Transanything: Essays

A debut essay collection that upends our notions of loneliness, wilderness, and liberation

Transanything reveals a world in metamorphosis. A hermit crab retires its shell, lovers drift apart, and seasons churn, all amid Ever Jones’s own narrative of midlife gender transition.

Jones takes up a tradition of writing--about the American landscape, solitude, wilderness, and the West--long intertwined with colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and makes it wholly their own. A self-proclaimed ＂nature essay＂ misbehaves, wandering away from the hummingbird outside Jones’s window. In their chronicle of a week in Yellowstone, Jones navigates trails frequented by grizzlies and a campground where their identity is regarded as equally dangerous. Elk, bison, and bark spiders roam this book’s pages, but it is the gray wolf--the embattled apex predator of the American West, narrow survivor of settler colonial violence, and vessel for American myths of independence--who emerges as Jones’s shapeshifting coprotagonist.

Taking on a global web of colonial systems that seek to divide us, Jones disrupts loneliness and forges space for queerness and transness to be aliveness--to be transanything.

EVER JONES is a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma. Their poetry books includenightsong and Wilderness Lessons.