by Joel Glover.
There’s a lot to know about Gwen Leonhard. For example, this is a woman who really loves a footnote[1]. Another thing about her is that she is laugh-out-loud funny, adding beats of wry humour[2] or pure silliness which bring a depth and vibrancy to her characters.
As an emerging author, Gwen isn’t currently pegged[3] to a single genre or expression mode, and is definitely what a reader might consider a developing voice. Working primarily in the crossover between sapphic erotica and horror Gwen exploits and subverts the genres to introduce some very personal insights and representation. Where erotica is a genre principally driven by mood, and horror one of mood and metaphor, in Gwen’s hands they are afforded the opportunity to create space for queer identity and truths to flourish and thrive.
This is in some ways in stark contrast to the cruelty of the cultures of elder millennial pop culture. Whether it is the magnolia whiteness of Friends or the anti-trans bigotry of Ace Ventura (and the play-it-for-laughs existence of transwomen in Crocodile Dundee) things were hostile in a way that we left unexamined. As Gwen puts it “A lot of comedy I enjoyed as a child aged rather poorly. ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and ‘Scrubs’ are both shows that kinda sting. The ‘Guy Love’ song from Scrubs turned from a nice anti-toxic masculinity song into an ‘I’m not gay’ – song. The literal first joke in HIMYM is how one man proposes to another man – laugh track.”
Of course, mixed in with that toxicity were still some moments of positive identity formation for her. “If I look back at shows like ‘Danny Phantom’, ‘Fillmore’, ‘Weekend Kids’, ‘Kim Possible’, ‘Totally Spice’ and others, the characters I liked the most were *always* the cool women…. If all your fave characters you want to relate to aren’t your gender? Think about that, my egg friend <3.”
All this is made more impressive by the fact that Gwen isn’t writing in her first language. A German native speaker[4] she has come to English as a language of preference for emotional expression[5] through video games[6] and media. Her Germanitude still makes an impact in her work, a verisimilitude to her Central European influenced fantasy environs that would be hard to match for an English writer, deliberately capitalised nouns punching through the text like fairytale castle spires. This also allows for a truthfulness in her queer and sapphic representations, including her marvellous romantic piece “I Dream of Dancing”, which I would characterise as “what if Hermione wasn’t a transphobe though?”
This uniqueness, for me, deserves a wider audience. Gwen isn’t aiming at that though[7]
“I am absolutely not interested in catering to the mainstream audience with my stuff. Because, believe it or not, they got enough. I want to create books and stories that help people find themselves and have characters to look up to or to grow with them.
Hiding them behind plausible deniability isn’t what I have in mind to reach that goal. Quite the contrary. I wish to be proud and loud and succeed beside that!”
Full disclosure: the author of this piece and the subject have published together[8].
[1] The germ of this profile was the interactions she and I had around the delightfully bonkers “Moving Across the Landscape in Search of an Idea” call for submissions from Air and Nothingness Press.
[2] As we contrasted our approaches and upbringings in preparing this profile she offered this: “You can be kind and funny and in a good place, even if you’ve been in a bad place for most of your life.” I hesitate to offer a moral to an author profile, but if you prefer to receive one, perhaps this will do?
[3] This joke is all mine.
[4] The phrase “mother tongue” has been removed from the draft as Gwen tells me her mother hates the fact that she has trouble reading the English.
[5] She wrote her wedding vows in the language, which is pretty emotional.
[6] In conversation she mentioned video games I have heard of but never played, due to the lack of dexterity required to find such pursuits enjoyable. Her claim that Final Fantasy X has a killer English dub is presented to the gaming community for interrogation and comment unedited by your humble interlocutor.
[7] I struggle to empathise with this, because I am a deliberately commercially focussed writer on a constant search for the next dopamine hit of external validation.
[8] You remember footnote 1? We combined our efforts to issue “Literary Footnotes” to demonstrate the totally different attempts we made on the challenge. Now we’re fast friends, and I contributed a song to “I Dream of Dancing” before I knew how honoured I should have been to be asked.