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"Puncture" by Maddox K. Pennington

4/28/2022

Photo by Rah Foard

Maddox K. Pennington (they/them) received their MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. Their first book, A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontes Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work, a bibliomemoir about the Brontë sisters, was released May 2017 by Hachette. Previous writing has appeared on Electric Literature, The Toast, The American Scholar online; they’ve performed at DC Nerd Nite, FemX Improvised Monologues, the DC Drafthouse, the DC Arts Center for the LGBTQ Comedy Festival, and other comedy venues. After teaching college and creative writing in Washington DC, they moved to Los Angeles to join the writing faculty at the University of Southern California. An upcoming play about the arrival of Okie Cherokees in Los Angeles prior to the Dust Bowl will be developed in 2022 with the Moving Arts MADLab First Look festival.

Woody Woodger is a trans femme, pan, anarcho-commie currently living in Washington, DC. Her poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM, Northern New England Review, Drunk Monkeys, RFD, Exposition Review, and peculiar, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. Her first chapbook, postcards from glasshouse drive (Finishing Line Press) was nominated for the 2018 Massachusetts Book Awards. You can find her column Pre-Op Thot on COUNTERCLOCK Magazine where she serves as Blog Editor. If THAT's not enough (and it is) you can find her on Instagram and Twitter @lovlyno1.

Editor's Note

Maddox Pennington, the author of "Puncture," was vital to this semester-long conversation about their place in a space that was founded for women writers. Maddox generously approved the republication and the introduction. At Grace & Gravity, we're wrestling with questions about identity and how we hold that space for others. Are we inclusive? What does it mean to be inclusive? Do our actions match our intentions? What's the best way to have open, respectful, meaningful dialogue about creative work and its authors? I'm looking forward to the process that leads us to those answers. I'm honored to bring you this fresh read of "Puncture," and I'm grateful to the many voices that led us to this page.

- Melissa Scholes Young, Editor

Introduction to "Puncture"
by Woody Woodger

A transgender identity is a state of flux, movement, and liminality within gender; a social category assigned at birth. Our existence asserts that where you belong is not something inheritable but chosen. A choice is dangerous in a factory-made world. There is an absence of visible, safe trans people everywhere. So, starved, I go looking for transness everywhere.

t matters what you call yourself. Because once you decided who you are, you must accept the consequences. The inclusion of “Puncture” in the Grace & Gravity anthology series for D.C. women is complicated for Maddox Pennington (they/them/trans). A publication exclusively for women now includes them. In our interview they asked the question: “Whose voices are in this collection and why?” Pennington might answer, “If you had an entire collection of non-binary perspectives, I wouldn’t be representing anybody, I would just be myself. But if I’m in this collection, now I’m representing somebody. Like somebody who used to be in spaces of womanhood and femininity and wasn’t comfortable there.”

A biographical, non-fiction piece, Pennington was 19 during the events that led to their writing of “Puncture.” The speaker takes a job at “The Make Your Own Teddy Bear Factory” in their mall. They have enthusiasm for it “from the soundtrack to the birthday party Hokey Pokey.” The speaker revels in the delightful innocence of the impressionable patrons; a reprieve from their immature boyfriend and overbearing parents. It’s a ritual of bringing something into being. First, the sticky stuffing machine, then the heart ceremony to imbue the friend with special qualities. While “Puncture” is awareness of the factory’s silliness, it also takes these moments seriously.

Through whimsy and “fluff,” the Teddy Bear Factory creates the façade that it is a frivolous space that produces nominally different products of little value. By extension, the feelings produced by the bears—friendship, love, child-like attachment—are similarly frivolous. Parents throughout the story reinforce this, concerned with price tags and “‘gender appropriate’” clothes. While this space is purportedly designed to allow children space to play and create, it ends up reinforcing dominant narratives about consumption, gender, and individuality as aesthetic.

But “Puncture” begins when a family—mother, father, and daughter—enters the store, asking to have a small bag of ashes placed in their bear. The rest of the narrative focuses on this “Bearial,” and the process becomes an extended critique for the ways our homogenized, capitalist institutions commodify and obfuscate of our rituals. After being handed the small bag of ashes, the speaker says, “I looked down at the small bag of brown and white shards in gray powder…awkward and uneasy, I tried to smile, and answered ‘sure,’ as though it were just potpourri or a pouch full of lavender, or a cup of beach sand, or anything but what I suspected it was.” At this moment, the consumptive decorum of the factory is breached. No longer do the bears represent facsimiles of personhood, this “light brown bear with cream-colored paws” becomes an urn. Through this broken expectation, the speaker finally sees the truth of the bears—that they ALL serve as representations of authentic, human stories, of defiant joy within a society of control.

So far so good, but this is where Pennington notes I start to read myself into the story. I argue “Puncture” is a confrontation between the speaker and their dead self, brought into consciousness when the speaker punctures the bag and spills ash into the bear and on their hands. To me, this literal spillage makes a larger point about elegy. There’s an attempt by the parents and factory to enclose grief; to preserve trauma in a shelfable package. When the speaker spills the ashes, however, this moment further transforms the bear from urn into the boy’s new body. And, I argue, TRANSforms the speaker into a Soul Shepard and the factory from a place of repressive consumption into a site of healing. I think the speaker’s power to transform is a portent of their dead self and the unique experience of having to live after you die.

But Pennington pushed back on my analysis and rightfully so. “I don’t think of my former iterations as a dead self,” Pennington told me. “…Every stage of me,” they said, “was doing the best they could with what was going on at the time.” At 19 they were unaware of their transness. Clarifying, they said, “…for me it’s the opposite of a dead self, it’s realizing that this version of myself has been alive this whole time.”

Pennington entered undergrad as a music major and later picked up a writing minor which led them to write reviews for the local paper. After graduation, they received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. In grad school, they wrote an essay about their experience reading the Brontë sisters and the effect their writing had on their young adult life. A Girl Walks Into A Book, Pennington’s first full-length, is a bibliomemoir exploring the Brontë sisters’ work, other biographies, and triumphs and indiscretions of the siters. The magic of A Girl Walks Into A Book resides in how other artists’ work can transmutes time and space, the words of others bubbling back out of the cosmos in the body of another. Through stories such as Shirley and Tenant, Pennington meditates on their own life, romantic partners, and their relationship to alcohol. Implicit throughout this bibliomemoir is the theme of reincarnation and how stories become the catalyst for rediscovery.

The problem with rediscovery is that it rarely stops. “How do I talk about [A Girl Walks Into A Book] now?” they asked in our interview. “What the fuck was I doing?!” It’s a good question. How is anyone supposed to own their past selves when we don’t even recognize who those people are anymore? Pennington suggests a retcon— “I have this dream of republishing this book someday with like a different forward that’s like what I meant was… So,” they said, “you can call this intro, What I Meant Was…”

(What I meant was…) Inspired, in our interview, I shared my reading of “Puncture” and offered that the speaker exists as a liminal space, a facilitator, a TRANSferstation, negotiating the children's’ wonder and the parents’ capitalist frustrations. When confronted with the “Bearial” the speaker is the only one who negotiates death. I said, “you spill the ashes.”

“There’s a huge mistake in the middle of it!” they said.

“I feel horrible about this story in so many ways,” Pennington said, “because…what if those parents read it, and are like oh my god, or if they realized when they got home.” Yes, I agreed it was a mistake, but the honesty to include the mistake, is also trans—the human foible. They said, “I do love the idea that in that mistake, that little baby isn’t trapped in the plastic bag anymore. I was able to think about the parents hugging the bear, but now you can actually think of the kid being loved.”

After Columbia, Pennington took a teaching position with American University in D.C. and entered the comedy scene developing a confessional, intimate story-telling style. Pennington was attracted to the DC scene’s unique inclusivity; however, Pennington is critical of how even the most well-meaning inclusivity initiatives reflect our prejudices. “Don’t call it ‘Ladies’ Night.’” they say, “…I don’t like the idea of creating a silo where ‘these jokes’ live, and only a certain audience is going to go there.” Siloing artist based on demographics like gender is like the reductive, consumptive aestheticism of the factory in “Puncture.” Reductive, like me forcing my reading of transness onto Pennington’s story. And like how Pennington found themselves in the Brontë Sisters? Is history just a spillage of people reaching out their hands toward each other?

What separates Pennington as a writer, comic, and artist, is how they can untangle the hairy matrices of interconnecting stories and honor and retain that complexity of these stories in their work. I’m where Pennington was. Redefining myself without an audience is miserable. So, when I catch myself in a story—another mistake—I can’t let go.

Pennington is surer. In their bios they declare non-binary and trans, it just encompasses more. Where do non-binary people belong? “There’s a gender non-conforming and non-binary support group that meets at the DC Center,” Pennington answered, “and it was the first place that I went and tried out my name for the first time and, like, introduced myself with pronouns as that shifted, and met other non-binary people in a low-stakes social setting. And it was great!” And, crucially, they added, “and people who don’t identify as non-binary were welcome, but they weren’t encouraged to share.”

Who belongs? Anywhere? “I was assigned to this group,” Pennington says of their former gender, “and I resisted this group, and I also feel like the group of ‘what is a woman?’ should be expanded enough for any kind of gender expression.” This is the eternal negotiation for non-binary people. To be included in this anthology reminds trans people that we must carve out our belonging—confounding auks nested on an imposing cliff. It is a brutal gift to live on the precarious, the uncertain. And not survive. But thrive.