Before 2012, I never wanted to publish a book. Nor did I believe I had the capacity to. I was the first in my immediate family to leave the automotive industry, extremely quiet, unhealed from many life circumstances, and, from a young age, I was placed in the “resource room” for the slowest readers at school. Even as a college student, I avoided writing classes with fear of rejection. My writing practice began as a private one. I started writing letters to my body parts because I was hospitalized for 10 days as a study-abroad student in Budapest, Hungary, with nobody to communicate with but myself. My body didn’t feel whole, so I wrote to myself one piece at a time.

Back home, I did not feel better in a place where many others also felt a disconnect from their own bodies. As an experiment, I invited everybody I knew to also write letters to their body parts to allow our pieces to co-exist and maybe even heal through our seemingly individualistic issues together. People shared pieces to their butts, bellies, thighs, cancer, and more. I ultimately self-published this collection as Attention: People With Body Parts through CreateSpace, one of the many online avenues for self-publishing. I made an account simply because it seemed like the easiest way to print copies for the many people who contributed to its pages.

For Portable Homes, my second anthology, I took it a step further. I came out as a domestic violence survivor as I focused on collecting survivors’ letters to their body parts. I raised over $4,000 on Kickstarter to fund another round of publishing on CreateSpace and organize a tour. However, I was terrified upon the release of this book. I was afraid of the consequences of coming out as a survivor and what that would mean for my personal safety. Because this book was self-published, I had control over where the book would be sold, how it would be marketed.

During this self-publishing period, friends and strangers occasionally offered, “Isn’t that heavy?” when learning of the content. I had to stick to the belief that my story, among other survivors’ stories, well before the #MeToo movement, was not heavy—it was a release. I accepted every letter from every survivor who submitted, and I would never force happy endings on their stories for any reader’s comfort. After each contributor turned in their piece, I did not touch the spelling, the phrasing of the odes they wrote to their own bodies, because nobody should have to be “beautiful” or “academically educated” in order to share their sacred truths.

However, as a self-publisher I was responsible for the outreach, editing, cover art, and the many, many contributors—the process did get heavy. I found that every email sent, every tour I organized felt like I was shouting in defense of an entire community as well as my own story, my own body.

When I decided to make my third anthology, this time focused on trans survivors writing to their body parts, I decided to try “traditional publishing” to focus on the craft and emotional labor of holding many stories that mirror my own. In every conversation I had with people in “The Industry,” I received the feedback that anthologies and these “heavy narratives” are not profitable. It wasn’t worth their time, and it shouldn’t be worth mine. I decided to move forward with self-publishing for a third time. I began collecting submissions, reached out to countless online magazines and bulletins to get the word out with the guidance of mentor, author, and writing professor Susan Shapiro. Thankfully, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, a small publishing company, found my call for submissions on the Lambda Literary website. The publisher reached out to me and asked if they could publish the collection when ready.

It’s because I had already self-published two anthologies that they trusted me to make controversial decisions that ultimately went into the making of Written on the Body: Letters From Trans and Non-binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. I protected the pieces from getting edited without consent—by extension, protecting the writers’ bodies from further violation and preserving the truths often lost by trans people, survivors, and trans survivors. I am thankful I started with self-publishing, because it taught me that anything I write is ultimately my story, no matter how many people touch it. This is especially important to queer and trans people as well as any “minority group”; we have to know that we don’t have to rejigger our realities in order for it to be worth the time and resources for it to get made. We take the risks before anybody else because we already know that existing comes with risk. And in this case, it paid off: In 2019, Written on the Body became a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

My debut middle-grade novel, The Ship We Built, comes out with Penguin Random House on May 26. It is my first piece with a large house. My experience with self-publishing taught me to be uncompromising with the narrator’s truth—namely, his truth as a young trans boy surviving incest. Without my self-publishing beginnings, it’s hard to say who I’d be. Nonetheless, coming out as survivor and trans with smaller audiences first has prepared me for the conversations to come on behalf of my childhood self, my community, and my characters. Most of all, self-publishing has proven to myself that I can do it all, but I don’t have to. As long as I keep telling the messy and oftentimes unspeakable truth, people and “The Industry” will catch on.

Lexie Bean is the editor of three anthologies and the author of The Ship We Built, a debut middle-grade novel coming out in May.