Casey Plett's latest book explores the essence of community — and the power of lived experience
CBC Radio | Posted: December 1, 2023 8:46 PM | Last Updated: December 1, 2023
On Community is a book-length essay that draws on her life as a trans woman who grew up in a Mennonite family
In the book-length essay On Community, Casey Plett writes about the implications of community as a word, an idea and a symbol.
Plett uses her firsthand experiences — as a trans woman who grew up in a Mennonite family — to eventually reach a cumulative definition of community and explore how we form bonds with one another.
Plett is the Canadian author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love. She is a winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Plett splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ont.
The Manitoba-born writer joined Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter to talk about communities, stereotypes and examining preconceptions.
I know you grew up in a small town in the Canadian prairies, in the region of southern Manitoba. You knew everyone on the block, in the duplex where you lived. Maybe take us back there. What does that community look like, particularly at that time when you grew up?
This was the 90s. It was a small, largely though not wholly, conservative Mennonite town. And it is true, I grew up there during my childhood, but when I was 11, we moved to the Pacific Northwest and to a larger city that was about 150,000 people and more suburban in character. And so a lot of my life has been thinking about that small town experience, where all my family is from, and this more secular, larger suburban experience of my childhood.
They were different in a lot of ways, but it's also complicated.
A lot of my life has been thinking about that small town experience, where all my family is from, and this more secular, larger suburban experience of my childhood. - Casey Plett
As a trans woman, you're often asked about community specifically. In the book, you make an attempt to define the "transgender community." What does that community mean to you in 2023?
What it means to me is that there are so many communities within our communities. We have this term, the trans community, but let's say, for example, you were talking about American life and you used the phrase "the Idaho community." That phrase doesn't make any sense, right?
To me, it's similar with the trans community; trans people have so many different complexities within all of us. You talk to any trans person who knows a lot of trans people, and the idea of some holistic, cohesive trans community where all of us get together and we're all friends and we all sort of think similar things, that's nonsensical.
I think that's not unique to us. That's just how communities work.
Casey, you've moved a lot — from Manitoba to Ontario, New York — you're now in your late 30s. What does community look like for you, particularly when you have to set down new roots all the time over and over again?
I think a lot about how I have been part of lots of different communities and still am part of different communities. And I think lots of us are, even if it seems like to an outsider, we belong largely to one community or with it, we are within one community.
Even if it seems like to an outsider, we belong largely to one community or with it, we are within one community. - Casey Plett
So the Mennonite community, like many communities, is often stereotyped and misunderstood. You describe in the book that you're often stuck on how non-Mennonites can be fascinated with the community in a way that disquiets you. Why is that?
There's a presumption of innocence, of how you think other people must be living. And then that's an Interesting case because, if you're a straight white Mennonite, which many Mennonites in Canada and the US are, though not all, it's not a marginalized population in the way that, say, trans people are.
So it's an interesting thing for me to examine, stripped of these other loaded, stakes-ridden political situations, to consider how a community can be stereotyped or exoticized or just all these preconceptions are brought to bear on it in ways that are weird, in ways that have made me examine my own preconceptions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.