Anastasia Walker on selfies, seasons, and swimming in the ocean 🤳🍃🌊

I was eager to talk with the gracious and witty Anastasia Walker, trans writer and photographer, to learn more about her transition and the inspiration behind her new book, The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is.

SK: Let’s start with the essay that concludes your book because reading it brought everything together for me. You express a longstanding distrust of cameras, yet you thrive in the medium of photography. How does your reappropriation of the medium help shift viewers’ perspectives?

AW: The selfie that essay starts with is a good place to begin. I took it when I was still finding myself and getting comfortable being out. Selfies, as part of the genre of portrait photography, and paintings before that, are informed by cis-normative conventions. A “good” selfie shows you looking and acting in ways that are typical for cis members of your gender. For women, it means meeting standards of beauty set by the movie and fashion industries. Becoming aware of these expectations, I was confronted with questions. Should I try to summon the smile that my friend in the essay chastised me about? Did performing all those expectations feel authentic? In that moment, it didn’t. And I liked that selfie because I was appropriating the genre to express my truth.

Photo of the poetry book The Girl Who Wasn't and Is by Anastasia Walker
The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is by Anastasia Walker
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Anastasia Walker’s poetry is a meditation on community, history, nature 🌿

Photo of the poetry book The Girl Who Wasn't and Is by Anastasia Walker
The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is by Anastasia Walker

We’re excited to tell you about the newest title in our ongoing series of poetry books. The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is is the debut collection by trans poet Anastasia Walker. Anastasia is a phenomenal poet with almost obsessive attention to detail that informs every word, syllable, and punctuation mark to the point that her poems are bolted together with architectural precision. Her photographs of the natural world and other surroundings, by contrast, are loose and free, the perfect pairing.

Often deeply personal, Anastasia’s poems explore not only her identity as a transgender woman but also her relationships with her family, the experiences of friends and allies, as well as her community’s ongoing quest for justice and dignity.

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Time, rain, and autumn twilight

An abstract image of autumn leaves
Photo by Anastasia Walker

The other day I watched a video about how time seems to go by faster the older we get. I definitely feel that. Where does the time go?

As time moves on, I like to mark the milestones along the way.

It’s the second November of the pandemic. That’s kind of a milestone. How many more Novembers before the old ways begin to fade? I already feel that to some extent and mostly feel comfortable with a new way of living, working, and being. Next November, certain things about the before times will seem even more distant. But there is also a sadness.

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