Regional interest in the Midwest and Louisiana, as many of the short stories take place in those two locations. Joe Baumann was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. Joe is also the author of , a short-story collection that won the Iron Horse Award for a First Book of Collected Prose in 2021. In the author’s own words: “I hope [readers] see how the bizarre and strange can be just as compelling and rich from a narrative & storytelling perspective as ‘literary’ realism. But I also hope that readers who aren’t LGBTQ+ discover how tender and challenging it can be to discover and embrace who you are, particularly in our current climate that seems to be trying to twist and force queer people back into a place of marginalized, closeted silence. In many of my stories, too, I simply place queerness within the world as a perfectly normal thing—because that’s what it should be; queer writers have been asked/forced to place queerness as the central element of characters’ lives for so long, when they should really simply be another part of their lives, as is the case for heterosexual, cisgender folks.”