I first want to offer thanks to Leylâ Çolpan for offering invaluable information on the details of growing up in America as part of Turkish diaspora and providing me with ideas about how to think about magic and nationality, magic and religion, and magic and family. Leyla’s own poetry and other writing has always been astounding and I was so lucky to have this input on my own book.
I would like to thank Mal Nair, Tom Phelan, Alaz Ada, Seph Mozes, Phoebe Weissblum, Destiny McEntyre, Constance Zaber, Sherwin Shabdar, Nathaniel Zanardi, Sami Brussels, Eden Staten, Luis Galvan, Stephen Ira, Mairead Case, Emily Lampkins, Vivyan Efthimiou, Chaya Klarnet, Sharon Adams, Kyle Lukoff, Micah Brown, Nicholas Shannon, and my mom for reading my drafts in whole or part at different points throughout the writing process and giving honest and invaluable feedback again and again, and/or for connecting me with spaces or people that allowed my writing to improve. Thank you too to those people who offered input and feedback who are not listed here. I love you even if I do not know more than your internet handles.
I want to articulate how lost I would have been without Cat Fitzpatrick, Jeanne Thornton, and Sanina Clark. I needed the intense and thoughtful work they put into helping me revise my manuscript. In 2016, Cat close-read my manuscript and helped me identify the things about trans communities before my time that I was leaving out and made me think about my characters’ relationships and how to resolve them. Cat, who is doing important work to connect trans authors with audiences and also to teach trans fiction in academic settings, also worked like hell to help me find a publisher who would give me the support I needed. She connected me with Jeanne, a genius and workaholic whose confidence in my book kept me going even when I was sure it would never reach a broader audience. In 2017, Jeanne helped me plot the story more, brought up ways in which I was leaving side characters out, and helped me figure out the goals and motivations of people who I had not thought about. Jeanne brought my book to Seven Stories, where Sanina Clark read it and advocated for its publication. Sanina’s painstaking editing and focus on timelines, character arc resolutions, and tiny details helped me make the manuscript a real book and worked to align the story in a way that made practical sense.
I would be extremely remiss if I left out mention of mentors and role models who encouraged me in my writing from a young age or who created work I liked and were kind to me when I brought it up to them. The following is an incomplete list of people I want to appreciate here, some of whom I knew well and some of whom I met once: Mrs. Sheehan, Jason Gacek, Janet Hubbard, Katherine Deneen, Sandra Rowell, Kirsten Bennett, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Ned Hayes, Filiz Satir, Talcott Broadhead, Eric Fleming, my mom, Jane Yolen, and Sy Montgomery. I want to include a special thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye, one of my favorite authors, who, when emailed by a twelve year old ten years ago, corresponded with me about my vacation to my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma for three weeks.
Finally, I want to thank Sebastian Blake Stott for reading the first thirty pages of a version of this story in 2013 and telling me it was good. Your encouragement stuck with me more than any other and kept me going with this project long after you were no longer part of my life. Rest in peace; may everyone who ever hurt you feel the weight on their conscience forever.