Last summer, salt tongue was still a vague little idea rolling around in my head. I wanted to write about a mother and daughter in present-day Ireland who had grown apart, and the daughter’s new understanding of her mother after returning to their small fishing village on the North coast. There was going to be a strange sea creature involved - myth, incompatible love, loneliness. All my usual suspects.

I wrote out this idea in a grant proposal at 10PM the night before I was scheduled to have top surgery. Call me a procrastinator (you’d be unfortunately correct), but it was the last thing I had to do before I was out of commission for the next few weeks, and I was losing my mind. It felt ridiculous, trying to pull a story out of thin air when in less than 24 hours, a part of my body would no longer be a part of my body.

It’s been a year since then and I’m happy to report that the surgery was a success. I’m more myself, more present in the world, more confident. It was possibly the kindest thing I’ve ever done for myself. But it was also the scariest, and it feels dangerous to say that. Trans people labor so much to convince the rest of the world they deserve care, it often feels like there’s no room for the full complexity of what that care can mean. And the truth is, at 10PM the night before this surgery, I was terrified. The idea of it felt very gruesome to me, and I struggled associating the relief I would feel with the violence of removal. I wasn’t sure I was going to go through with it.

My mom came to stay with me following the surgery. I had predicted that being cooped up in my small apartment together would be a challenge for me; not because my mom and I don’t get along, but because I can be prideful about my independence and sensitive about being misgendered. I thought that after the surgery, I’d be too vulnerable to withstand even the well-meaning slip-ups my parents often made. But my mom was incredibly patient - suffering through nights on a blow-up air mattress while I slept off pain meds in my bed, cooking and cleaning and managing my constantly shifting moods. Instead of getting claustrophobic, I became overwhelmed with love and gratitude for her, for the seeming inevitability of her care, and for the way that this, being here, was a deeper form of acceptance than any language she might use for me.

I had written in my grant proposal that I would travel to Ballina during my research trip to Ireland. It’s the town where my dad’s side of the family is from, and I visited my relatives there when I was in undergrad. I wanted to set the play there, tie it back to my ancestry, interview my family to get a better sense of what daily life was like. But when I got to Ireland, I couldn’t bring myself to ride up to Ballina. I was too afraid of how my family would react to my transition, knowing that they were rural, Catholic folks, and that the country itself had a torrid history with queerness. I left Ireland without ever letting my family know I was there.

When I finally sat down to write salt tongue, I didn’t set it in Ballina. It became dark, desperate, mythic. I decided the play was veering towards horror and leaned into it. Present day became the 1600s, the mother-daughter relationship grew more complicated with the introduction of Rossa, a disruptive stranger on the island. And the sea, which captivated and lured me while I was in Galway, became the center of the play.

I often say I write to discover what I’m thinking about. In salt tongue, I see clearly what was on my mind; the pain of transition, the love that is action and not words, the magic of motherhood, the way queerness is everything all at once - how it contradicts and ignites and opens, constant in its change.

Kayla Adams, the extraordinary director of this production, once pointed out that salt tongue is not about queerness, it simply is queer. This distinction feels important. There’s a possibility people will leave the theatre without ever considering the transness of the play, and that’s alright. I hope, instead, they will leave having felt something inexplicable. I hope they will wonder.

Many thanks to Kayla Adams, Rebecca Weaver, and the entire creative team, to John Baker and Sydné Mahone for their generous feedback, to Derick Edgren Otero, who saw the transness in this play when it felt hidden, to the Iowa Playwrights Workshop for their thoughts and support, to my grandmother, Eileen Brandli, who instilled in me a love for our Irish heritage, and to my mother, Susan Campbell, who helped me through the scariest thing I ever did and loved me on the other side of it.