Lydia Conklin has a truly impressive curriculum vitae. They have been published in The Paris Review and Tin House. They’ve been a Fulbright Scholar. They’ve won three Pushcart Prizes. They’ve even drawn comics for The New Yorker. Their debut story collection, Rainbow Rainbow (Catapult, May 31), makes it clear that these successes are well earned. These stories center the experiences of LGBTQ+ people. Sexuality and gender identity are, of course, important aspects of a person’s sense of self and experience of the world, but they are not the only attributes that make a whole person or an engaging character. The people Conklin creates here are multidimensional and diverse. In a starred review, Kirkus praised Conklin for their “open-eyed, tenderhearted, well-crafted stories.”

We spoke with Conklin, 38, via Zoom from Ann Arbor, where they were serving as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Queer fiction has changed a lot in just the past few years. There are more stories about people who happen to be queer rather than stories that are about queer people. It’s as if LGBTQ+ people are simultaneously more visible and less visible.

I think about that a lot. When I was a kid trying to find queer representation in fiction, I read a lot of books in which the queerness was coded. Dorothy Allison was out, but in her fiction, I could tell who the queer kids were because I recognized myself in them, not because they were actually practicing queer people out in the world, having queer relationships, or whatever. Carson McCullers was never out, but her characters are clearly queer.

I started finding more overt representation in literature—and in movies—and there were just a few very specific narratives. It was a coming-out story—and coming out was the point of the story. There might be a suicide at the end. But there were no stories in which coming out and being queer are just one part of people’s lives. People don’t just sit around waiting to have their sexuality and their gender identity validated. We all have a lot of other things going on.

Are there books you wish that you had been able to read when you were a kid, or do you feel like you needed to put the pieces together in these coded texts?

No, I don’t feel like it was enough. Because I had to do a lot of work to get there, and it wasn’t, like, Here are some books about queer kids. I mean, I do consider To Kill a Mockingbird to be one, possibly, but those kids never grow up and have a future, right? How was I supposed to imagine my future? Like, damn, do I just fall off a cliff?

“Sunny Talks” gets at some of the generational issues we just addressed. Sunny is a 15-year-old trans kid who has become a minor YouTube star making videos about “crucial queer Gen Z issues.” And it’s only through Sunny that his aunt finds the language to understand their own gender.

I have two trans niblings [the children of Conklin’s sibling]. They’re in their 20s now, but they were teenagers when they came out. When I started transitioning, I was like, they’re just way ahead of me. I’m part of that older generation looking to them for guidance.

When I was in high school, there was one out person who was bullied all the time. I had a girlfriend, but we kept our relationship a secret. The idea of being out was definitely scary—and I grew up in a liberal town in Massachusetts. And now there are kids on YouTube talking about their transitions. Obviously, not everything is great for queer kids, but I never would have imagined that much progress would be made in such a short amount of time.

It’s been interesting to watch authors respond to the pandemic. In “Pink Knives,” you explore how Covid-19 transformed our experience of proximity to other people’s bodies and connect that with discomfort with one’s own body. At what point in the pandemic did you feel the need to write about it?

It was actually pretty early in the pandemic—the first summer—that I wrote the first draft of that story. It felt fresh, but I also worried about it because I didn’t know how the pandemic was going to filter down culturally, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to have any insights that a million other people hadn’t already had. That’s why I focused on gender dysphoria, surgery, and open relationships. I felt like the emotional struggles around those, in the story, were tied to the pandemic but not just about the pandemic.

I mean, everyone’s had a different experience of the pandemic, but a lot of the challenges we all experienced were the same. We all had the experience of our lives shrinking. Looking at it through filters that were relevant to me seemed like a good way to write a story that expressed some of the ways that made my experience different from everyone else’s.

What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m working on a novel—one I’ve been working on for a while. I’ve written a couple of drafts, and now I’m reverse-outlining it. I can’t start with an outline because it makes writing feel like I’m just filling in the blanks. It deals with a lot of the same issues as the story collection—gender stuff, nonbinary identity—but I also focus on making art and toxic ambition and some of the issues that I touch on a little bit in the stories. I’m picking up some of those threads in the novel.

Jessica Jernigan is a writer and editor in Michigan.