My (mostly) true story “The Concentric Circle Method” is available on The Moose & Pussy
This is a story about childhood sex education and the XV Commonwealth Games. Check it out here!
Once I tried to make a sectional book of monsters as a present for my uncle. You know, the kind where the paper is cut horizontally into thirds, so you can create a mutant with the head of a fish, the body of a policeman, and the legs of a ram. I was probably six years old. I’m not sure why I thought my uncle would like a book of monsters, but once I finished it, my mother read through it and told me I shouldn’t give it to him. She told me that although she and my father were okay with looking at human anatomy, perhaps my uncle wasn’t, so maybe I should make something else for him instead. At the time I understood the subtext: it wasn’t appropriate for a child to give his uncle—or anyone else, really—drawings that depicted genitals. Even if the child represented both male and female genitals as a series of concentric circles, because he didn’t quite understand how to depict a three-dimensional item on a two-dimensional plane. (more)
Jeremy Hanson-Finger is a writer and editor, and co-founder of 