A Lamb for a Backpack

5x5 (I) with Mr. Troy Ford on What We're Serializing & How Life Meets Writing

I came to the writing of Mr. Troy Ford of Substack’s own fabulous Ford Knows via Lamb, a work of LGBTQ+ serial fiction. The first installment “We Regret to Inform You,” dropped Nov 17, 2023, and I was hooked. The writing is fantastic. Though the title character’s absence is key, we “meet” Lamb—complex and compelling and someone I long to protect—right away: “The shock implosion of the air in my lungs strangled my cry to a whisper. ‘Lamb.’” Lamb’s fans now eagerly await installment 11. (So, if you are someone to whom Lamb is new, a wondrous bingeing awaits.)

Troy also shares compelling, evolving personal writing here on Substack. In a bardic thread, he’s doing a deep dive of Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” And he’s starting a library of LGBTQ+ writers. He’ll say more about these projects in part II of this convo, which will drop tomorrow. Troy’s first novel, Watrspout, is seeking a publication home. His fairytale “The Crier” was recently published in StoryTeller XPress Publishing, and I’m as in love with its main character as I am with Lamb.

Our exchange was too good to cut and a bit long for one post. So, Part II will come to your inboxes tomorrow. Here’s Part I. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

First, a peek inside Mr. Troy Ford’s Lamb

MTF. Thanks for inviting me to this 5x5 collaboration, Holly, and for being such a faithful friend and reader—you and so many others here on Substack have given me such a warm welcome. It’s been a gift to find cool people like you, and such a supportive environment.

HS. Ditto! I’m delighted to be having this conversation. Your Lamb is among a growing handful of serialized works I gobble up. They’ve inspired me to start dropping my own serial, despite warnings they’re “too much of a commitment.” For you, why serialize? What gifts does dropping installments one at a time have for you as a writer? And what gifts does it enable you to give the reader?

MTF. It was reading a few different writers’ serials that got me interested in writing one—notably, Garrett Francis (who has now set up camp at Ghost) and his serial, In the Dark They Are Born; Ben Wakeman’s The Memory of My Shadow; and Nathan Slake’s Precipice. In particular, Nathan’s layered approach to writing character-driven episodes surprised me with how invested I became; and then Ben started his new serial, Harmony House, without a safety net, meaning he hadn’t finished the whole story before he started.

I had the beginnings of a novel I abandoned because it got too convoluted, but when Lamb popped out as a character to loosely knit together the scenes I had already been working with, I decided I’d found the perfect vehicle to write individual episodes which build up a whole picture, like a puzzle. And because each is written as a standalone, you don’t necessarily need to read every one, or remember what happened in the last episode, to pick up the thread that runs through them.

HS. Lamb attains this layered depth by a well-employed literary device. Letters, poetry, journal excerpts, and short stories are among the conceits that drive the narrative arc and let us in more and more deeply to the characters. How did you land on this device? Did you always know these elements had to be included?

MTF.

Margaret Atwood

’s The Blind Assassin was the inspiration for the fragmented interjection of letters and short stories and so forth; in her novel, there is a story within a story within the story, as well as newspaper clippings, which build up the world of the characters and give some information which might otherwise be difficult to include. I employed a similar technique in my first (as yet unpublished) novel, Watrspout, with an interview of the main character interspersed throughout, as well as a press release at the end.

Because Lamb is told in first-person by his friend, I wanted Lamb to have his own voice without necessarily shifting the point-of-view, and adding some of his own writing—short stories, poetry, letters, and journals the narrator excavates from Lamb’s long-abandoned papers—was a way to accomplish that.

HS. Your other work is not to be missed. Personal pieces like A NICHE! A Niche! My *Queendom For a Niche! make me realize how good you are at giving voice to the narrator of Lamb, as I’d sort of thought it your own without realizing I'd thought that. Your voice and tone are quite different—jovial, quick-witted, possessing a far greater depth of self-knowledge. In “NICHE,” you land on mirth as, well, your niche. Is this a writing voice, or is it also indicative of Mr. Troy Ford in the wild? Is “to have fun with what humble wit I can muster” a part of your approach to living?

MTF. Several people have commented they think of me as D, the unnamed narrator, and Lamb as a real person, but they are completely fictional even if some of the events and settings of the various stories are drawn from life—like all fiction, I suppose.

Even though I love to laugh, and there’s a lot of mirth in our home, my humor doesn’t always come out in the “wild” because I’m often slow to respond to shifting personalities and situations in real-time—I’m the queen of the two hours too late quip. In writing, I’m able to develop that humor and my thoughts in my own time, which is probably why I’ve kept a journal for almost 40 years even while I had writer’s block and could not finish a story to save my life. So my writer’s voice is both me, and not me—and it’s been huge fun developing new voices with Lamb and his writings, and with the narrator’s and his no-nonsense stewardship of his friend’s angst.

Mr. Troy Ford and a new friend at the London Book Fair, 2024.

Even though I love to laugh, and there’s a lot of mirth in our home, my humor doesn’t always come out in the “wild” because I’m often slow to respond to shifting personalities and situations in real-time—I’m the queen of the two hours too late quip. —Troy Ford

Now my backpack, aka Walking the East Coast

MTF. I have often wished for some aspects of the monastic life, and am drawn to the idea of small living places - I hesitate to call them wombs, exactly - with the bare necessities and little else, to focus on a bigger picture of the world and life. I find similar ideas in your writing.¹ Is life on the road the "place" that you imagined escaping to - a citizen of the world, rather than a more cloistered life, for lack of a better term?

HS. To be a citizen of the world was a desire that grew in me so early I can’t recall its seeds. Walking the East Coast, a serialized memoir I’m dropping a chapter of monthly on Substack, chronicles a trip I took meandering the US East Coast for nearly seven months. In this case, my womb, as you both lyrically and aptly put it, was a maroon-colored 55-liter backpack. As for it holding the bare necessities, you should know there was a little red dress and a pair of slinky heels.

By the time I headed out, my longing to travel was nearly bursting from me. I’d been in a holding pattern. I had the online job, the gear, the dearth of material possessions, all I needed to live on the road but one “crucial” thing—a partner. Born of this womb was a dawning; I could roam solo.

Yes, life on the road is the place I imagined. Yes, it has been, in part, escape from what I saw as a cloistered path. Is it irony, then, that each iteration has not been without a smidge of cloistering? On the East Coast, on South American explorations, on a West Coast journey by bicycle, my life was contained in small bags, myself as primary companion. I’ve learned, too, that all I seek can be found staying still, that a place and its people witnessed regularly is its own kind of nurturing ground. As for what will be born of this latest womb, called Ruby the van, we shall see.

MTF. In your writing I’m very much reminded of the play and exuberance I also find in Walt Whitman’s poetry, his embracing of the world and especially of people in all their forms and wherever they are. But it seems like it might not always have been so - that you longed for deeper breaths than you were able to take.² What was key to capturing - or perhaps opening up to - that sense of vibrance for you?

HS. I had to sit with this beautiful question for some time. To be mentioned alongside Walt Whitman, well, I had to let that soak in.

Have you ever seen Paige Bradley’s “The Story of Expansion”? It’s a six-foot sculpture of a woman in lotus. She’s cracked, from forehead to sternum to folded legs, and light spills from her insides. Bradley, feeling compelled to make contemporary art—the figure out of date—dropped to the floor a piece she’d sculpted with precision for months; thought, What have I done?; and then trusted her vision would come together. She cast the wax pieces in bronze, assembled them to float, and worked with a lighting specialist. The piece is magnificent.

I think that’s how opening ourselves up often works. Those times when I’ve longed to breathe more deeply have asked of me to shatter what I once thought I would become and trust I’d reshape the pieces to let out just the right amount of light. I’m amid one of those times now; my body is feeling the pain of the break.

You mentioned play and exuberance. That you find these, to me, crucial aspects of life in my work is a treasure. Playfulness, lustiness can be tricky to capture in difficult personal times, hard to feel entitled to amid larger-scale suffering. But isn’t it all the more necessary to open to what fills us in those times? Your question, I think, is a reminder, one of the answers I’ve been seeking during this latest period of personal reassembling. So, thank you. I have to say these questions are gifts. Having writer friends who are deep readers is a special way of being seen. Again, thank you.

Holly Starley playing in the snow late 2023.

Expansion, Bronze with Electricity, by Paige Bradley, paigebradley.com. Used with permission.

I think that’s how opening ourselves up often works. Those times when I’ve longed to breathe more deeply have asked of me to shatter what I once thought I would become and trust I’d reshape the pieces to let out just the right amount of light. —Holly Starley

MTF. You’re welcome. In your writing I find a definite wish to understand, and hold with respect, the situation and perspective of other people, and to defend it when you find the cause is just. And this applies to people with whom you disagree; let’s call it a reluctance to “otherize.”³ Where do you think this comes from?

HS. Pouring through logs and correspondences from the 2007 East Coast trip, I’ve found the similarities between the two me’s, now and then, a bit endearing, a bit surprising. It’s not that I haven’t changed; but evolution was expected. Woven through recorded conversations and character sketches is a longing to see the world through the eyes of everyone I met.

I could muse about where that comes from. Perhaps the loneliness of being othered has been fuel. Perhaps I felt guided to otherize in a message I received in my youth that only one way to explain our vast world is “right.” I could work backward and say the illumination of diverse ways is, to me, the solution our worlds needs. But maybe what’s most true is the seeds—like those for roaming—are so deeply embedded I may well have been born with desire to engulf it all.

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And links to our serials

Original photo by Mekuria Getinet on Unsplash.

Original photos by Mike McAuliffe. Cover design by Alli Rickards.

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Check out the rest of the 5x5 series to meet other writers whose works you’ll wanna dive into. Hit me up here if you think we should collab. And pretty please, support this work and

1. “Growing up in northern Utah, I’d been raised by Mormons, who in their love wanted only my salvation—an offering that made me sometimes sorrowful, sometimes angry, for I simply couldn’t want it. I had been trying to escape God for a very long time” (“Empty and Full on a Northbound Greyhound”); "The thinness of my separation from the world living in the van—the heat, the cold, the flora, the fauna, the houselessness, the well-housedness only a sliver away—has been like that for me. A harnessing of something vital. When the wind blows, my entire world rocks ... But its that thinness—how I feel myself melting into the life and rhythms all around me—that sends a thrill through my veins..." (“My Living Room Is the World”).

2. “I’d found myself taking the kind of breaths that make you realize you’ve been living too long on shallow sips” (The Column That Wasn’t. Pride 2004”); “For Margarette, a dear one who passed on too early. And a reminder to dance, even, no especially, when you or someone you love is suffering. I am reminded of Margarette’s laughter, a gleaming fountain that would gush from her and fill the room with magic; of the warmth of the light she would pour into you till you couldn’t help but glow; and of the ephemerality of this one precious life and, even harder to swallow, of those we love” (“Last Dance Pre-Pandemic”).

3. “I was sent home for the day. She, I’d learn later, was suspended. She was black. I was white. … When he turned in a paper in the English class that’s part of the MBA program he’s gone back to school for, the teacher’s response to his address of racism was that it was old news” (“The Fistfight”; “What could I say that would help me not categorize this man on the beach (like I assume he does ‘immigrants’) as “other”?” (“‘Other’: Anemones, Humans, and Others of Us”).