By the author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian): the fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician that reveals how the act of creation can heal trauma and even change the past.
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.
Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex - a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.
Hazel Jane Plante is a librarian, cat photographer, and writer. Her debut novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (Metonymy Press, 2019) won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for both a Publishing Triangle Award and a BC and Yukon Book Prize. She releases music under the name lo-fi lioness.
“I wanted to luxuriate and soak in Hazel Jane Plante’s trans demimonde, bubbling over with queer desire, scented with longing. A hall of mirrors refracting space and time, Any Other City interweaves heartbreak, art-making, guitars and drums, all with electric aplomb and vigor.” — Bishakh Som, author of Apsara Engine
“Hazel Jane Plante has given us another inventive wonder to sing about. Any Other City is a fictive memoir, a letter to two ex-lovers, a portrait of a trans punk musician as a young artist, and a healing spell for collective release. From Side A to Side B, it's sweet and sly, hot and wise; it glimmers with humble brilliance. Like the best mixtape a friend-crush could give you, this book will hit all the messy big feelings and impress you to pieces in the process.” — Megan Milks, author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body