Her arms and legs were bare, her shoulders and hips disappearing behind the broad brim of the hat balanced over her torso.

—Rode Hard

A staple of my friend Anna’s undergrad apartment was the hat rack. People coming into a party would grab a hat off the rack until it was empty. There are photos in the depths of some long-lost Facebook album, no doubt, of me wearing cardboard-and-glitter leprechaun headgear, a bowler, a Tyrolean hat, a Mad Hatter topper. Since it was the post-Mad Men era, H&M and Forever 21 were flush with cloches and pillboxes. I bought a red cloche and wore it exactly once, to the old redlight redlight location on West Colonial, where a drunk college guy kept taking it off my head and putting it back on until the Hairpin meet-up I was attending (yes, really) decamped for the patio.

When I moved to Cleveland, I stocked up on knit beanies for winter (my boss at the American Greetings art library made me a particularly warm one, thanks Erica); when I moved to New York, I had to restock. A few Halloweens ago, a friend gifted me the perfect vintage felt beret, while my hat-of-all-use for cold weather is pale grey and Deco-inspired. Treasured memory: a visit to Saratoga, wearing a jumpsuit over a pussy-bow blouse and a floppy straw hat, where an elderly railbird told me I looked like Diane Keaton. I remain attached to a black straw hat, somewhere between a pork-pie and a bowler, scooped from a sale rack almost ten years ago.

The hat I miss is a faux-fur cloche with a feather, one I wore out during Ohio winters—but only with friends. My boyfriend at the time didn’t like how it hid my face. When we moved back to Florida, I gave it to Goodwill.

She might wearing a pink polo and a khaki skirt to go out tonight, her closet free of black mesh and stolen rosaries and the sluttiest bikinis in the Quiet Flight shop.

—Devil’s Cup

I entered college in the mid-2000s, generally agreed to be one of the worst eras for American fashion. Worse yet, I’d spent the previous decade fettered by Mormon modesty codes: shoulders and stomach covered at all times, shorts to my knees, pantyhose for church, one-suit bathing suits, all in preparation for someday donning temple garments. Growing up in a beach town surrounded by girls in bikinis and sundresses gave me a specific idea of what carefree, sinful femininity looked like. When I left the church, one of the first things I did was buy a two-piece bathing suit.

Mormon culture and doctrine also prize domestic arts like cooking and sewing. In the 90s, this was called “homemaking” without an eye-blink. I never had much facility for any of it, learned to associate these useful skills with repressive gender roles and quashing of personal interests like reading fantasy paperbacks and being depressed about the Iraq war. Then again, pull a trap card—comic books, heavy metal, science fiction—and whose interests are those? Maybe I had to power through a decade and change of other people’s interests, men’s interests, overwriting any that might be truly mine, before I could come to a domestic art with humility and distance.

Still, when my mother tells me she’s happy to see how I’m developing my talent of embroidery, I feel conflicted at best.

I lifted the jacket and we admired it together, its wide lapels and high collar, its tails flaring from a narrow waist and gold-filigree buttons down its front.

—Little Nothing

In Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis says, “As a boy, I would put secrets, coins, words, messages, anything into the lining of a garment. Things that only I knew were there.” This notion, along with my lifelong love of Sandry and Lark’s thread-based power in the Circle of Magic series, shaped the drafting of Little Nothing. I was revising the manuscript as I was learning to embroider. I felt something of myself go down into the fabric as I stitched, very badly, a geological map of New York. It was the pandemic and I couldn’t keep my loved ones safe. How good it would be if so many global myths were true, if we could sew a lock of hair over a beloved’s heart or secret their name into a lining, these stitches powerful enough to stop bullets.

I gave Bess the power to sew, weave, braid, and embroider strength, beauty, and protection into the clothing and hair and very beings of the people she loves. I gave Maria and Jonnie elaborate hairstyles and clothing that sumptuary laws might have prevented them, as Black women in the antebellum South, from wearing. When Jonnie dons her red velvet coat, it’s heavy with love and with import, its embroideries encoding spies’ messages—but more importantly, it’s a sartorial fuck-you.

I love to dress characters. The various queers of a long-shelved romance series get all the flavors of soft butch, high femme, stud, and everything in between. The teen codependents of Devil’s Cup wear the nostalgia-washed 90s gear I was too young or too religious to be permitted. A recent novella allowed me to dig out a book about Weeki Wachee Springs and paint 1950s mermaids onto the page, spangles and feathers and silk Alix of Miami bathrobes. My current project is one about surfaces, really: the ability to mold oneself via hot yoga, hair dye, and the correct clothing, the narrative voice unable to restrain itself from naming everything in sight, from Cezanne paintings to Frankie Shop trousers, a superstitious litany of brand-awareness recited to stave off detection.

There are many urban myths about Mormon temple garments.

“Be careful, please! This is a vintage Alaia.”

—The Kill

To this day I’m not much of a clotheshorse, although I love to look at textile exhibits in museums, I follow celebrity fashion coverage, I have books like Strip Tees and Fashionopolis on my shelves, and I mourn the death of the street style blog. I doubt I’ll ever be very comfortable with the responsibility of adorning a body, although I was a Polyvore devotee back in the day and I still maintain multiple outfit Pinboards (currently we’re in German Expressionist Winter, but Clinchcore Spring is on the horizon). People around my area sometimes think I’m from downstate, but when I’m in New York City no one would mistake me for being from anywhere but the provinces. One of my least amiable traits is frenetically trying on 3-5 different outfits before leaving the house in whatever I wore to the last occasion.

I try to ask myself, Are you committing to a bit only legible to yourself? Is this outfit going to say “Joan Chen in Twin Peaks” to anyone but you?

I sometimes wonder, What would a hot person wear?

I often fantasize about being a disembodied voice dispensing story times and readers’ advisory. I think the kids at the library would really like that.

In deep winter, I wear so many layers I start to believe there’s no body beneath them. When I come home, I take off my down coat, ear muffs, scarf, some part of me hoping that when I remove my cardigan, only a void will be revealed.

Unwind, unbutton, the scent of flannel warmed by skin, breath crystalline on lumpy knit, modest layer cake.

—”infinite yield”