Green Glass Ghosts is a poignant fictional story based on the author’s own experiences growing up queer and trans. Spoon offers insights into the world of a complex character trying to find connection, meaning, and stability in their life as they attempt to start over again and again, weighed down by traumatic and uncomfortable parts of their past. Spoon’s composition deepens students’ understanding of diverse, complex ideas about identity, others, and the world in Composition and Creative Writing. Spoon models how creative writers are observant of the world and have a real-world purpose for sharing their stories in Creative Writing. The story of Green Glass Ghosts, featuring the lives of trans and queer characters, is a necessary window into a world that is unfamiliar to some as well as a necessary reflection of a world that is very familiar to others.

256 pp., 6 × 8", b&w illustrations

Source: Association of Book Publishers of BC - BC Books for Schools (2021-2022)

Rae Spoon is a transgender musician/writer/workshop facilitator originally from Calgary. Rae has been nominated for a Polaris Prize, toured internationally, and released six solo albums. Rae is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist First Spring Grass Fire (2012), and co-author (with Ivan E. Coyote) of Gender Failure (2014). Rae was also featured in the Arsenal Pulp anthology Persistence and composed the instrumental score for the National Film Board film Dead Man. Rae is the subject of a National Film Board documentary entitled My Prairie Home (2013), which screened at film festivals internationally, including the Sundance 2014 Film Festival. They have also composed scores for films that have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and Vancouver International Film Festival. Rae lives in Montreal with their partner, Kendra Marks.

Rae Spoon's profile page

Gem Hall is an itinerant interdisciplinary artist of mixed Romani/British heritage currently based on Coast Salish lands. Gem is interested in creative work as a means of survival and language to express stories & songs of resilience, recovery, diaspora, and the magic of storytelling and witnessing. With a background in DIY/zine culture & queer and trans community organizing, they use illustration, textile work, writing, harp playing, tarot reading, and plant medicines to hold liminal spaces between worlds and ways of being.

Gem Hall's profile page

Green Glass Ghosts chronicles the realities of queer protagonists navigating love, health, addiction, and healing in Vancouver on the cusp of the new millennium. The chaos in survival is documented by Rae Spoon's iconically poetic prose and illustrated by Gem Hall's bold yet haunting ink drawings. Green Glass Ghosts walks us through both the grit and camaraderie of underworld subcultures, with art and storytelling that doesn't alienate but encourages us to normalize our disarray. -Cristy Road Carrera, author of Next World Tarot, Spit and Passion, and Choked Up

Green Glass Ghosts is a compelling coming-of-age story that is so specific and yet so universal. Every queer and trans person will recognize themselves, their friends, someone they've known, loved, and lost in this novel. The collaboration between Gem Hall and Rae Spoon is tender, haunting, raw, honest, asking of us to not only look back at our past selves but also dream up different possibilities for our future. This is a book to hold in our hearts. -Kama La Mackerel, author of ZOM-FAM

This book is wild and familiar, not unlike young queer lust, love, or existence. It perfectly encapsulates the balances between being wide-eyed and resourceful, running away and running to. Spoon and Hall clearly know that survival is a messy landscape, with as many hands pulling you down as there are lifting you up. Reading this book is being lifted up, a firm reminder of still being here. -Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, editor (THIS Magazine), writer (Whatever, Iceberg, Somewhere to Run From, Emergency Contact)

Rae Spoon and Gem Hall's Green Glass Ghosts documents a time that hasn't been written much about, and needs to be - a particular kind of working-class, queer/trans kid life in early 2000s Vancouver. Spoon and Hall craft a portrait of the many kinds of ghosts - of trauma, colonization, and displacement - in that place and time, and the messy, persisting dollar pizza-eating queer and trans kids trying to get by and make something different, even if we don't know how. Hall's artwork does a beautiful job of capturing this place and all the beings on both sides of the veil who inhabit this queer space of becoming. -Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work and Dirty River

Lonely and spectral and hopeful. A book about being young and queer. About trying to find community, create a home, and stay in the world despite old trauma and new harms in the places you seek safety. A tether for when you feel yourself floating away. -Jaime Burnet, musician (Sockfoot), writer (Crocuses Hatch from Snow)

Glass Ghosts is hopeful and raw in its honest depiction of how survivors experience and interface through their filters, the cautionary tale of 'medicine' becoming poison, how we sometimes need to be taught self-care, patiently by loving Others, those surrogate strangers, gently moving us toward trust, as we imperfectly seek stability on an ever-shifting coastline. -Imogen Di Sapia, associate member, European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC); writer/textile artist (The Selkie: Weaving and the Wild Feminine)