Interview with Holly

Holly’s story is one of quiet strength, profound resilience, and heartfelt courage. Born in 1962 in Connecticut, she has navigated a lifelong journey of self-discovery and transformation with grace and determination. From a very young age, Holly knew her truth, that she was a woman, despite the world around her insisting otherwise. Enduring early years shadowed by misunderstanding, bullying, and the struggle to conceal her authentic self, Holly’s journey is a testament to the power of inner light shining through adversity. A devoted writer and storyteller, Holly chose to share her transition journey on Reddit under the name mikah_rowan, offering honest insights and support to countless others navigating similar paths.

 

Her story is marked not only by her physical transformation through multiple surgeries and hormone therapy, but also by a deep emotional and spiritual awakening that continues every day. Holly embraces her femininity with pride, expressing herself through vibrant fashion and a rekindled love for life. Her dreams extend beyond her own transition, she hopes to inspire others to blossom into their true selves, to pursue their passions boldly, and to find peace in their own skin. As she prepares to step further into the world with newfound confidence, Holly’s story reminds us all that the journey to authenticity is never just about outward change, but about embracing the radiant soul within.

Interview with Susan Jane Bigelow

 

Susan Jane Bigelow writes from a place where speculative fiction, political conviction, and personal experience meet. She has built an unusually varied creative life in Connecticut, working as a librarian and political columnist while establishing herself as a science-fiction and fantasy novelist. Her political writing had begun years earlier with CT Local Politics, which she wrote and operated from 2005 to 2010, before she became a weekly columnist for CT News Junkie, where she wrote about Connecticut politics and issues affecting the state. Her fiction, meanwhile, has developed into something much larger than the single novel she once imagined herself writing. Broken, published in 2011, took six years of drafting, revision, and anxiety to bring into the world. What she expected to be a one-time achievement instead became the beginning of the Extrahumans series, followed by Sky Ranger and The Spark. In May 2013, she was preparing readers for an entirely new universe with The Daughter Star, the first book in a planned trilogy about three sisters. The change was creatively demanding, she explained, because the earlier universe had been growing in her imagination since childhood.

 

There is a particular generosity to the worlds Bigelow creates. Her science fiction does not simply use extraordinary abilities, dystopias, aliens, or fantastical adventures as spectacle; it uses them to explore character, relationships, politics, gender, and the complicated ways people become themselves. A 2013 review of Broken praised the novel for transforming familiar superhero conventions into something emotionally powerful, with a richly constructed dystopian world and deeply human characters. Her transgender experience also found a place within that imaginative landscape. In the 2012 anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, Bigelow contributed “Ramona’s Demons,” a story about Mona, a former demon hunter whose magical abilities have changed following her transition. The anthology, written entirely by transgender, transsexual, and gender-variant authors, went on to receive the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for its category, placing Bigelow within an important emerging generation of trans writers creating their own speculative and literary narratives.