Q&A with Micro-Anthology Contributors

Miracle Monocle has released the fifth installment in our micro-anthology series, A Little Sugar in the Tank. The book represents the first collaboration between the journal and PubLab, a new initiative pairing students interested in working in the fields of writing, editing, and publishing with projects that will give them a one-of-kind hands-on experience with bringing a book into being. One of our three PubLab fellows this year, Lizzy Roth, has stepped forward to conduct interviews with some of our wonderful contributors. We’re hoping that their words of wisdom and inspiration convince you to click through and order your copy of the book, which is now available in print and digital format.

Lizzy Roth: When you think about your piece what are the first things that come to mind?

T.S. Leonard: The sound of a dial-up modem, those crunching chirps and beeps in the dark computer room. Riding shotgun in my best friend’s car with the windows down, our hometown at night. Reading lyrics in the CD liner notes during spring’s first thunderstorm. Dreaming about leaving.

I was so obsessed with feeling misshapen to Missouri that I dreamed only of fleeing, finding salvation somewhere else — once I got there, I realized how much salvation I had already found back home, among these cherished friends. “The Gay Lunch Table” makes me feel a bittersweet nostalgia, and a defiant sense of pride, to have come from where I did and to have come up with my fabulous friends.

LR: What is your favorite aspect of your piece?

TSL: I think what I love most about this piece is its specificity, and its honesty. There is little attempt to dress up or gloss over this supercut of moments of young becoming—the boys in the poem are coming through an awkward stage, flirting with dangerous elements, and trying and failing to find their place. Some of it’s ugly or uncomfortable, but some of it is so pure and playful and full of possibility. And isn’t that what it feels like to grow up?

LR: Can you describe the process behind crafting this piece?

TSL: It started as a much longer piece, with the title “Before PrEP.” I had been doing a lot of research into the HIV/AIDS epidemic – how the queer community showed up for each other in crisis; what that cratered generation has endured – and I became a bit obsessed with this period between the introduction of lifesaving HIV treatment and the innovation of preventative HIV drugs. I came up in this complicated era between epidemic and equality campaigns, in the wake of a lot of loss and fear but amidst these huge shifts in cultural acceptance and social progress. I wanted to capture what it was like to grow up gay in the tempest of all this change – how exhilarating, how risky.

On a craft level, it was an early decision to emphasize these different acronyms, initialisms, and online contractions. There was something about this particular era’s alphabet soup that seemed to capture that kind of queer language, that if you know, you know signaling. It was important that each stanza was a quatrain: four lines the four sides of the four boys that comprise the Gay Lunch Table.

LR: How does this piece fit into your larger body of work (theme, form, etc.)?

TSL: In my collection Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival (Fordham University Press, 2026) this piece caps off a suite of poems titled “A Fraternal Order of Glitter and Ash.” They span ancient times to gay liberation, linking experiences of struggle and camaraderie across generations. A mesh of queer connection. I write a lot about queer history, and it seemed appropriate to find my place along that line with this piece, a missing link.

LR: Finally, if you were to choose a song to play while people were scrolling through this interview, what would it be and why?

TSL: “Lost Girls” by Tilly and the Wall – they were part of the Saddle Creek Records scene in Omaha, which felt impossibly cool but also close enough to barely touch. By senior year, we’d drive the three hours up from Kansas City to go to shows and spot our indie rock heroes in the flesh. This song, “Lost Girls,” in particular feels like a companion to this poem: the refrain repeating “you will run, you will run, you will run.” We’d blast it on our drives and shout along, hearing those lines like an instruction.

The lyrics actually directly reference the Chicago outsider artist Henry Darger, known for inventing a vast fantasy realm in total obscurity. It’s another link along this chain of art that opens up a portal, beckoning the reader or listener or viewer across the plains and into a technicolor world. When you feel like a lost kid in a tough place, it’s these works of art or song or poetry that push those doors ajar, daring you to step out into the world differently illuminated. A little less lost.