Amid social and political turmoil, Casey Plett continues to do the work

Casey Plett is living a double life. As an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio University, she said she’s an organized, dependable force. Her creative existence, however, is general chaos in comparison, with Plett comparing her writing process to “a mad raccoon tearing things around in the attic.”

“On the first floor where the teaching happens, everything is nice, everything is squared away, everything’s clean,” said Plett, who will join friend and fellow author Jeanne Thornton in conversation at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters on Friday, April 11. “But we don’t talk about what’s going on a couple floors above.”

When Plett accepted her position at OU in early 2023, she had never even visited Ohio. She adapted quickly to life in Athens, however, comparing it with the small Manitoba town in which she grew up, with the added bonus of the Southern Ohio locale’s more immediately liberal politics. Even so, this year has provided a seemingly endless stream of challenges for those working in the state’s universities, which across the board have offered concessions in the face of executive orders issued by Donald Trump – orders that have ruthlessly advanced segregationist and anti LGBTQ+ policies under the guise of rolling back corporate DEI practices. These orders have combined with recent bills passed by Ohio Republicans – Senate Bill 104 went into effect in February and prohibits transgender students at K-12 schools statewide from using the facilities that align with their gender, while Senate Bill 1 is aimed at curbing what right wing politicians describe as a liberal bias in the state’s colleges and universities – to have a destabilizing effect those working in higher education.

“I can tell you there’s been a lot of uncertainty and fear,” said Plett, who has tried to adopt lessons absorbed in the first Trump presidency as a means continuing with her work (the author is currently knee-deep in a new novel) in a time when circumstances could otherwise smother that creative muse. “I remember when Trump first got elected, I was finishing up my novel and it kind of felt like, ‘Well, who the fuck is going to want to read this bullshit? I better finish so I can concentrate on things that really matter in this crazy world.’ … But I think there’s a lot of wisdom I took from that experience, which is that you just cannot predict the world into which your work is going to enter. Especially as writers, where it can take a long time to put something out in the world, you just cannot control it. It is not up to you.”

Plett said she was also reminded recently that there have been many points in history when writers and dissidents were barred from publishing particular works amid political crackdowns. And while she hopes this reality doesn’t come to pass this time around, she allowed that she can’t let any potential censorship impact how she approaches the work. “I’m not going to let that stop me from actually writing the thing,” she said. “I’ll confront those problems when I’m done with the actual book. In the meantime, I’m still going to do my work. That is something that is still available to me.”

Plett has looked even deeper into the past in collaborating with Cat Fitzpatrick to grow LittlePuss Press, a publishing house the two co-founded in 2021. Plett said the two have taken inspiration from early lesbian presses, which worked in tandem with women-run lesbian bookstores to build and sustain the infrastructure needed to get their books into the hands of readers even in times when it was a social and political challenge to do so. Initially created as a means to repress an out-of-print collection, Plett said LittlePuss has since evolved into a needed platform for trans writers whose work might exist more toward those outer fringes.

 “When we started, we were like, ‘Okay, the big five [publishing houses] are starting to publish more trans authors … but who’s publishing strange trans writing?’” Plett said. “We wanted there to be a space for trans writing that was off-kilter, really unique, really creative, and not necessarily commercial. There are established indie houses who are like, ‘Here’s the crazy shit the big five won’t get you.’ And we were like, well, what if you’re a trans writer like that? Maybe we can be a space that can do right by those kinds of books.”

At one point, Jeanne Thornton could have been classified among that group, with her 2017 sci-fi short story “Angels Are Here to Help You” (edited by Plett and included in the collection Meanwhile, Elsewhere) serving in part as a newly prescient cautionary tale on the ills of tech. Now, she’s a Lambda Literary Award winner whose new novel, A/S/L, released April 1 on Soho Press, has received laudatory mainstream press from Kirkus Reviews, Seattle Times, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and LitHub, among others. 

Even Plett, who first met and bonded with Thornton in 2014, can’t help but sound like book jacket copy in describing her friend’s evolution. “She feels like a literary sorceress who is only growing more and more powerful,” Plett said. “If I believe in the Great American Novel, then I would say our Great American Novelist for the 21st century is Jeanne Thornton.”

In recent years, Plett has also been given the opportunity to consider her own growth as a writer, with the 2023 republication of her 2013 short story collection A Safe Girl to Love allowing her to spend unexpected time with her younger self.

“And, man, that was so weird. But I think it made me consider allowing more grace for my younger self, and maybe in that more grace for others,” said Plett, who shared that she went into the initial reread with “snarling, bad feelings,” prepared to let loose her claws on the writer she once was. “I think a lot of times, especially in the writing world, it’s easy to dismiss younger writers as juvenile or unwise. … But I also think that younger writers sometimes hear certain kinds of music in a way that probably doesn’t happen as much once you’ve pumped out a few of those books, or once you’re not that young anymore. So, yeah, I think I came away from that experience wanting to have a larger capacity for grace.”