Queer on a Bench

by Mark William Lindberg

Em sits down on a bench in a park and makes a deal with themself not to get up until something happens. What follows is a formally experimental stream of consciousness novella that digs deeply into the way we think about the world and view both the people around us and ourselves. Em’s relentless self-examination brings up beautiful insights and frustrating questions about privilege, gender, and religion, and gets constantly interrupted by short story daydreams that veer off into sexual fantasy, memoir, and playwrighting.

Mark William Lindberg, author of 81 NIGHTMARES, gives us another eye-opening look into a human mind at work.

Genres: LGBT, Contemporary

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2015

About the author

Mark William Lindberg is a queer author, artist, performer, and educator living with a man and a dog in Queens, NY.

Reviews

[LenaRibka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a unique being in a unique instant. My only true task is to live that instant because no one else can.

Not every painstakingly thought-out story has to be told. And not every consideration has to be heard. But sometimes to spend some hours in a smart head is all we need.
I'm not a blog reader. But I had a lot of fun reading Emmett's observations and thoughts on the bench in the park. Written in a blog manner, the author proves his experimental creativity or, better to say, exudes an evident delight to experiment on paper, in a sarcastic, touching, honest, entertaining and, yes, very inventive, unique and even poetic way.

Absolutely worth reading!

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was BRILLIANT!!

I'm on this bench.
I'm on this bench today until something happens. I will know what that something is when it happens. This is an official pact with myself not to move my butt off this bench until an event occurs.

So, this is the setting :) The whole book plays on the bench. We, as the reader, are in Em's head and partake in their thoughts, memories, dreams, imagination, creativity.

Em's thoughts read just like exactly that: thoughts. I mean, I only know my thoughts and thought patterns, but this was so amazingly real. Em's thoughts are flighty and jump to whatever catches their interest. Their thoughts are funny and absurd. They are panicky and fearful. They are thoughtful and deep.

I found this to be very captivating and fascinating. Not only how the author tells the story, also the thoughts, ideas, and doubts that are included in it. I have thought so many of them myself, it was kinda scary at times. I could be Em. I was Em. I am Em. All the time. Always will be.


If you are already convinced that this is your book, skip to the end, because you want to know as little as possible. The rest of my review won't be really full of spoilers, but it might take away from your own reading experience. By the way, that is exactly what this book is: an experience.


I am at a crossroads in life. I've been dropped in a new country. I have no map. There is no path ahead through the landscape.

That's Em's situation. The situation in which they decides to sit on a bench to... what? Have an epiphany? Find some direction? Find themself? Think? Meet someone? Wait?

It's kinda all of the above.


While Em sits on the bench—for a long time, for the time of the whole book (I've got a bad case of bench-butt)—there are some themes prevalent:

Identity.

Who even am I?

We don't want to say that we are our jobs, but that is definitely how we define each other. Who do you fuck and how do you earn money, that's who you are. Also, while we're asking, what kind of genitals do you have? Just so we're clear about everything.

Categorising and assumption.

There we go, I see a human and immediately ascribe to them a pronoun and sexuality. Be the change.

Changing.

Every day is a fight against what I grew up knowing, believing, trusting.

Thoughts and influence.

But I don't want to think that. How can I want to think something but not think it? How can I want to believe something but not believe it? How can I believe something I don't want to believe? Is it all training, upbringing, brainwashing?

Judging.

I fucking hate people who just litter.
Wow, you fucking hate them? Really?

Queerness. Being different. Gender.

I'm taking it out.
I am not taking it out. I am not taking this goddamn queer-ass hair accessory out of my goddamn queer-ass hair, you queerphobic homo.
Okay, so, maybe the only thing deeper than desire is anger. Or maybe it's just hurt. Is that what anger is?

Future.

Suddenly this feels like the event I've been waiting for. The getting up. Get up. Get up. Get up from the bench. Go forward. I will. I rise.


'Queer on the Bench' is not only this, literally I mean. The whole writing is queer. Different. Unique. Like nothing I've ever read. Not only is Em thinking 'only' thoughts, they is day-dreaming, people-watching and imagining their lives, they is remembering, imagining their future, they is writing a play. The latter was absolutely stunning, by the way!


I was right. This book was so my thing. I loved it and recommend it. All the stars.

***

I stumbled upon this author because he was interviewed by Larry Benjamin the other day, and I immediately knew his books would be right up my alley. By the way, this month the book is for sale for 1$. In the US and Germany at least. It seems VAT may mess up the low price :-/
It's also on Smashwords for 1$...

[Noura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if this is for everyone but it was definitely what I needed to read. There are parts that dragged on but in the bigger picture of this book I can see how they're necessary. I'm probably going to revisit this again. Soon. The thought process described here is alarmingly familiar.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The weight of an author’s message often depends on the weight of the execution with the medium in which it is communicated. In the light hundred and six pages of Queer on a Bench, Lindberg’s Em bravely and whimsically explores the heaviest of topical internal exploration. Em wades through a world deeply mired in philosophical questions of gender, childhood sexual identity, maturity, work, relationships, queer-ness, religion, and many other aspects of existence that at times hinge on a single word weighed down by hundreds of years of cultural baggage.

This book triumphantly dances around medium on the page, at times reading like a confessional memoir of our narrator, while other times it muses poetically, and then transforms into a stage play. What is fascinating is how Lindberg manages to weave through genres as effortlessly as Em meditatively weaves through the passing crowd’s identities. Rarely do we see such organized, sequential, brilliantly scripted thought in such a short, beautifully transformative work.

As I read, I laughed as often as I found myself pausing to meditate on a single sentence, and perhaps the most amazing part of the book is the weight that Lindberg has heaped in so few pages in Em’s musings of sexuality and identity in a single life. It truly is a gorgeous little book, and left room to open many of my own questions about my relationship with myself, my gender, my lovers, and the world.

I have already recommended this to three of my friends, and likewise extend it to you.

[lauraღ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this! Great style, great movement, great flow. It was easy to read while being simultaneously extremely interesting to read, because you never knew what format Em's thoughts were going to take next. And I loved Em a lot, they were extremely relatable to me, with all the navel-gazing and self-questioning and self-consciousness and their thoughts on words and society and gender. Em would voice a thought and I'd be like "!!! I know that exact feeling!" Which is a great thought to have while you're reading a book.

I've come across a fair few novels that take you deeply into a character's head and this has be one the the most accurate (in my opinion) and faithful depictions of true stream of consciousness. For such a short book, I feel like I KNOW this character, and I know they're going to stay with me for a long time.

[♣ Irish Smurfétté ♣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full reviewage on Prism Book Alliance®

Bleeding Hope In the Sunshine

If I was permitted to use just five words to review this book, these’d be what you get. They’re all you need.

But what’s the fun in that???? (Except, it did get my poetry writing juices flowing.)

I knew going into this story that it’s written in a unique manner, a mish mash of not quite stream-of-consciousness, first person, greatly internalized, with imagined sequences between the patches of reality. No matter how you slice it, this is a kick ass brave honest piece of writing that I… well, it made me celebrate and bleed and fight the tears and want to hi5 everyone I ever meet ever again. Ever.

Lindberg is laying all of it out there: determination, insecurity, experimentation, silliness, sarcasm, curiosity, questioning the most basic of human and societal ~everything~, all while working to define who he is amongst it all.

I’d like to contemplate them one at a time. I’d like them to meet them one at a time. I’d like for us to contemplate each other.

And it only gets more spectacular from here.

When I slow down, or even stop, and let the mind wander, it can take me to creative and previously unexplored and unexamined places. Thoughts string along, becoming new and other things. Some are expected, mundane, annoying, while some are exhilarating, frightening, and fleeting, flitting away from me, taking their solutions to the universe and my own life with them. Even still, I’m left in a state of wonderment.

This is how I felt while reading this entire book.

Like ascribing a pronoun, I can ascribe an entire life. It’s just as presumptive, just as invasive. Just as automatic and inescapable.

And this.

I am in a position in life to have an idea and make it happen, even such a seemingly simple idea. Not everyone can do that.

Just... let those settle for a minute or three, or more. Breathe 'em in.

Our narrator is expressing thoughts and wishes many, many, many - maybe most? - of us have but don’t, or can’t, take the time to do, or feel silly even doing the thinking and the wishing, fearing ridicule or misunderstanding if we put voice to them.

Everything is questioned and tossed into the unavoidable bright light of reality: racism, sexism, misogyny, gender bias, self-hate, religion, all of it. They’re approached from both a very personal level and a larger societal existence. Some of the questions he asks about why we do how we do as a society when they create those masks we feel forced to wear but want so much to chuck to the side of the road, left forever to rot and disappear.

Seriously, right now, someone give me a hi5, right now, c’mon.

~ hi5 ~

Thank you!!!

Our storyteller, Em, is going through some things. He’s at that point in life where you can feel the change in every cell of your body and it makes you think about and question everything, just as I’ve already described. I mean, I swear, I must know this person. Do I know you? I’ve been you. I might be you again.

How can I want to believe something but not believe it? How can I believe something I don’t want to believe?

See?? Em, you are making me ponder, and remember. I felt that allegiance through recognition, with Em, especially regarding family, and religion, church specifically, deciding as a teenager to stop attending because I no longer could see myself as a part of that world that didn’t see me, and many others, as part of them.

I’m recommending this to all of you. Everyone. Don’t question this. And while you’re reading, roll with it. You won’t regret it, you won’t miss a thing. I promise. Just do it.

Do it!!!

You can’t stop tears with shallow breath. You have to breathe into tears, to breathe down deep below them, then they will quiet. You can not stop emotion by holding it tighter. You have to release it. You have only to breathe into it, to lift the lid on it, to expose it to the light, and it will out. And it will heal.

Yes. YES. Thank you, Mark William Lindberg, for being so effing out with all of this.