Quick review: Collected Stories by Catherine Kim
Catherine Kim’s Collected Stories is the first in a series of monthly booklets from the Trans Women Writers Collective, a group aimed at publishing work by trans women and especially trans women of colour.
Kim’s stories are slices of life about trans women; the quiet domesticity of the everyday underlaid with tinges of horror. This horror is occasionally fantastical, but mostly it’s the horror of living as a trans person in a transphobic society.
For the most part, the stories are about family, both found and biological. There’s also a strong sense of heritage throughout – like Kim, the protagonists of these stories are Korean, which impacts their lives as much as their gender and sexuality does.
The writing itself is beautiful and an absolute joy to read; Kim crafts her sentences with care, creating turns of phrase that flow together like poetry. I really look forward to her future writing.
You can find this booklet and more about this series on their Patreon, and I would definitely suggest subscribing if you can. Works like this are so important when it comes to supporting trans women.
