09/08/2026
Q***r composition, Violet Livingston writes, has grown “like a mycelial network, branching in all directions.”
For Livingston, figuring out where that network might go starts with knowing where we are. At Landmark College, she teaches neurodivergent students in a small first-year writing class where the same five-paragraph essay can feel limiting to one student and reassuring to another. “We are gentle here.”
That classroom is also where she reads Octavia Butler. Butler looked at the problems people were already neglecting and gave them thirty years to grow. Yet she called the work of looking ahead—of discerning possibilities and offering warnings—an act of hope.
Livingston carries that hope into q***r composition: “How much of our q***r brilliance has been spent arguing for our right to exist?” Critique stays. Her question is what else becomes possible once argument and critique are no longer the field’s primary modes.
Her answer begins with the shape of the field itself. A mycelial network has no single trunk or tidy genealogy. It grows through connections: elders and younger scholars, q***r-of-color critique, citational justice, divergent viewpoints. And when the field branches, its writing can branch too.
Livingston describes her own writing as “a scrapbook of thoughts half-glued onto the page.” When that writing is “purposely misunderstood or deemed illegible,” she says, she has the most empathy for the neurodivergent students she teaches.
Her closing ask is aimed squarely at journals: keep making room for textuality, speculation, lyricism, and poetics. These are, she writes, “resources we will need to keep hanging on.”
What forms should our field make more room for?
Read the full response: https://bit.ly/54-1_14
***rComposition
