Exile and Pride with Seeley Quest and Eli Clare

Exile is not a choice that anyone wants to make. It’s something we come to through necessity.

Today we meet seeley quest and we’re talking about the book that saved hir life: Exile and Pride by Eli Clare. And Eli joins us for the conversation!

Seeley Quest (sie/hir) is a trans disabled environmentalist, working in literary and body-based composition, curation and facilitation.

Eli Clare (he/they): white, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli lives near Lake Champlain in unceded Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont). He is the author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Their next book, a mixed genre volume titled Unfurl, will be released in July, 2025.

In Exile and Pride, Eli Clare’s revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer unspools the multiple histories from which our sense of self unfolds. Their essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home.

Connect with Seeley and Eli
Seeley's website and newsletter: questletters.net

Eli's website: eliclare.com

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To purchase Exile and Pride visit: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780822360315

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Credits
Host/Founder: J.P. Der Boghossian
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
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Transcript

[theme music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
Hey everyone. We’re talking about home today. And talking about exploring who we are, like, are we exiles from our homes? How do we make a home within the queer community while at the same time trying to answer the question of what does it mean to define ourselves as living with a disability?

And then, coming back to the idea of exile, it’s complicated right? In a time of a global refugee crisis, and climate change, and coordinated legislative attacks against the trans and queer community. Asking the question who am I in all of these intersections?

A lot to get to today. I’m J.P. Der Boghossian. And this is This Queer Book Saved My Life.

[theme music]

[curious music]

seeley quest
Hi, I am seeley quest. I use pronouns sie instead of she or he and hir instead of him, his, or her. I am from the US originally. I've been based in Canada just over seven years now. I am currently located in Kajoptuk, which is also known as Halifax, Nova Scotia.

J.P. Der Boghossian
seeley used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 16 years. And it was there that sie had the opportunity to connect with queer literary and activist communities, as well as working at hir first libraries, and ultimately to a current constellation of literary and theatrical projects.

seeley quest
I’m doing a lot of work in theatre. So a lot of, I would say, dramaturgy has been a passion. I have a couple larger scale and I would say very community engaged theater slash media projects, slowly in development. I also have some longer fiction and other writing projects in the mix. I'm working on curating a disability-centered video shorts screening event that would be multilingual, hopefully to come in Montreal within the next few years. And multimedia, sculptural, and tactile involved kind of installation piece that I'm trying to organize also to feature with other disabled artists.

J.P. Der Boghossian
As you can see, a wide ranging pursuit of interests that seeley has for connecting and organizing in the Canada, while keeping an eye out for international collaborations.

[music transition]

[curious upbeat music]

Eli Clare
I'm Eli Claire. My pronouns are he or they. I am based in unsuited Abenaki territory, also known as Vermont. I'm a writer, poet, social justice educator.

J.P. Der Boghossian
Eli is the author of three books including Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. In their work, Eli blends critical analysis, historical research, poetry, and his own personal experiences living with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. Eli also describes themselves as a rabble-rouser.

Eli Clare
I'm interested in just shaking it up. In rousing people. I'm interested in being one little part of remaking the world.

J.P. Der Boghossian
Eli shared with me that one of the more important experiences that shaped their life as a rabble rouser was walking across the country with 400 people, from Los Angeles to Washington DC, over eight and a half months, for global nuclear disarmament.

Eli Clare
This was in 1986. There were missile silos staffed 24/7 ready to send missiles to the Soviet Union. There was a nuclear weapon tested every three weeks at the Nevada test site. The meltdown at Chernobyl happened while we were walking. The atomic clock was three minutes to midnight.

And during those eight and a half months, I learned about the power of storytelling, the power of art, and the power of doing it with our bodies. We were a spectacle crossing the country and some people came to see the spectacle and then we talked about global nuclear disarmament and doing that has really shaped my entire life as a writer -poet rabble rouser.

J.P. Der Boghossian
Here’s my conversation with seeley and Eli.

[music swells and then fades out]

J.P. Der Boghossian
seeley, what is the queer book that saved your life?

seeley quest
I’ll just bring my copy on camera. Exile and Pride by Eli. Subtitled Disability Queerness and Liberation by the most excellent South End Press. The book came out in 1999 originally. I found it I think in early 2001-ish. And at that, okay. So I was finishing my BA at San Francisco Small College that year and working on creating a solo performance piece. So finishing my degree in performance studies and gender studies. And came to terms during that year, really kind of at the end of and into that winter with, okay, I...actually have a variant gender, I can't really locate myself within just whatever femaleness can contain.

And recognizing at that same time that I needed to understand my identity as disabled as well. So I kind of came out in both these...self -concepts simultaneously.

And then by the end of the summer, I was also working part -time in this bookstore space. So I saw the book, I was like, hmm, disability and queerness and liberation. Let's check that out! At that point in my life, I was really, I had a lot of gusto for very actively notating marginalia. I was writing notes to a, you know, incorporating kind of artful flourishes as well. So I was adding like spirals and stars and squiggles and a lot of, and you know, so like toward the end of the text, just for us who are currently on the video. I don't know if you can see some of the amount of I was, I started journaling basically in my, in my copy of this book, and you know, tagged a couple of the pages in particular, and then included this copy in sort of, again, involving sculpture and multimedia installation that I ended up presenting along with the evening performance.

I would say there are a handful of different books that have come to mind when I found out about this show, podcast series, that have really been influential and to the extent that I would say they saved me in some way. But yeah, I felt like this is one of the foremost that I wanted to highlight.

J.P. Der Boghossian .
And speaking of highlighting, so we're not a video podcast for folks who are listening and wondering where's the video? But when seeley was holding up, hir book, there were paragraphs that were outlined, there were words in the margin, there were individual words that were highlighted or circled. I saw some Post -It notes in there and I am laughing to myself because I did the, there were, multicolored Post-It notes in my copy for the longest time. I had some poking out of the top, out of the side, out of the bottom for areas and they were all like themed if I remember correctly of like, okay, if I see this color of a Post-It note, this is what is happening. So it was absolutely, there's something about your book, Eli, that I think brings that out. And so when folks get their copy, Eli, and they open the cover, what can they expect when they start to read it?

Eli Clare
It’s a hard book to describe because it's a book that ranges from queerness and disability to the freak show to clear cataloging to surviving childhood sexual abuse. And so it's really a hard book. In September, the book will be 25 years old. And I started writing the book 30 years ago. I started writing in 1994 what became this book. I didn't start thinking I was writing a book. I was just writing standalone essays when I started, but that had started 30 years ago. And still 30 years later, I do not know how to easily describe what the book is about, except to say the book is about home. Home as our bodies. Home as Place. Home as Community. Home as a Set of Politics. It's a book about home in very expansive ways and it claims home not as an easy place and not as a comfortable place but as a necessary place.

J.P. Der Boghossian
You know, it's interesting you're saying it's kind of hard to describe. It is not hard to read. Your writing style is so fantastic that you are dealing, that's what one of the things that I remember when I read it the first time that struck me is I'm like, wow, you're writing about these very intense, deep things, but you're the way that you're taking us through it is, I don't want to use the word simple, but you're just guiding us there as a writer and we're able to go along and be with you. And so it's interesting.

You know, it may be hard to describe maybe, but you take us as an author in just a wonderful way through the book that makes it, you know, helps us navigate the difficult-ness of these conversations, but also what I appreciated, the intersectionality and how all of this comes together. But I'm not the guest here, seeley. So seeley, well, first of all, I just wanted to...so your major was in performance and gender studies. So I imagine there was a lot of Judith Butler in there?

seeley quest
Uh. Some? So I double majored. They were actually two departments. This was a very small, fringy school in San Francisco, which unfortunately no longer exists, but it was founded in 1971 by a radical Jesuit priest. I did pick up some Judith Butler. But something I really also appreciate so much about Eli's book here is, yes, how remarkably accessible, I would say, the style of writing is, and I have found that in other, other writing by Eli, poetry, later nonfiction that he's put out as well. So very much appreciated when writers can get into the topics that can be so dense and layered, but welcome readers to think through together at a pace that is made approachable and using the tools of, I would say, the kind of poetic lyrical language as well and your choices to intersperse segments of that work sometimes to, I would say punctuate sections of content that you're working through. I admire that approach so much.

J.P. Der Boghossian
What was the book making you think through differently or for the first time when you were reading it for the first time?

seeley quest
I don't have the exact same life experiences Eli and nobody does. However, I did, I just, there was a lot of resonating with some amount of similarities. Where I was processing at the time, you know, I had just started to acknowledge my experience as trans shortly before I found this book. And, you know, the passages, I don't have one, you know, immediately to hand, but Eli's writing in it about a similar journey of earlier identifying within the lesbian dyke community and gradually dealing with the friction and the degree to which, okay, this isn't actually matching.

And I think the way that Eli also explores being othered at certain physical levels is something that was very powerful for me. And that was one of the pieces just so many facets that feels very true to the way that I've been inclined to process my own life and the world beyond.

J.P. Der Boghossian
Thank you for that. Eli, you said that you were an essayist before publishing the book. And I don't know if it's literally the first of its kind, but I imagine it is in terms of the topics and what you're trying to unpack for us, probably one of the first. Did that influence how you went about writing it? Because I guess you didn't have to write the book. Writing a book takes a lot, right? So what was you know, sort of driving you was it to kind of fill that void, that lack of perspective that was in, that wasn't, in the publishing world?

Eli Clare
So I started my writing with other poets. I started writing poetry when I was 15 years old. And I wrote poetry, I wrote almost exclusively poetry for about 15 years. And, but at some point in the early 90s, it became clear to me that there was material I needed to explore. I've long written from questions rather than from answers. I don't start with an answer I want to communicate with people. I start with questions that I need to explore.

And the questions about home, the questions about what it meant to be living in Michigan, and homesick every single day for the ocean and for old growth forests. At the same time I was a queer person trying to find space in the disability rights movement and not finding much space at all. My little rural raised mixed class queer person trying to find disability space in urban queer communities.

And so I started writing with all these questions. What did it mean to be living 2,000 miles away from this place that was still home? What did it mean to have made home in this poor community that was where disability was seemingly so absent? So I started writing because I had all these questions and I desperately needed queer disabled people that I didn't have many queer disabled folks in my life.

And what I've discovered is mostly disability community happens in little bits and pockets. Like for most of us, if we have three or four disabled people in person-to-person contact, and this is pre-pandemic. Now so many of us, two or three disabled people in person doesn't even happen. It largely happens via the internet and via Zoom. But one of the things I learned in the ten years after I found Pride [and Exile] was published is that disability community operates in really different ways from queer and trans community.

It's also, it's hard to, now it's a little hard to talk about there not being queer and trans disabled community because there is so, such a relative plenty of it. Now I remember five or six years, talking with a disability organizer in the East Bay. And she's like, “yeah, I forget that there are straight disabled people in my organizing circles.” And it's like, that's so different from 25 and 30 years ago. And that's largely because of the work of disability justice and the work of disabled, queer, and trans BIPOC women and friends.

I really want to name that labor as one of the reasons why there's so much more visible and plentiful queer and trans disability community.

J.P. Der Boghossian
You were writing Exile and Pride from questions that you wanted to explore. What did you find coming up in terms of potential answers to those questions that you were discovering as you were writing it?

Eli Clare
In the writing of it, I found the word “exile.” I didn't start with the word “exile.” I found the word “exile.” In writing about losing home, in my fleeing the backwoods of Oregon, partly because of childhood violence, partly because of homophobia, because of lack of ability to find work in the backwoods of Oregon, to put the word exile to advance is really useful. To, discover, I discovered through writing that piece about losing home, I discovered this the idea that I was mixed class. I didn't know that before I wrote about it because my parents were teachers and because we lived in a house with a foundation and because we had health insurance even though we had to balance dental care against new school shoes and sometimes there weren't new school shoes because my parents chose dental care. I thought we were nearly rich because most of the people I lived with didn't have health insurance. And food. We didn't think about food insecurity because that was just food.

Until I wrote myself into this notion of like, oh, my class location isn't nearly rich, my class location straddles the working class and lower middle class reality in the community where baseline was poverty.

You know, one of the questions in Exile and Pride is why do I love the word “queer” and hate the word “freak”? And I learned that, through that, I learned about the relationship between language and history. I learned about there not being a single answer for any single word. Um, I could go on and on and on. Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian
No, I love that. And you bring up the word “exile.” And seeley, I want to ask you about when you saw that word in the title and as you're, you know, Eli's exploring it throughout the text, what did that mean for you?

seeley quest
Yeah, exile. It's just, it's been an ongoing life project for me to figure out I suppose when it's beneficial for me to claim this term and this experience and when it serves me more to push against it. But it's certainly been a theme.

J.P. Der Boghossian
How you do you mean?

seeley quest
How do I mean?

J.P. Der Boghossian
I mean for you, because I could project onto that, but...

seeley quest
So yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. I mean, I think that...you know, the companion word in Eli's title, and pride, like I think that there's a lot of pride that a lot of survivors claim, as we should, in having survived as well as we have and, you know, navigating the impacts of...of often living through exile from different communities in different ways. You know, exile is, it's not a choice that anyone wants to make, right? Like it's never a first choice. It's something that we come to through necessity.

I think it's also for me important to consider when embracing that identity, ends up, it can sometimes mean like grasping onto the barrier and the divider versus recognizing where there are living points of connection and of not just being in exile.

Eli Clare
Can I add to that? For me, exile hasn't been an identity so much as an experience in the process. And it's a word that I chose with a lot of hesitation as I was writing Exile and Pride because exile as a process on a global level is so differential. Like the differentials around race and class and citizenship and poverty and global south versus global north are so intense.

And today, I'm sitting here thinking about the word exile and thinking about the word refugee and thinking about the southern border and the executive order that's just come down that limits the number of asylum seekers who can come into the US. And I just want to, I just want to explode about that. I think about what's happening in Palestine right now. I think of what it means for people to have been born for four generations in refugee camps.

And so today, and none of this is to disown the word “exile” or to say the word “exile” is wrong in the context we're talking about it now. And it's a set of experiences that need to be, that I need to think about the power, privilege, and marginalization that creates such differential experiences around the experiences of exile. And the experiences of exile describe this incredible range of dispossession from dispossession that's generations and generations. Again thinking about Palestine, but certainly Palestine's not the only place. Thinking about peoples who live in diaspora and how diaspora and exile are connected.

Yeah, so just 30 years later, still feeling the need to complicate what exile means and still feeling hesitation about the way, the way that claimed some of those experiences, even as that claiming has had resonance for me and many others. And I'm not judging that resonance, but J.P. you had asked me much earlier in this conversation to describe a little about what I meant by rabble rousing and actually this is a perfect example of that. That much of my rabble rousing is yes and less complicated. Let's make it uncomfortable. Let's not make it easy. Let's not like draw, draw analogies.

Let's not flatten an incredible range of experience in the name of finding connections.

J.P. Der Boghossian
I love that.

Eli Clare
And I hope to be able to say that with particularly to you, seeley, without. I want to be clear that I'm not trying to call either of us in. I'm not trying to call either of us out. I'm not suggesting that either of us are wrong. I’m just doing that thing of complicating.

seeley quest
I think it's perfectly appropriate and it's exemplified also in the book, Exile and Pride and yeah, all of the non-fiction and some poetry that you put out as well. That's something that really appeals to me. Your, efforts to, to self question, to interrogate and to, yeah, I would say also that you're sort of “yes and” approach. So very appreciated.

Eli Clare
So I found Pride is 25 years old this September. And I remember vividly coming home, I was living in Ann Arbor, living in this cheap, shitty basement studio and there was the box of books on my front stoop. And it was this really big deal for me. And at that point I thought that if the book was read by five people who didn't know me, read and liked, and I wasn't laughed off the edge of the earth, the book would be a success.

And what's true is if I had known what was going to be true for this book, that 25 years later it would be used by lots and lots of people in lots and lots of contexts and be really useful both in the community and in academia.

And read and read and read, even today read as a contemporary text and not just a historical text of the mid-90s. Even though it feels so a book of the mid-90s. And you know if I wrote it today there's a dozen things I do differently. But in 1999 when, on that September day, if someone had told me, I would have been like, no way, no how, I cannot do this.

I would have turned around and torn the contract up and it would just have been too much. I mean, it's a story of coming in the back door to something that has become really important to a whole community of people. It's many people when hearing that story say it's a really good thing for all of us that you didn't know. A piece of that story is about the exile we were talking about earlier. Like I had only three or four years before been able to break, make the final break, of my father. My father had been stalking me for a number of years. And that part of it was like not knowing what was going to happen when this book was in the world. It ended up being fine but at that juncture I didn't know.

At that juncture I did not know that writing about survival was going to be actually part of my survival. That's been another thing I've learned through the writing that those of us who write about survival often are writing is actually an integral part of our survival.

[poignant music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
I want to thank seeley and Eli for being on the podcast today.

seeley is currently working on quest letters dot net, gradually putting up projects and materials, such as journalism, articles, and other collaborations. One of the goals is growing equity and systems thinking via analysis of art/media texts and project design.

There is a newsletter you can sign-up for that will update you as new materials are added. Head to quest letters dot net.

Eli has just wrapped edits on a new manuscript for a new book that will come out next year. It is about sorrow and survival, exploring and destroying the boundaries between human and non-human, of sentient and non-sentient.

For updates on this new book and to connect with all of Eli’s books and rabble-rousing, visit eli clare dot com.

[music swells and fades]

[theme music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
Well, thanks for listening today.

Our podcasts are executive produced by Jim Pounds. Accounting and creative support for our podcasts is provided by Gordy Erickson. Our associate producers are Archie Arnold, K. Jason Bryan, and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kaefer, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shea, and Sean Smith.

Our Patreon subscribers are Steven D, Terry D., Steven Flam, Ida Goteberg, Thomas Mckna, and Gary Nygaard. Our soundtrack and sound effects were provided through royalty free licenses.
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And until our next episode, see you queers and allies at the bookstores!