual anxiety and despair; there is also fleeting, shared joy. Again, Harder is the sardonic heartbeat of a new generation of American trans women.