FINALIST, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC and Yukon Book Prizes)

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) received the 32nd Annual Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. She also releases music under the name lo-fi lioness and helms the podcast t4t, which is about writing while trans.

Hazel Jane Plante's profile page

• Short-listed, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC and Yukon Book Prizes)

What Canadian trans writer Hazel Jane Plante offers in her second book is a way to show a trans life in the making, rather than the sort of coherent narrative we are obliged to construct in retrospect ... Plante, herself an accomplished rock musician, writes lovingly about the process of composition. The ways of making a body - its presentation, its sexuality, transforming its traumas into livability - and of making visual art, writing, or music are all connected. -The Nation

Absorbing and intricate ... a witty and wry novel about self-acceptance and living ethically. -Rain Taxi

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

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

I loved this book. Plante masterfully depicts the plurality that is woven into the lives of transwomen. Any Other City dances you through the walls of fact and fiction, of time and place, to give us a heart-wrenchingly beautiful glimpse of a life lived through many lives. This is the vulnerable, loving, gorgeous, sexy trans dyke novel I didn't know I needed. Like a timeless song, there is always another layer, another meaning, another story, within these words. Any Other City not only shows us thrilling trans-positive sex, it also provides a picture of healing from an abusive ex. All with so much love, it hurts so good to read. -jiaqing wilson-yang, author of Small Beauty

Hazel Jane Plante's Any Other City is absorbing, funny, hot, tender, and punk AF. Her characters are so vividly rendered that it feels like Plante has actually manifested her novel's conceit: a musician who is a DIY punk icon and a trans woman invites a fictionalized version of Plante to collaboratively write a hybridized, experimental memoir. Both Plantes deliver and the writing is wise and raw, joyful and subversive, messy and real. Heartbreak and pain drive some of the plot, but Plante also ensures that pleasure and creativity and creation are given equal space. Gloriously visceral sex scenes abound, provocative art installations are genuinely immersive and thrilling, and there's tangible exhilaration and exhaustion in the fits and stops of songwriting (and finding ways back to ourselves through our art). Any Other City will get inside your head and your heart, and it will change you in the best possible ways. -Andrea Warner, author of Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography and We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the '90s and Changed Canadian Music

Any Other City is everything I love about queer lit: it's full of characters who are whole, flawed, and constantly changing. It's about queer healing and the power of queer community and all the specific weirdnesses and wonders of trans life. -Book Riot

Any Other City is an invitation to consider one's own body as a time machine, something we've carried with us across our entire lives. -Chicago Reader

Any Other City sparkles with heart and sex, art and life. Hazel Jane Plante gives us a world of brightness and sorrow to get lost in. I didn't want to leave it. -Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir and Knocking Myself Up

A big-hearted novel about the need for queer community, the desire to create, and the importance of sexual pleasure. -Buzzfeed