God, how I loved Crawl. In this razor-sharp, hilarious, and empathetic short story collection, Max Delsohn has created a space for transmasculine folks and those who love them to curl up in a world that feels safe and familiar – but at once brand new, given the limited transmaculine canon in contemporary literature. Set in 2010s Seattle, Delsohn’s characters populate bath houses, nudist beaches, college campuses, public parks, and bedrooms. They run into their exes, they ruminate, they cry, they fuck, they seek answers to unanswerable questions.
Like all the best books, as soon as I finished Crawl, I reopened it to the first page and began again. Kirkus, in a starred review (!!) called Crawl “a no-skips collection.” It’s even better. It’s an on repeat collection. It’s a “Your top song of 2025 was…” collection. We’re so lucky to have this glittering gem of a collection, which immortalizes the shape and texture of our stories in a time which is so hostile to them.
I implore you: buy this book. Buy it for yourself, then throw in some copies for your roommate, your neighbor, your mom, your best friend’s cat. You won’t regret it.
In our interview, Max and I talked about the limited transmasculine canon, OCD, the story behind his epic gummy bear cover, and Andrea Long Chu.
Crawl comes out October 21st. You can pre-order it here, or from your favorite local independent bookstore.
Claire Fennell: I am so excited about Crawl, in part because it’s very difficult to find books by trans writers at all, but especially transmasculine writers (though not impossible! To shout out a few faves: Idlewild, Ponyboy, Drag King Dreams). What was writing into this tradition like for you, especially working on this collection in a traditional MFA program? Where and how did you find mentorship?
Max Delsohn: Crawl is comprised of stuff I couldn’t find in traditionally published trans literature. Idlewild and Ponyboy weren’t out when I started writing these stories—Confessions of The Fox by Jordy Rosenberg was as big an influence as anything, if we’re talking contemporary, especially as a trans guy who used to be a lesbian. It’s one of the best articulations of that path to transmasculinity, of coming to it through lesbianism. Obviously, Stone Butch Blues looms large, and the physical book itself even shows up in one of my stories, “The Bubble.” I learned a lot from both Rosenberg and Feinberg about how to write good fiction that has a distinct politics without feeling overdetermined or didactic. That said, when it does come to genre and style, I would say I’m more squarely working in the tradition of writers like Torrey Peters, Imogen Binnie, Casey Plett—literary realism that tells the truth about how trans people live today. But those are all trans women writers, and I spent my first years out as trans sort of desperate for more ways to think about what it meant to live as a man. There’s plenty of internet forums to read, but not the kind of carefully considered writing you find in a professionally edited book. I wanted to see contemporary transmasculine consciousness on the page, beautifully written and rigorously explored.
In the MFA, my mentors were my professors, who are all cis. I am endlessly grateful for the amount of work each of them put into helping me execute my vision for this book. Dana Spiotta, Jon Dee, Mona Awad, Chanelle Benz, George Saunders—like, these people are geniuses, their skills boggle the mind. They are masters of the craft. I had a ton to learn from each of them about writing fiction that I could then apply to my own ideas and obsessions about trans life. I didn’t need to figure out what I wanted to say, I needed to figure out how best to say it.
CF: Talk to me about the gummy bears on the cover, which I am obsessed with, especially because my favorite flavor (pineapple) is represented. Why gummy bears? What feeling do you hope the design evokes in the reader?
MD: I am forever indebted to the cover designer, Jeff Clark, for those gummy bears. I made a mood board for the cover that included a photo of gummy bears being thrown into the air with the blue sky in the background, and he ran with it. I think a lot of people think of weed gummies when they see them, which is appropriate—there is a lot of weed in this book. But I also think candy evokes pleasure, which is something I think about often when I write, especially on the level of the line. I want the sentences to feel musical and inevitable, a pleasure to read. Somehow, I had no idea the yellow gummy bears were pineapple?!
CF: Something I found very captivating about the collection is that – a la the brilliant Torrey Peters’s collection Stag Dance – your characters are not all in the same place on their journey of transition, nor are they all on the same path, at all. What was it like for you to embody all of these different versions of transition stories? Was it emotional to revisit eggier days?
MD: Yeah, I had more fun writing certain stories than others… It was hard as hell to write the stories that include characters who are pre-transition and in college, “All Time Low” and “Don’t Be Boring.” On one hand, the concerns feel somewhat less urgent to me personally—I’m pretty far removed from the events that inspired those stories, so it took a bit of extra work to get myself in the headspace necessary to make the characters come alive. Something convenient about “All Time Low” was that my ideas about the dynamics at play in the central relationship (between the narrator and his straight girlfriend) now feel fully realized—I wrote “Don’t Be Boring” a while after I wrote “All Time Low,” and hoped for a similar experience while writing it, but I was miserable and confused the whole time (lol). I guess that’s appropriate, given the subject matter; trauma scrambles the brain. I’m happy with how that story ended up, ultimately, even though I felt like I was only ever on the edge of understanding how it worked while drafting.
CF: On a lighter note, I saw in your bio that you used to work as a stand-up comedian. This was unsurprising to learn - Crawl is as hilarious as it is heart-wrenching. From a craft perspective, how do you feel like comedy has informed your writing?
MD: Thank you for the very kind words about my sense of humor! I think literary fiction can be even funnier than stand-up, when done well. “Willing” by Lorrie Moore is a short story I read over and over, like once a week for years, in part because it is just so funny. And it’s more than funny. It’s surprising. What’s that line in Fleabag… When she’s speaking so lovingly about her dead friend? “She was a surprising person.” I mean, that’s what I come to fiction for, that surprising sentence, that sudden defamiliarization. There’s this line in “Willing” when the main character makes a sort of snide joke to the guy she’s dating. “She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.” Like how did Lorrie Moore think of that lizard in that hat? How did she do it? Genius.
Part of why I quit stand-up is because of the limitations of the form—you’re on stage alone, you’re saying your jokes into the microphone, you’re dealing with the crowd. Prose has its own limitations; they just work much better with what I want to do artistically. I can take forever to craft this perfect sentence, and then when it finds it way to its audience, I don’t have to be there. There’s an authority to prose, or at least well-written prose, and I was never sufficiently confident doing stand-up. I dreaded crowd work. I also wanted to make art that didn’t have to end in a laugh. I process bad shit through humor, so the stories end up full of jokes, but I don’t set out to write funny stories, if that makes sense. Stand-up as a form can absolutely accommodate trauma and the suffering of the marginalized—I’m talking Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Ali Wong, Aparna Nancherla, and not, like, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, though that’s a tirade for another time—but ultimately, stand-up has to be funny. I didn’t want to have to be funny in my work.
CF: Do you have a favorite story from the collection? Which story was the most challenging to write–be it emotionally, from a craft perspective, or something else?
MD: The most challenging story to write was “Same Old.” My loved ones are so, so glad I am not working on that story anymore. It was cool that Kirkus Reviews called it moving/ambitious, because it does feel like my most ambitious work so far. I was re-writing the last page with my editor Yuka until the last minute. I still don’t know if it completely works, that story, but I decided I was comfortable with that because it reflects the soul of the story itself—there’s just this desperate grasping for sense, for meaning, for some kind of help. The stakes are high for the characters and the stakes felt high for me while writing it. I workshopped that story with George, and we talked a lot about what he calls the “Ur-story,” the way a story functions when stripped down to its most basic parts, almost as if it were a myth, and we decided it was a story about how much we can and should help another person, what kind of power we have to intervene—The story is much indebted to George’s story “The Falls,” but the people who need saving in his story are two girls in a boat and the man doesn’t know them beforehand. What’s going on between Simon and Harold is more complicated, because they know each other a bit, but also, they’re both trans guys, and Harold is in trouble specifically because he is trans.
My favorite story is “Don’t Be Boring” because I think it’s the best story I’ve written. “Crawl” has really grown on me over the years, too. It’s the first short story I wrote for this book. I’m really curious which stories stand out to readers. Please tell me, readers, if you have a favorite!!
CF: I’m also from the Pacific Northwest (Portland!), and your descriptions of Seattle made me feel right at home. In particular, the beach you describe in “Moon Over Denny-Blaine,” was so evocative, as were the descriptions of Cal Anderson Park in “The Bubble.” How did you first come to Seattle, both physically, and as a setting for this collection? Are there any Seattle spots that didn’t make it into the collection that you wish you could have included?
MD: I’m so excited you can fully appreciate the PNW aspects of the book! I came to Seattle for college in 2011 and left in 2020, so the bulk of my twenties happened there. A lot of life in those years! I came out as trans, I met and married my wife, I worked a bunch of jobs, I did stand-up, I got serious about writing. I started writing “Crawl” just after moving away because I missed Seattle so much, and I think felt like I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye because we left early in the pandemic. At the same time, I spent a lot of my last years in Seattle complaining about the city. There was rapid gentrification in Seattle between 2011-2020, and it’s only gotten worse since then. It’s a very white city. It’s very neoliberal. The nightlife and the queer community on the whole left a lot to be desired. My friends and I would go out to the bars and be like, “Why is this so insufferable?” And it’s like, it’s insufferable because whiteness and neoliberalism make cities insufferable. I wanted to bring the disappointing parts of Seattle to the fore while also celebrating the good stuff. Denny-Blaine is a special place where a lot of us can actually feel liberated and hang out together and relax, so of course now there are evil rich people trying to take it away. Anyway. I hope the collection strikes the balance of feeling both like a love letter to Seattle and also, I guess, like a letter to the editor.
I think I get a lot of beloved Seattle spots mentioned in the book one way or another, but I always regret not figuring out a way to insert Wandering Goose, which was a brunch spot a few blocks from an old apartment and is long gone now. Wow, did I not work in Honey Hole, either? I had birthday dinners there for years. Somehow, I got two different Thai restaurants into the book that are great, but not my favorites—I’m sorry, Amazing Thai! I’m sorry, Jamjuree!
CF: One of my favorite stories in this collection is “Maude,” which paints a searingly accurate portrait of gendered rumination. In our narrator Taylor’s voice, you write: “Are you a girl? A boy? Do you feel like a girl right now? [...] In bed and alone, though, I think I can do it. I think I have a shot at freezing the moment, or at least clipping the corner of some essential, gendered feeling.” Is Crawl an effort to ‘clip’ the gendered feeling of transmasculinity?
MD: I’m thrilled to hear you like “Maude.” That story went through hundreds of drafts, and I would keep working on it if I could; I think because yes, I am trying to capture something really elusive with that one, much like the character is trying to figure out some kind of perfect understanding of their gender. This story is also about OCD—I’m in recovery now but trying to figure out if I was trans or not triggered the worst OCD episode I’ve ever had. I couldn’t get out of bed for months; I just spent all day under the covers trying to think my way out. The only thing that worked was starting T, even though I had no idea, still, if it was the “right” decision. I went on and off hormones for a while before settling into life as a trans man. I also went on SSRIs, which really helped. It wasn’t until I was very far away from trying to “figure out” if I was “really” trans that I could put the experience of being stuck in that mindset into words. It’s a hard kind of thought process to depict, that of an OCD episode: it’s so scary when you’re in it, it’s disorganized and circular. Motherhood by Sheila Heti was a major influence on this story. I was also reading a lot of Bernhard at the time. Milkman by Anna Burns, one of my favorite novels. I just love that ruminative, spiraling kind of style those books do so well.
I do hope Crawl clips the corner of transmasculinity. I like to think some stories/characters answer some of the questions posed by the other stories/characters about how to approach transition itself, how to have meaningful relationships as a trans man, etc. So hopefully there’s a coherent vision of transmasculine life there.
CF: I started They Read Book to demonstrate a queer and trans reading practice, and to show that queer and trans literature isn’t ‘marginal’ or ‘niche.’ Tell me about some queer and trans literature that has been meaningful, formative, magical, challenging, to you.
MD: This is such a hard question! There’s so much, and different books/writers shift in and out of focus depending on what I’m working on. Andrea Long Chu’s work has been a major influence, maybe the biggest influence, if I had to choose just one writer (that I didn’t already mention). My life changed forever the day “On Liking Women” was published. Finally I had found a way to think about transition that felt true—that is, the idea that transition is rooted in desire, in wanting rather than being. It broke the thing wide open for me.
I read and reread all her work all the time. She’s completely uncompromising in her thinking and in her values, which is so refreshing, and her sentences are perfect. She’s so funny, too, I mean talk about a pleasure to read!
CF: A question for you, from Grace Byron (read her interview here!): How do you approach writing (or not writing) about sex?
MD: Hi Grace! Everybody go buy Herculine! [CF: seriously, do it! Do it here & now!] There’s a lot of sex in my book. I don’t think about it as different from any other kind of writing. Maybe because it’s a big part of how I’ve forged relationships with people, historically. I hope the sex writing in the book comes off well to readers—I think sex writing doesn’t go well when you can feel author hang-ups getting in the way of honest depiction, or thorough depiction. Garth Greenwell is the model, always. Sheila Heti’s blurb on Cleanness reads, “Most American literature seems neutered by comparison.” That idea has really stuck with me. Like, oh god, don’t ever let anyone call my work neutered!
CF: Inspired by 2000s blogs, I also offer each author the chance to ask a question to the next They Read Book interviewee. What would you like to ask the next author?
MD: Do you think your writing will help anyone live or die? Why or why not?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
MAX DELSOHN’s writing appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, VICE, Joyland, The Rumpus, and Triangle House, among other places. He earned his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. He lives in Los Angeles.