I admittedly don’t read many YA novels, but I had to make an exception for a Jen St. Jude book. They were our Managing Director and continue to be part of the CHIRB lifeblood. For proof of the latter, check out their annual list of notable debuts by trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming authors. A lot of time, effort, and, especially, love goes into creating that list—but then, love is something Jen generously pours into everything they do. Certainly every novel they write.
Like their debut If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come, their latest, Where You’ll Find Us, is a beautiful queer speculative novel. This one tells the story of Cal Quick, a trans teen whose parents have disowned them and has been temporarily taken in by their girlfriend’s family. Cal’s girlfriend thinks they were kicked out for being gay, unaware of Cal’s gender identity—something Cal is hesitant to reveal to her because of her openness that she’d never date anyone but cis females. On prom night, the couple discover a magical farmhouse that’s a refuge for queer kids throughout history, where time ceases to exist. The place is called Amaranth, and the teens form bonds with the other queer teens there. It’s in Amaranth where Cal is able to be themself and finally come out to their girlfriend. Where You’ll Find Us is a profound and moving story about friendship, identity, history, and being true to oneself.
I had the extreme pleasure of talking to Jen St. Jude about Where You’ll Find Us.
Rachel León
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember your second novel was going to be about soccer. What made you pivot and write this novel instead? I’d love to hear about this novel’s journey to becoming your second book.
Jen St. Jude
Ha, yes. I wanted to write a Hunger Games-esque dystopian novel where a tournament like the Olympics had actual political consequences in a not-so-far future where the earth has been ravaged by climate change, but my publisher was looking for something a bit more in line with the quieter speculative contemporary mood of If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come. Although I think that book would have gone pretty hard (and I still secretly want to write it), they were guiding me in the right direction. Establishing a brand and readership as a debut author is important. So I tried to write, instead, a story about two best friends who are forced to play against each other after their school is destroyed by a flood. I spent at least half a year trying to find my footing and the heart of the story, but I never did. A lot of (well-meaning, of course!) people told me to just keep going, write my way into it, that I’d get there eventually, but when I talked to my agent Erin about it, she surprised me by telling me to stop working on it. She noted it was missing a speculative element, which is what excites me most about my work. She urged me to step away and see how I could bring that back into the story. And also promised me Bloomsbury would not cancel my contract or hate me forever for needing more time. Thankfully, she was right.
Looking back, I can see I was running from myself, although I knew that at the time too. I poured so much of myself into If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come, and found that experience to be beautiful and rewarding but also very painful. To protect myself, I wanted to write a character who was very different from me, living a life in a world different from mine. Climate change is important to talk about, and it impacts me in the way it impacts everyone, but not in a way that felt vulnerable. But ultimately that meant it wasn’t my story to write, and I didn’t have enough to give to it. For starters, other people have more interesting and urgent things to say about it. (I absolutely recommend This is the Year by Gloria Muñoz if you’re looking for a gorgeously-written speculative YA in verse with climate change at its center.) But I also realized I didn’t want to write a novel just to fulfill a contract. I thought, if this is the last book I ever write, what do I really want to say? What questions do I have about the world and myself? I poured a lot of myself and my own life into it. It’s been very painful and beautiful all over again. Writing it changed me forever. That alone is enough.
Rachel León
You mentioned to me about how you’re working on a novel for adults, which I’m excited about, but I’d love to hear why you’re drawn to writing for teens.
Jen St. Jude
I love writing for teens because even in adulthood I’m a person with big emotions and big questions about myself, the world, and how I fit into it. I especially love writing for queer teens because we have only recently been allowed to publish books like mine on such a big scale. About a decade ago, I listened to Adam Silvera talk about how hard it was for him to publish a book with a gay main character (and if you love his work, please don’t miss his debut: More Happy Than Not is genius). He got a lot of pushback, and ultimately he pushed harder and was one of the authors paving the way for the rest of us. What an overwhelming privilege it is to tell stories about kids like me for kids like me. I really didn’t have access to that representation when I was growing up and it was lonely.
Rachel León
Digging into that further: Cal’s explanation for why they [originally] used she/they pronouns was revelatory because that logic of making it easier for others pretty much sums up my own experience. It had an unsettling but also very affirming effect on me. I also noticed the author’s note about terms and pronouns. Language can be so personal. There’s a line I love: “The words and terms may not be the same, but the feelings are.” I’m wondering if you could talk about that. Is it important to you to make space for that for teen readers?
Jen St. Jude
Yes, absolutely. Studying queer history has been healing for me because I’ve learned how fluid and ever-evolving things are. We exist in the context of our times, communities, and cultures. The internet has revolutionized how we talk about our identities, and social media has shaped how our inner and outer worlds coexist. There’s this immense pressure to know who you are and communicate it, to finally arrive at yourself. As if the core of you is a knowable, permanent destination. A lot of that comes from the “born this way” or “in the wrong body” messaging that has taken up a lot of space over the past few decades in the public conversation on queer identities. And I understand why that messaging became so mainstream and what it was meant to challenge, but it’s made it seem like there is an inherent truth to a person that is undeniable and immutable. It makes it seem like you’ll know your own inherent truth if only you’re brave enough, and honest enough, and enlightened enough. Certainly some people experience their sexuality and gender like that, but just as many have a more complicated journey. I wanted to show through these characters that any experience around this is valid. Some transgender people want to pass as cis while others hope to be read as trans. Some want to erase any trace of who they were before they could live authentically, and some very much want to keep and own those chapters of their life. Some people feel like they have been at home in a single identity their entire lives, while others feel like they’ve authentically lived in many. It’s all real, real, real—until it changes.
Rachel León
Amaranth is this magical place where time doesn’t exist, but also everyone there is loved and accepted for who they are. This country is increasingly dangerous and hostile towards the LGBTQIA+ community, and I wondered how that played a role in the creation of Amaranth.
Jen St. Jude
In 2018 I attended the Lambda Literary retreat for emerging LGBTQIA+ writers and met a group of trans and nonbinary people I now talk to every day. Our group chat has been such a virtual haven for me over the past eight years, and we’ve really grown up together, although we were all adults when we met. But any questioning, shifting, or growing around gender or sexuality is celebrated and met with curiosity and kindness. And playfulness! None of us take any of it all that seriously, even if we’re talking about the most precious and vulnerable pieces of ourselves. Over the years, many of us have tried out new names or different pronouns with each other and it all just feels so freeing. And so easy. I could tell them tomorrow I want to change my name to Shark Attack and they’d be like, “Hell yeah, Shark Attack! Pronouns still they/them or something else?” I’m sure plenty of people would tell us to grow up and live in the real world, and I would feel sorry for those people, because it is a real world. Whenever I get to see any of those friends in person it feels like coming home.
Amaranth embodies that feeling, as well as a sense of safety and abundance. I know I dreamt this world up because of the one we currently live in. I wanted to visit that place in my mind for a while, and I wanted readers to join me there; light on, door open, a fire burning, cake baking in the kitchen, an empty chair just waiting to be filled. I intentionally chose an idyllic farmhouse setting to reclaim a type of domestic, Americana fantasy for these young American characters pushed to the margins of our history. In this house, their portraits hang on the walls. Their stories matter. They have intergenerational relationships that feel like family. They are cherished and believed and remembered. They belong, no questions asked. Amaranth is a fantasy land but we can create these spaces for each other in this world, in this life. We can be that home for each other. We can even become that home for ourselves.
Rachel León
I admittedly tend to shy away from reading much speculative fiction, but your novels have such emotional depth and are so relatable that I wonder if I’m losing out on a lot of poignant novels. I mean, I think you certainly have a special gift as a writer by being so emotionally intelligent and drawing rich characters, but I also wonder if there’s something about the speculative genre that allows for accessing truths in a deeper way than realistic fiction provides?
Jen St. Jude
Maybe I’m just a queer, neurodivergent Aquarius, but I’ve always felt like I’m living in a slightly different reality than most people. A space parallel and so much the same but just a bit stranger. So it almost comes naturally to me, to dream and create this way. I’m not saying speculative plots are easy to write, exactly, because they require a certain innovation and require buy-in, imagination, and trust from readers. But I do think speculative premises can hack fiction in an extremely convenient way. You can ignore or discard the rules and limitations of our world. You can use the new rules and parameters to keep the plot moving. You can force characters to interact in situations they’d normally never be in. You can custom-build a reality that zooms in on your themes, neon exclamation points flashing around them. Speculative stories ask us to imagine how the world could be different. For queer people, for young people, for anyone living in the margins, I think that type of imagining can be really healing and even life-saving.
Rachel León
The novel’s breadth is astounding. You tackle a wide range of issues through a historical lens, including AIDS and trans pregnancy. I’m curious about the process of including those stories. Did you always know you’d include them? Did you write them as backstories and then realize they needed to be centered? How much research did you have to do?
Jen St. Jude
I’ve always been a history nerd, but don’t remember the exact moment I decided to build the cast with diverse characters from other eras. I do know as soon as I made that choice I felt overwhelmed. I remember thinking, “This is ambitious, and it could be really cool. But it also feels very easy to mess up.” I had tight deadlines and not much time to write this book, and I’m a slow writer. I wanted to share a lot of perspectives and stories without the text feeling preachy or heavy-handed. Queer history is hard to study, too, because there are so few primary sources. People lived their lives in the shadows, and so much has been lost to time. And what words did they use in certain communities? And when did those words change? What questions should I be asking and what do I want to show, really? It would take so much work, I knew, but I also knew there were people already doing that work. One of my favorite queer historians is Hugh Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention, When Brooklyn Was Queer, and a new memoir, My Bad (check out my Chicago Review of Books interview with him here!) His work is brilliant. I thought, “I wish I could just, like, talk to Hugh Ryan about all of this.” And then foolishly or cleverly, “Maybe I can?” We were mutuals on Twitter (RIP) mostly because I am such a huge fan of his work and was very loud and annoying about that over the years. So I emailed him offering to pay him for his knowledge and an hour of his time, or at least his guidance on how to do this kind of research. He hopped on a Zoom for multiple hours for free, for which I will never be able to repay him. He talked to me about all of the characters I had in mind, and helped me make intentional and economical choices around which historical moments I wanted to include. He gave me the names of certain people in history I might want to look into. He also taught me to ask one important question about each character: Where would they have encountered queerness in their world? In other words, when did they realize they weren’t alone? It helped me create their stories, stakes, and to humanize them too.
Rachel León
Let’s end by talking about poetry! The novel mentions trans poets and specifically talks about one poem in particular, “Your Life” by Andrea Gibson. I just finished reading The Madness Vase, thanks to your online recommendation. I’d love to hear about your relationship with poetry—do you write it? Would you talk about discovering Andrea Gibson’s work? Are there any other poets whose work is important to you?
Jen St. Jude
I am such a fan of poetry. I love to send poems and collections to people, it’s one of my love languages. I adore its images and fragments and questions and half-answers. I follow its searching and yearning and surprises. I feel its urgency and let-it-be-enough-ness. I wrote poetry in high school (as one does, I guess), and certainly never won any awards for it. But I return to that form still, especially in my hardest moments, and I always love reading it. There are so many brilliant poets writing today, and the trans poets I’ve found have changed my life. Maybe Andrea especially. I first got really into their work in 2019 when I was looking for readings for my wedding. I found “Good Light“, and a friend read it at our ceremony. Their work became even more important to me in 2020 when I started thinking more about my own gender. I remember watching them read on Zoom during the pandemic, and then got to see them twice live in Chicago. We had them sign the “Good Light” page, even. How lucky I was to witness them and carry them with me still.
FICTION
Where You’ll Find Us
By Jen St. Jude
Bloomsbury YA
Published June 2, 2026
