Interview with Hope Giselle

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Hope Giselle, an American activist from Miami, writer, artist, activist, founder of The #AllowMe Movement, and author of the biographical book titled “Becoming Hope: Removing the Disguise” (2018). Hello Hope!

Hope: Hi Monika!

Monika: You describe yourself as an artist and activist. Could you say a few words about yourself?

Hope: I’d like to call what I do “being the change I want to see”. I found my passion by simply inserting myself where I once complained. I found that it was easier to create solutions and art rather than criticize them.

Interview with Lannie Rose

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Elaine Rhodes, a.k.a., Lannie Rose, an American computer engineer, and writer, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Clara University. In her day, she was a regular contributor to the e-zine Transgender Forum, a member of the Triangle Speaker Bureau, the author of “How To Change Your Sex: A Lighthearted Look at the Hardest Thing You'll Ever Do” (2004), “LANNIE! My Journey from Man to Woman” (2007), and “Everything Nice: A Late-Onset Coming-of-Age Story” (2009). Hello Lannie!

 Lannie: Hi Monika! Your website is an impressive body of work, as well as being nicely designed, and I say this as one web designer to another. I am happy to become part of it! 

Monika: Before we get started, could you please explain your name? Are you Elaine, or Lannie, or what?

Lannie: Yeah, uh, well, it’s like this: Early in the Internet days, in the late 1990s, there was a lot of fear about people online tracking you down and murdering you in your sleep, so nobody used their real names. Nobody actually got murdered in their sleep, by the way. 

Anyway, I became Lannie Rose at that time, and it stuck. When it came time to legally change my name, I went from Edward Rhodes to Elaine Rhodes, keeping the same initials, you know?

Interview with Lisa Bunker

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Lisa Bunker, an American writer, known for her debut novel “Felix Yz“ (Viking, 2017), about a boy fused with an alien. Her second novel, “Zenobia July”, about a trans girl getting to live as a girl for the first time in a new school, is due to be published in Winter/Spring 2019, also from Viking. Hello Lisa!

Lisa: Hi Monika! I’m glad to be talking to you today.

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself?

Lisa: Well, you covered the basic facts of my current life situation in your intro. I’m finally a full-time author after decades of trying to make that my work. Also, I’m in a wonderful relationship and finally getting to find out what it’s like to love and be loved as the person I actually am. Plus, my children are grown and my parents are gone. So, I guess you could say I’m a person whose dreams have finally come true who then finds herself curiously free to look around for the next thing to do.

Interview with Marissa Alexa McCool

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Marissa Alexa McCool, an American LGBT-rights activist and speaker, multiple podcast host (The Inciting Incident Podcast), author, mother, columnist, and stage performer, the author of “Passing Cars: The Internal Monologue of a Neurodivergent Trans Girl” (2017) and four other books. Hello Marissa!

Marissa: Hello Monika, thank you so much for reaching out to me. It’s a pleasure.

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself? You are a woman of so many talents and interests. Is writing most important for you?

Marissa: I don’t know if I can rank my interests by importance, but perhaps I can by longevity. But let me answer your other questions first: I’m 32. I graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in English, Cinema and Media Arts, and Anthropology. I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota with my husband, partner, and two children. 

Writing is the interest I’ve been pursuing as long as I can remember. I learned to type when I was four years old, and I can remember using a word processor as a young child to create stories involving people I know. As I grew up, I used that imagination in role-playing stories, and I couldn’t imagine pursuing anything else when it came to university focus. I was able to learn from some amazing professors, including Meta Mazaj, Kathy Van Cleve, and Marion Kant, and I don’t know where I’d be without them.

Interview with Rachel Eliason

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Rachel Eliason, a fiction and nonfiction writer, speaker, the author of the biographical book titled “The Agony, The Ecstasy and The Buddha: One Woman's Month in Thailand having a Sex Change” (2017). Hello Rachel!

Rachel: Hello, thanks for having me here.

Monika: Could you say a few words about yourself? When did you decide that writing will be your vocation?

Rachel: I have wanted to be a writer as long as I wanted to transition. For years they were my two secret “W’s” wanting to be a woman and to be a writer.

Growing up in the U.S. Midwest in the 1970s and ’80s, I never heard anyone say the word transgender, and as far as I knew at the time, changing sex was something that only happened in science fiction. So I dismissed those feelings and tried to make the best of my life in the wrong gender.

Interview with Ryka Aoki

Monika: Today it is my pleasure and honor to interview Ryka Aoki, a Japanese American award-winning author, performer, and professor of English at Santa Monica College, known for her book "Seasonal Velocities" (2012), novel "He Mele a Hilo" (2014) and set of poems "Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul" (2015). Hello Ryka!

Ryka: Hello Monika!
Monika: It has been already 2 years since you published your last book. Can we expect any new publication soon?
Ryka: I’ve had some stories and poems published, most recently in Meanwhile, Elsewhere from Topside Press. But my main work is a new novel, currently untitled, which is set in the San Gabriel Valley, in the Greater Los Angeles area. It centers around a traumatized transgender runaway, and a violin teacher bargaining with the Devil to win back her soul. On their journey, they also meet a family of Vietnamese space aliens escaping interstellar war and trying to run a donut shop. I am trying to convey a world of flux, adaptation, sweetness, and loss.