I have a new book coming out this fall, The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health. Like my other two books, it’s had a long gestation period. I’ve been working on The Care We Dream Of since the summer of 2019. It’s a book that both predates and is fundamentally shaped by the experience of creating it during a global pandemic.

The Care We Dream Of builds on what I’ve learned since my anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care was published in 2016. This new book feels louder, bolder and angrier than The Remedy in the demands it makes of the health system—though if I’m honest, it might be more accurate to say I feel louder, bolder and angrier in my demands. As Hil Malatino writes, rage “is an energy that propels us toward more possible futures;” as an emotion, it is “transformative and world-building.”

In this spirit of transformation and world-building, The Care We Dream Of offers possibilities— grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future—for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. Creating this book has challenged me to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and healing, a challenge I want to extend to readers. I’ve felt called out, called in and called to action by this book in ways that have changed how I approach my work as a writer and LGBTQ+ health advocate, and even how I understand my own identity as a queer person.

The Care We Dream Of asks what it would look like if our health care were rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honoured and valued queer and trans people's lives, bodies, and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure, and liberation? The Care We Dream Of is an invitation to demand more for ourselves and our communities and to dream differently about what’s possible.

Someone recently asked me how The Care We Dream Of fits in with other books, genre-wise. When seeking to answer this question, I look to books like Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism or adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism as inspiring examples of similar books that defy categories for what a book can be. And what is queerness if not defiance of categories and the very act of categorization?

The Care We Dream Of is not quite an essay collection, not quite an anthology. Instead, it’s a hybrid kind of book that weaves together my essays on topics like queering health and healing, transforming the health system, kinship, aging, and death, alongside stories, poetry and non-fiction pieces by a diverse group of writers. Contributors include Alexander McClelland and Zoë Dodd, Blyth Barnow, Carly Boyce, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas, Joshua Wales, Kai Cheng Thom, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Sand C. Chang.

The book also includes interviews with activists, health care workers and researchers whose work offers insights into what liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health can look like in practice: Anita “Durt” O'Shea (of St. James Infirmary), Dawn Serra, Hannah Kia, Ronica Mukerjee and Sean Saifa Wall. I’m honoured and grateful to work with each one of them and am excited to tell you more about them and their contributions to the book in the months leading up to the book’s launch this fall.

The Care We Dream Of reflects my commitment to collectivity, and my belief that there are as many visions for liberatory and transformative health and healing as there are queer and trans people. It is a book that centres community knowledge, expertise and action because the most important and sophisticated things I know about LGBTQ+ health I learned from, in and with my community and through my queer body, not from a doctor or a textbook.

My knowledge is both shaped and limited by my vantage point as a non-disabled cisgender queer woman who is a white settler on the stolen lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This is another reason why I believe The Care We Dream Of could never be in my voice alone, and why I will contribute at least half of all future royalties from this book to people, groups and organizations working to support health and healing for Indigenous, Black and people of colour. It’s also why I’ll endeavour to be accountable for the ways I will inevitably screw up in this book.

When I think about this project’s origins, I’m mindful I didn’t set out to create The Care We Dream Of as much as it called me to create it, a call I resisted at first. I made excuses: I was too busy with my day job and co-parenting my young child. I’d already covered this terrain in The Remedy. I was afraid of taking on a huge project that would undo all the effort I’d put into healing from the burnout, workaholism and grief I experienced after my mom died and my marriage ended in 2014, just as I was beginning work on The Remedy.

Even early on, I knew this new book would demand more from me as a writer and editor than my previous books. To do it justice, I’d have to reveal more of myself and my story, which felt vulnerable. I resisted this book at first because I was scared of what it would ask of me. In the end, the call of The Care We Dream Of was louder than my fear. This book loudly and insistently announced itself to me in a way that felt like a sacred call and a loving shove from the queer and trans ancestors who guide me in this work. I have learned to listen to them, so I said yes.

Fortunately, when I pitched them this project, so did Arsenal Pulp Press, the queer-led independent publisher I’ve worked with for over ten years. My work is relational and deeply rooted in a commitment to community, and I’m grateful to work with a publisher I respect and trust so completely. The team at Arsenal has my loyalty not just because they’re genuinely wonderful people, but because they do their work with such integrity and care. It’s a privilege to collaborate with them. I’m also grateful to artist Tiaré Lani Kela Jung for creating the book’s gorgeous cover art.

Early in the process of working on this book, I created an intention I return to every time I write or work on it: Let this book, and the process of creating it, be a spell of healing and transformation, rooted in love. I hold fast to this intention because it reminds me that books are so much more than words on a page, and because for me the process of creating a book is as important as the outcome. My hope is that when you hold this book you will feel this commitment woven through it.

In December I shared an early draft of The Care We Dream Of with a handful of trusted early readers. When I asked how reading it felt for them, one of them told me: “Gorgeous, healing, joyful, often devastating but always with an eye to the radical possibilities of transformation. I cried a lot, but always stopped reading feeling invigorated.” Another said, “I read it like it was a book that called to me from an unassuming shelf in a second-hand bookstore on a frequency pitched specifically to queers who need to be found without knowing how to name how lost they feel. I read it the way I imagine, hope, believe so many will, feeling found, heard, seen as well as sad, overwhelmed, afraid, and hopeful.”

I am reminding myself of these readers’ words as I work to finish The Care We Dream Of, which is due to the publisher at the end of April. Those early readers also generously gave me lots of feedback for how to make the book better, so I’m taking their input to heart as I bring this book into a more final form. If you want to follow along with the process and get early previews of the book, you’re welcome to sign up for my newsletter.

I send out a monthly letter on the last Friday of every month so it’s the best way to learn about what’s happening with the book as well as what articles, books, talks and podcasts are informing and inspiring me that month. (Plus, I might even organize a special virtual reading just for newsletter subscribers at some point, so sign up now to stay in the loop!) You can also pre-order your copy of The Care We Dream Of directly from the publisher today.

It always feels vulnerable and vaguely nerve-wracking to share a new book with the world, and also exciting. I want to know: what is the care you dream of, and how can we bring it into being? Dreaming is integral to transformation, and I hope The Care We Dream Of inspires both dreams and action.