Over the last 21 days, I received offers on two very personal short stories. They were from organizations at the top of my dream list. I accepted them both.
On November 14th, I received an offer from the Managing Editor of Narrative Magazine to purchase my story βHoney Buns & Cream Soda in the Stairwellβ. It is told from the point-of-view of troubled trans teenage castaway Alma Castillo during the summer of 1991 following a day in her life from a hopeful start to a careless assault, and the fallout of her unhealthy and self-destructive coping mechanisms as she tries to find a way to survive in a life of compounding tragedy without wasting her young years.
On December 5th, my story βWaffles & Ice Cream for Breakfastβ was accepted for publication by Foglifter Journal, voted in unanimously by their team, which I was told was βrareβ. It is also told from the point-of-view of Alma Castillo in 1993 following a resplendent weekend entrenched in Philadelphiaβs underground gay ballroom community, returning home to Harlem, trying to find a way that she and her best friend Jordan can endure the shared misery of their lives.
Both of these stories are excerpted and adapted from a planned novel.
The Narrative Magazine offer blew me away! According to many prominent 2024 ranking lists, including Clifford Garstangβs, it is in the top ten literary magazines for fiction in the world. They have over 250,000 subscribers and 400,000 monthly views. To be included among their contributors like beloved poets Chris Abani and Ocean Vuong, Pulitzer Prize winners Jericho Brown and Natalie Diaz, and personal favorites like Jennifer Egan is an indescribable honor. My impostor syndrome is on chaos mode right now.
It is my belief that βHoney Buns β¦β is indicative of my core values as an artist and an example of what I think are my literary leitmotifs. If you want to know me as an artist, read βHoney Buns & Cream Soda in the Stairwellβ when it comes out.
Foglifter was an even more unexpected and savory surprise.
I wrote a version of βWaffles & Ice Cream for Breakfastβ in Winter of 2022 as a writing exercise because I was depressive and uninspired. Earlier that year, I had put the finishing touches on my first manuscript βThe Life of Almaβ, and was querying it to agents and publishers with no success. In August of 2024, I dusted it off, did some extensive rewrites, and submitted it to a few journals with strict word counts that would never accept my newer, more ambitious, lengthy stories like βHoney Buns β¦β. I didnβt expect any traction on that, and was stunned when one of my dream journals responded so positively.
Foglifter is a prominent LGBTQ+ literary magazine with a passionate fanbase in the queer community. It is a platform that amplifies queer and marginalized voices recognized by community leaders across the world β the underworld and overworld. To have my story unanimously selected for inclusion in their print magazine was overwhelming for me. I felt seen by community. I felt recognized. I felt validated in my mission to influence culture through art, to humanize my inner-city queer and trans brothers and sisters raised in homeless shelters and western New York City piers through my own lens as a queer black boy raised in hostile ghettos.
It is more important to me than other, larger journals with exponentially greater reach that have purchased my work because Foglifter reaches and highlights the audience that is most dear to me. I write these stories for them, the thousands of trans people murdered every month across the world for the sin of their existence, and for myself β for the fragile woman in me that was shamed into an echo.
βWaffles & Ice Cream for Breakfastβ is slated to be appear in Foglifter Volume 10 issue #1.
βHoney Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwellβ will appear on Narrative Magazine in early 2025.
Alma, Zayn, Paige, Jordan, Gianna, and Jasmine are fictional characters but the people that they represent have lived very real lives. I honor them, and myself, through these stories.
Support this kind of literary art! Find me on Patreon!
I hail from the same world as the one that my characters inhabit: Bronx homeless shelters, the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, Brooklyn projects, and the Manhattan piers of yesteryear. My project utilizes years of hands-on research inside NYCβs underground queer community and my own life as a queer black boy in hostile ghettos. I feel uniquely positioned to tell these stories because I have lived them and have the drive necessary to bring them to life in a way that I believe can change the landscape of queer black fiction.
– A.T. Steel
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