ADVANCE REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Join us for the launch of To Conceive a Deer by Marta J. Sanchís, with poet James Mesiti. The novel explores pain, pregnancy, precarious work, and migration through the lens of queerness and the animal body, delving into desire and survival in dark spaces—both internal and external. It reflects on the meanings of "conception," from pregnancy to the birth of ideas and emotions, asking how often one can revisit an untainted encounter.

There is the conception of an idea. Conception in pregnancy is the most direct meaning. I have also seen the following definition: “to begin to feel a passion or affection,” which also has a presence in the story. How many times can you return to the experience of meeting someone you have not yet harmed?

The backbones of the novel are pain, pregnancy, precarious work and migration in the context of queerness and the animal body. To seek satisfaction and eroticism even in the darkest places (place meaning here: inside and outside one’s body).

Marta J. Sanchís (Granada, Spain, 1990) has published the novel To Conceive a Deer (Editorial Dieciséis, 2024). In 2023 she was a finalist for the XXXIV Ana María Matute Prize with the short-story Fortaleza, published by the Torremozas publishing house. She holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Granada and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. She is writing a thesis on liminality and healing in the PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.