Zenobia July - A Trans Teen Girl Solves Cyber Crimes

Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker

Zenobia July is starting a new life. She used to live in Arizona with her father; now she's in Maine with her aunts. She used to spend most of her time behind a computer screen, improving her impressive coding and hacking skills; now she's coming out of her shell and discovering a community of friends at Monarch Middle School. People used to tell her she was a boy; now she's able to live openly as the girl she always knew she was.

When someone anonymously posts hateful memes on her school's website, Zenobia knows she's the one with the abilities to solve the mystery, all while wrestling with the challenges of a new school, a new family, and coming to grips with presenting her true gender for the first time.

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An Interview with Lisa Bunker, Author of Queer Teen Novel "Zenobia July," Which Comes Out Tomorrow!

Here's my interview with Lisa, on the eve of her second book being published!


Lee: Congratulations on the new book - tell us about Zenobia July.

Lisa: Zenobia July is a teenage trans girl with genius-level coder/hacker skills and a troubled past who has moved to Portland, Maine to live with her cool Lesbian aunties after the death of her last surviving parent. As our story opens she is about to start a new school year, attending for the first time as the girl she has always known herself to be. She makes friends, but also tangles with the school’s queen bee and a cyber-rival. Then, when someone hacks the school’s website, posting hateful memes, she knows she can help, but struggles to decide whether it is worth the risk of increased attention.

Lee: Why that title?

Lisa: One of the funnest parts of gender transition is getting to choose a new name. Zen wanted to pick something really unusual and interesting. She chose “Zenobia” because it starts with Z and ends with A – an alphabetical depiction of going to back to the beginning and starting over. “July” is the month she changed her name. Also, there’s a character in the book who cares a lot about words or combinations of words with no repeat letters, so I needed a name for Zen that fit that.

Lee: How much of the main character is you?

Lisa: Not all that much, actually. I didn’t transition until my 40’s. Zen came to life in my mind after the death by suicide in 2014 of Leelah Alcorn, a trans girl in Ohio. Leelah left behind an eloquent note on Tumblr, asking the world to make sure her death meant something. So I started thinking, what did Leelah need that she didn’t have to survive her life? And that’s how Zen started to take shape. Where Zen and I overlap is in the often surreal experience of switching genders in the world – all the odd little ways gender pops up all the time. 


Lee: Your debut novel, Felix Yz came out two years ago. What’s different this time around?

Lisa: Felix is gay, but his identity is more incidental to his story than Zen’s, whose struggle to navigate middle school while living as a girl for the first time is one of the main threads of her book. Also, Felix was in first person, with a strong feature for his quirky voice – the book takes the form of his secret blog. Zen is close third person, so the narrative style is markedly different. And in Felix I included lots of LGBTQ characters as a kind of writerly lark. This time, it’s very much on purpose, as I seek to depict the power of queer community and family of choice to save lives. 


Lee: Is there a vision of Zenobia July being the first of a series? (The solves cyber crimes makes me think, perhaps…)


Lisa: Yes! Zen is my entry into the super-sleuth canon. I’ve always wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes-style character. It’s just that my Holmes is a teenage trans girl, and she does her genius detecting in cyberspace, not in the real world. This book is her origin story, in which she meets Arli, the character who will become her Watson. I hope to write many more Zen books.


Lee: Sounds so fun! What do you hope readers get from reading your latest?


Lisa: Reading pleasure, of course! Beyond that, though, I hope to add to the growing body of nuanced fictional portraits of trans people. I want to increase the world’s understanding of the trans experience, and I want to show that non-binary folk are just regular humans, with strengths and weaknesses, but as worthy to love and be loved as anyone else.

Lee: Awesome! Anything else you’d like to share?


Lisa: I’ve been thinking a lot about what I call “post-binary narrative,” by which I mean a couple things. The obvious first layer is story focused on queer characters, foregrounding them and digging into the details of their experiences living outside the imposed binaries of gender and sexuality, which are still so strong. But I’m also interested in avoiding what I see as pitfalls of a too-binary approach to storytelling, with Heroes and Villains. There are some transphobic characters in the story, but I’ve taken care to depict them as human too, with their own reasons for what they do. 


Thanks for taking the time to tell us about Zenobia July, Lisa!

The Many Lives of Felix Yz - a guest post by Debut Author Lisa Bunker

Today’s guest post is by Lisa Bunker, author of Felix Yz, a debut middle grade novel about a 13-year-old boy fused with an alien, which will be released tomorrow June 6, 2017 by Viking Children’s.

Debut Author Lisa Bunker

Story-making for me comes from a place of childlike geeky-joy play—as in, ooh ooh, what if there was a guy who was merged with a fourth-dimensional being? And what if that gave him superpowers? Like, what if he could detach any part of his body and have it appear somewhere else? Yeah, that would be so cool!

I wrote a scene involving detachable-parts superpowers when I was a teenager, so, fair to say, the basic idea for Felix Yz has been around for a looong time. That would be the idea of a person with a completely different being inside. Was I, as an unexpressed trans girl, groping to articulate my gender truth? No, ya think? Somebody can write that English paper someday. But, it was still also a promising idea for a story.

Fast forward thirty years, during which I kept trying and failing to write something anyone wanted to publish, and also during which the whole man-project developed more and more strained seams. Eventually, finally, I solved my gender conundrum, and began the switch from trying to live as a man to actually living as a woman. This freed up my writing, which until then had been encumbered with, in the process, lots of resentful mumbling, and in the product, a string of gratuitously angry mother characters. Yuck. Evidently, if you use your story-craft to futilely bang your head against something, you don’t do your best work.

In November of 2012, gender-transition well begun, I found out about NaNoWriMo. OK, I decided, gonna do this. So, what 50K words of crappy rough draft shall I crank out this month? How about that old alien-within concept? Sure, why not. But what if the story was a countdown to separating from the alien? (40-something me was way more interested in the dynamics of connection and loss than in superpowers.)

And so, in 30 days, the first draft of Felix Yz was born. The two things that fascinated me the most as I wrote that draft were working out the logical ramifications of alien-fusion, and capturing something of the lovely family vibe I had with my two adolescent children at the time. Less centrally, I knew I wanted Felix to have a crush, and his mom to have a love triangle, but I didn’t think as hard about those elements. I relied on stock tropes, and the romances were cis-het. (Let it be noted, however, that Grandy was genderqueer from the start.)

Next stage: an experiment in multimedia serial web-fiction. I acquired the URL felixyz.com and set up a fake blog where, since Felix’s story was structured as a countdown, it could unfold in real time, with the posts appearing at the right times on the right days of the week. My child Cy made illustrations, and some friends and I produced the big payoff chapter as audio drama. Lots of people thought this experiment was a wicked cool idea, but hardly anyone actually read it. Take-away: long-form fiction is tricky on the ‘net.

During the let-down after the kerplop of the web experiment, Cy, who is genderfluid, made an important remark. You know, they said, there still aren’t enough stories about queer characters. Especially stories where their queerness is just one detail about them, rather than the preachy Point.

OMG, lightbulb! (Please recall, at the time I was still getting used to thinking of myself as one of the Rainbow People.) Gleeful rewrite time! Felix gay? Yes, absolutely! His mom bi/pan? Yes, that too! Those were the only two big changes, actually...the other LGBTQ characters were already in there. It was fascinating, retrofitting the genders of two major love-interest characters. Turns out, I didn’t have to change much. A crush is a crush. Just more clandestine, is all.

That rewrite was the version I self-published on Amazon, Smashwords, and assorted other platforms, to, still, zero notice.

Then, lucky break time. I met someone who had an agent. (In the gratuitously over-the-top happy ending department, this person and I are now engaged.) My new sweetie read the latest version, liked it, and offered to mention it to the agent. Of course I said yes. The agent read it and liked it. (It was definitely tighter and stronger for having been through so many iterations already.) The agent did suggest changes, most notably aging Felix down from 15 to 13. I thought I had written a YA novel, but, if the Biz said middle grade, OK, sure, middle grade. And then out it went on submission, and certain someones at Viking liked it enough to preempt, and that lead to a contract and the final round of editorial shaping and polishing which has resulted in the book coming out now.

A tight, clean book. A complex, faceted book. A book that, any more, feels so unlike a thing I made myself that I have this bizarre sensation of having been put in charge of a precious artefact that has always existed – a sort of devotional trust.

Writing Felix Yz was a long, often frustrating, but ultimately magical experience. It ended well because I kept trying, both to figure out my own truth, and to work from that truth. So now I finally get to be who I am, and I get to do what I’ve always known I was put on this planet to do: make stories for people. Yep, gratuitously over-the-top happy ending all around. As long as the world still exists by publication day.


You can find out more about Lisa and "Felix Yz" here.