Claire Star Finch

Oh oh this is the first issue of Tongue Ring, a journal of experimental writing in English & French, with original contributions and translations of texts* by Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

Vous voyez, c’est ça mon genre. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. 
Mais c’est mon genre. J’ai cet esprit en moi—qui est très ému
par la féminité. Je pourrais me mettre à pleurer. Je veux poser
mon manteau par terre pour la laisser marcher dessus
—Ariana Reines

Premier numéro de la nouvelle revue fantastique et bilingue (FR + EN) d’écriture expérimentale Tongue Ring, avec des contributions originales ainsi que des traductions* de textes de Ariana Reines*, CAConrad*, Camille Kingué, Kaur Alia Ahmed*, Rafael Moreno, Taos Bertrand, and Théo Robine-Langlois*. 

In Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action. 

Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain—sex and democratic theory—Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. 

Claire Star Finch is a Paris-based experimental writer & performer. Their literary performances and hybrid ficto-theories are regularly presented in art spaces, both as part of their solo work and with the collective RER Q. Their research centers on themes like dildos and vomit, defining these objects as forms of emancipatory literary technologies.

They published in French the experimental fiction Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche (Les Petits Matins, 2024).

Design by Victoire Le Bars

A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure is a toolkit for writing and remembering queer and trans histories. Expanding on Nat Pyper’s series of fonts whose letterforms derive from the life stories and printed traces of countercultural queers of the last several decades, this new book showcases overlooked biographies alongside previously unseen archival materials, as well as Pyper’s unique approach to designing fonts as containers for memory.

The book debuts a new essay by Pyper, and includes contributions from Paul Soulellis, Claire Star Finch, Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Rosen Eveleigh, and G. B. Jones that offer vital perspectives on queer archival practices, language lineages, design as protest, and love as the basis for research. Part reader, part type specimen, part love letter, these fonts foreground the politics of queer memory while opening up new avenues for writers, designers, and curious readers.

Dear writer,
A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing.
I began making these fonts in order to rapidly document and disseminate the work and ideas that they cite. I pack these histories, or part of them, into fonts for a couple of reasons. First, font files are durable. OpenType fonts (.OTFs) have persisted in their ubiquity since the late '90s and maintain their utility as a nimble and reliable format. Second, fonts have the capacity to contain a hefty amount of information within a tiny package. In under 100 kilobytes, an entire alphabet! In the font’s metadata, a manifesto! Fonts then function as a useful format for ferrying information from one place to another.
I am using these fonts as time machines. These machines take me back—to Robert Ford and Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in early 1990s Chicago; to the Lesbian Alliance, a socialist-feminist enclave in 1970s St. Louis, Missouri; to G.B. Jones and queer punk filmmaking in 1980s downtown Toronto—but they also take me forward to unknown futures through the act of writing itself. In use, these fonts engage the past as a provocation. They engage the past as a verb.

Is this romantic? Yes.

Love,
Nat