DescriptionThis collection of personal essays explores the questions of self-making in the context of artistic process and interpersonal relationships. The first two pieces meditate on the discernment and expression of queer identity in the context of a creative community in Chicago—how these wild, conflagrating experiments made self-discovery possible while also complicating the "coming-out" process endlessly, in ways that were sometimes hilarious or awkward or devastating. The second two pieces interrogate childhood friendships as two separate platonic queer pairings, using a literary critical lens to theorize connect personal stories with literary observations. Together, these first four essays also approach, from different angles, masculinity, boyhood, and manhood as apprehended by a speaker in a fence-sitting, masculine of center subject position. The final essay sketches some of the challenges Christianity poses in the context of a queer relationship using the story of the woman at the well as a touch point for reflections on where religion lives in the body and what romantic love has to do with God.