Like the endearing cast of characters in his debut short story collection Crawl, Max Delsohn spent his coming-of-age years in 2010s Seattle. After growing up in Thousand Oaks, California and coming out as a lesbian at his Catholic all-girls high school, Delsohn went to Seattle University, hoping to find a “queer utopia”. However, what he encountered was quite different.

This tension – the dissonance between what we want and what we actually experience – is one of the primary themes of the 32-year-old writer’s impressive debut. Over the course of ten delightful, acutely observed stories, Delsohn’s characters grapple with what it means to exist on the transmasculine spectrum, and with how to find their place in a supposedly liberal city that’s undergoing rapid cultural change. Traversing across Seattle’s factories, queer beaches and bathhouses, the characters we meet in Crawl all appear to be searching for something, if not someone, in a city and time that was ripe with promise, but lacking in delivery. 

Also akin to one of his characters, Delsohn, after his transition, spent time as a stand-up comic, which eventually set him on the path of creative writing. Disillusioned with the tradition of transphobia in the comedy scene, and with the performative and very public nature of the form, Delsohn’s creative pivot came when he realised he wanted to be using his voice on his own terms. 

“When you’re doing stand-up, you're up there; it’s your body, it‘s your voice, it‘s real-time feedback, which has its own joys, but I think my strengths, and what I always really loved about stand-up, was the writing of jokes,” said Delsohn. “I really realised that what I wanted to do was be in the little room by myself, writing, really taking time, and perfectly crafting every sentence. And then when the reader receives the work, I'm not there.”

Despite hanging up his comedy hat, Delsohn’s wry sense of humour is sharp as ever in Crawl. His characters go on bad Tinder dates, “moon” their exes, and navigate the trenches of the friend zone; each tender moment is balanced with one of levity and wit, making for a collection that’s not only touching but also compulsively readable.  

We spoke to the writer about the beauty of short stories, music’s role in fiction and writing about the city that formed him.

This is your debut book. What drew you to releasing a short story collection as opposed to a novel?

Max Delsohn: There’s this phrase that I keep coming back to – I wish I could remember who originally said it – but the quote is ‘equipment for living.’ I think that fiction can be equipment for living; ways to think about the experiences you have and lives in a really nuanced or unfamiliar way. It’s like, ‘Oh, I just feel my brain working in a totally new way; now I’m going to come back to my life and feel there’s a totally new texture to my lived experience’. I really feel that short stories do that. I, of course, have so many novels that I love and that have done that for me too, but I think something so wonderful about a short story is that the sentences themselves have to be so tight and not necessarily beautifully written, but particularly rendered. I really wish that I had been a rock star or something; I wish so badly I could make music. But I feel with short stories, that’s the closest I ever get to being able to write a piece of music, because if you do it right, the sentences become these small perfect things, and you can let the lyricism take you away. 

The time and location this collection is set in feel just as important to the stories as the characters themselves. There are references to Amazon workers and tech bros, the bands Passion Pit and All Time Low, and more broadly, the sense of millennial malaise that that era produced. What about Seattle in the 2010s interested you as a writer?

Max Delsohn: The first and easiest answer is that I lived there during that time. I also had a lot of very foundational experiences being there. I got there when I was 18, and I left when I was 27 or 28. When I got there, I definitely saw it as what I hoped would be a queer utopia. It was interesting because when people would talk to me about Seattle when I was in Thousand Oaks, they thought of the Seattle of the 90s. So this Kurt Cobain, very punk, very DIY, very granola and hippy queer culture over there. And when I got to Seattle in 2011, that’s not what was happening. The way gentrification has happened in Seattle is, I think, especially heartbreaking, with Amazon being the biggest force in that. But also, I think that Seattle’s gentrification is an excellent reflection of something that’s happening in so many cities, and it actually ended up being a good sort of example of this thing that is really relevant nationally.

There’s a line in the book that describes a popular queer beach in Seattle called Denny Blaine: ‘People called it paradise, but baby it wasn’t’. Were you trying to say something about the city as a whole there?

Max Delsohn: Yes, totally. There was a lot of thinking through ‘OK, why did I feel disappointed with my time in Seattle?’ So I was trying to navigate how much of this is being a young person and thinking, ‘I want this city to make all my wildest dreams come true’, which is not necessarily a reasonable thing to expect of a given city, and also just the experience of coming of age and getting older and realising what’s possible and what’s not.

Even more broadly than Seattle, I hope that the book is taking down some of the half-truths and clichés about what it means to be trans. There’s pressure for trans writers to write the ‘it gets better’ story. Like, ‘OK, I transitioned and everything’s good now. I never ever have a problem’. I hope that the book is willing to say some hard or ugly truths about what it actually looks like once you’ve transitioned, or maybe you want to transition but you don’t. It’s really, really hard. We live in a culture that really doesn’t want to hear that from trans people. 

In one story, a college student who’s a music snob pretends to like Less Than Jake because the girl they’re interested in does. So, what about having a crush do you think makes us act this way, and how were you trying to use music as a tool for storytelling?

Max Delsohn: Crushes make people just stew and say anything in terms of their music taste. I think, too, the ways that the characters in several stories are using music to anchor their identities when so much about their gender identity is in flux, was important. That was very much my experience as a young person. I remember my first girlfriend in high school; I was so obsessed with her, and part of it was that her music taste was amazing. She showed me all this music that I had never heard. It got me into EDM for the first time. It just felt like a whole new world was opening up to me. That’s how transition can feel, too, in the most wonderful way. This whole way of being and this whole way of understanding yourself is available to me now that wasn’t there before. 

There’s a pressure for trans writers to write the ‘it gets better’ story. Like, ‘Okay, I transitioned and everything's good now. I never ever have a problem’

While the collection doesn’t necessarily feel like coming of age, there are a few characters in Crawl who are experiencing romantic firsts. What drew you to writing characters that were at different stages of their relationships to dating?

Max Delsohn: Some people have a really strong sense of what their gender is from a really young age, and that wasn’t necessarily the case with me. I really knew that I was interested in girls when I was a young girl myself. But it was through dating that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m noticing patterns in the kinds of girls that I’m interested in; I’m into a very feminine girl, and also I like to feel like there’s a man type of vibe that I clearly am’. That kind of surprised me. I didn’t really know that about myself until I started having relationships with other people. I really needed to understand myself in relation to other people in order to figure out things. The classic, ‘Do I want to be him or do him?’ thing is so much a part of this book, which so many queer people experience. Like, ‘I’m into you, but also I kind of want to look like you’. 

In the story ‘The Machine’, there’s a trans factory worker who meets a higher-up at his company who at first seems amiable, but then, as the story progresses and eventually asks him to talk her niece out of transitioning. Was there a certain archetype you were trying to explore there?

Max Delsohn: I wrote that story a lot later in the collection because I wanted to represent a certain kind of very specific – I’m sure it’s not specific to Seattle – person. A Seattle version of the ‘girl boss’. Someone wealthy, very in the corporate world, but also still trying to play lip service to liberal values. It’s even a hippy kind of aesthetic. But then, the analysis is not necessarily there, the politics are not necessarily there. It’s well-meaning cis people who are like, ‘We love trans for sure’. But is that actually what you believe? Are you actually willing to sacrifice anything to fight for trans people? What are you actually doing to materially improve the lives of the marginalised communities that you say that you care about? You see that a lot in Seattle. 

This book is obviously coming out at a time when trans rights are under attack in America. So, how did the country’s current political backdrop affect your writing process?

Max Delsohn: I started trying to sell the book in 2023, and I wrote the stories between 2020 and 2023. There are things that feel like they were better in 2010, and things that feel bad and have accelerated. I really wanted to write about issues that trans people would face now, five years from now, 20 years from now, and wanted to speak to things that I could imagine trans people dealing with for a long time. I really hope that the book is a book that endures. So many of my favourite books were written a hundred years ago, I’m absolutely a classic literature freak. So, that was really my main priority. 

It’s interesting because some people have responded to the book and said, ‘Oh, I wish we could go back to this. I wish this still existed,’ which is interesting and not necessarily what I intended, but I love that that’s what people are bringing to it. It makes me think about, ‘OK, what did I take for granted?’ But it also makes me nervous because what I was trying to say is that it wasn’t that good. We should want better for ourselves. I don’t want to just accept the bare minimum. With the current administration and kind of right-wing backlash, culturally, if you give them an inch, they're gonna take a mile from us. 

What do you hope audiences will get out of the book?

Max Delsohn: I don’t want the book to be disposable. I think a lot of books come and go. There are so many factors at play there, but I just tried to write about the truth of my experience as a trans person, and the book that I wish was there for me when I was early transitioning. For me, the stakes while writing this book and in publishing this book are really high. I really wanted it to be something that hopefully people can return to and change the way they think about trans experience, whether you’re having that experience as a trans person, you have trans people in your life, you’re just curious about what it is to be a trans guy or somewhere on the trans masculine spectrum. I think there’s a lot to enjoy if you’re cis, too. But this is really for trans readers.