Join us to celebrate the launch of I love you forever is murder by amy etherington, the first text in A Series of Attempts, a new series by Sticky Fingers Publishing. amy will be joined in conversation by Biogal, moderated by Donna Marcus Duke
Doors: 7pm
Performances at 7.30pm
Tickets: £5-£12 (sliding scale)
Join us to celebrate the launch of I love you forever is murder by amy etherington, the first text in A Series of Attempts, a new series by Sticky Fingers Publishing. The event will include a reading from Biogal’s forthcoming publication Prayer for the Slipper Limpet, a reading from I love you forever is murder, and then a discussion between the two writers moderated by Donna Marcus Duke.
Here, in a work of trans pessimism, amy etherington asks what love and grief mean in a world that wants you dead. Speaking to a structural, architectural violence, I love you forever is murder imagines transness as an exit, which then implies a reentry. Understanding love and grief as inextricably entangled, etherington examines how trans people are often met with grief by those who claim they love them.
Part break-up text, part grief-oriented trans theory, part whispering, pricking, ghostly presence-from-beyond-the-grave, etherington calls upon Lacan through Edelman, Freud, Derrida, and the voices of friends, writing with an aching warmth and confessional intimacy that seeks to live, write, go on, after your own passing.
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.
amy etherington is an educator–researcher–writer, exploring grief, death and transness and how they sit by the edges of things. Her writing feels through/with a pessimism that there might only be no place for transexuals in this World, itself an imagining wrought from our violent unmaking. Her teaching work seeks ways to resist the institution a little longer from within its grounds, through collaborative investigation of care and caring practices with students. She is contributing a paper titled Care and Grief and a coming to Weariness to the upcoming Strategies of Critique conference at York University, Toronto. She is also working with her collaborator Tea, to coordinate a workshop and subsequent published output exploring trans care, titled Loving in the Shade.
Biogal is an anarchist T*S performance artist, writer and sculptress. Her work seeks out transness in the wild, quiet, messy and illicit in order to develop alternate modes of self-expression and communal connection. Spirituality and sexuality form the core of her practice, found wet and stumbling somewhere between porn and prayer.
Donna Marcus Duke is a writer and organiser based in London. Their writing on queer/trans culture and politics has been featured in the likes of Frieze, I-D, Vogue Italia, AnOther, Dazed and 3AM, and their essays and poetry has been published by Sticky Fingers, Pilot Press and UCL Press. In 2021, they were appointed both a BBCxICA New Creative and a Frieze New Writer. When they're not writing, they're organising the trans* reading evening TISSUE, in collaboration with Frieze No.9 Cork Street or their queer club night Haute Mess where they enjoy getting naked in front of scores of adoring fans xoxo.
Sticky Fingers Publishing is an intra-dependant press based in London. We are a feminist, queer, disabled-led publisher producing work at the intersection of design, academia, art, visual culture and performance.
ACCESS: The venue is down a ramp and is wheelchair accessible, but the toilet is not fully wheelchair accessible (there's also one step to get to it). The floor is cobblestoned and quite uneven. We don't have any additional rooms to be used as quiet rooms etc (only separate space is outdoors).