I Stole You by Kristen Ringman

Ringman, whose novel Makara was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Debut Fiction, has this to say about her second book:

I wrote the stories with the intention of writing about love in a way that could go beyond gender. I decided to do that by writing from an “other” perspective and not allowing myself to ever mention the gender of the lover/victim. After all, fae creatures could be a metaphor for any “other” or marginalized human beings.

I did this by using second person POV and describing the “you” human in ways that could be either male or female.

In one of my stories, there is a clearly bisexual character, but the reader doesn’t know their gender, so either gender can be imagined.

I did this with Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body in mind as a successful example of concealing gender, because she told a love story while never mentioning the narrator’s gender.

I also did this to explore the ways how we as humans both love and consume each other, and what human beings might look like from an “other” perspective a slight step away from ourselves.

My stories touch the edges of fantasy and horror genres, though at heart I consider them to be magical realism.