We were lucky to catch up with Bailey Merlin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Bailey thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

As a bisexual, I’m used to people misunderstanding me. As a married bisexual in a straight-appearing relationship, I’m used to people REALLY misunderstanding me. I’ve come out so many times, sometimes two or three times, with the same person. “Bailey, why does it matter that you’re bisexual? You’re married to a man. Why do you have to talk about your sexuality?” I talk about bisexuality a lot because, well, someone should. Comprising the majority of the LGBTQ+ community while receiving the fewest research and community dollars, my identifying as bisexual is a political act. I go into the world every day ready to talk about bisexuality.

What I wasn’t ready for was to be a bisexual author and for people to refuse to believe that my debut novel, A Lot of People Live in This House, is queer. Well, I was ready for the straight community to ignore the fact that queer people can exist without tragedy. I wasn’t ready for the queer community to look me in my face and tell me that my book wasn’t queer. One reviewer said, “I really liked this book. The characters are so ALIVE. I don’t think any of the characters are bisexual, though.”

I remember being stunned by that. The main character, Rachel, is obviously (to me) bisexual. She owns a button-down shirt with cacti on it! Don’t get me wrong, the book has other, more overt queer characters. My favorite character, Wren, is a nonbinary sweetheart with a penchant for wigs and social work textbooks. But why didn’t people believe me when I said that Rachel was bi? At the end of the day, after rereading the novel, I realize that it’s the erasure that bisexuals face on a daily basis. If bisexuals don’t perform their sexuality in the form of a bi flag or quirky socks, are they even bisexual?

Six months after publication, I’m still quick to correct people when they tell me my book isn’t queer enough. What is queer enough? Are queer people clowns to you? Is that why we need to dress up and pronounce our queerness? What’s wrong with getting up every day and just…being queer? Because that’s what I do. I get up out of my bisexual bed, brush my bisexual teeth, and put on my bisexual clothes every day. My book is queer, my main character is bisexual, and you should get yourself and your queer friends a copy for book club, then invite me to your book club so we can talk about it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

In hindsight, getting married, pursuing a full-time education while maintaining a full-time job, and publishing my debut novel all in the same calendar year was a bad idea. I should have paced myself. But 30 was looming large, and I wanted to finish everything now, so I did. A nervous breakdown and a new job later, I’m finally putting myself back together by establishing a community for writers who identify as bi+ (i.e., bisexual, pansexual, plurisexual, etc.).

After publishing my first novel, A Lot of People Live in This House, which is a cozy novel about a woman who moves into an intentional living community with 10 strangers before a global pandemic shuts down the world, I realized that I didn’t have a writing community or a bi+ community. My entire master’s thesis had been on the impacts of bisexual erasure on health outcomes, so I knew that bi+ folks were more likely to feel like they didn’t have community as compared to the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. I wondered if any other bi+ writers felt the way I did.

They did, and the Bi+ Book Gang was born.

Originally started with a handful of mutual friends I’d made on TikTok, the Gang has grown in the last 3 months. I’m proud to say we have nearly 50 members from around the world, though the goal is a thousand. These are writers who have never published and some who have published dozens of books. We have writers who are indie, hybrid, and traditional published, which means any semblance of gatekeeping goes right out the window. If bi+ authors don’t support one another, no one will.

Our group offers a robust Discord channel, which one of the first members of our group was kind enough to set up for me when I knew nothing about the platform, where people pop in and out as they please. There aren’t a lot of expectations for people being active in the channel. I understand that life gets in the way, and the Gang is meant to be a place of respite and encouragement, not homework. The Discord is also a place where participants are encouraged to promote their work, ask craft questions, and request help promoting their books. We’re small right now, but anything helps new writers.

Some future goals for the group are to have a book club and free writing and publishing workshops. I went to school for too long and spent too much money on a master’s degree in fiction not to give away this info for free. I encourage every member to feel empowered to teach on a topic they care about because most knowledge isn’t learned in an MFA program.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll run our first critique group. Most of the people who have signed up for the six-week workshop have never had their writing discussed in a formal roundtable, and I hope to make the experience as painless as possible. This will be a learning curve for me, too. In the future, it would be great to have enough writers and enough facilitators to run two or three workshops a quarter. Time will tell.

No matter what, I’m happy to say that when I look to my left and to my right, I have writing and bi+ community in spades.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Lesson unlearned: Indie publishing isn’t real publishing.

Growing up, most young writers have dreams of being traditionally published and becoming international bestsellers overnight. We’re all so certain that we’re the ones who will defy the odds. Unless you have an uncle in the business, it’s not going to happen. As you get older and learn more about the publishing industry, the more hurdles you see. Finish the book, write a query letter, learn how to pitch the story, find an agent, go to edit hell, and then try to sell your book. Most people die in step three or four. You accumulate hundreds of rejections. Some people are resilient enough to keep pushing. Maybe they even make it to the selling stage! But then you realize that publishing isn’t the way it was fifty years ago, that you are responsible for most of your marketing, and that your publisher, agent, and publicist all take a cut of your profits.

I wanted to be traditionally published in such a real and deep way for a long time. I wrote novels that no one wanted, and it broke my heart. I went to grad school to learn how to pitch my book. Somewhere in my last semester, an agent that my school brought in told me that no one wanted historical fiction about the French Revolution and that I should write something else. I stopped writing.

Finally, when the pandemic happened, I started again. People told me time and time again that they were fascinated by the fact that I live in an intentional community, so I wrote a book about it. This was the book that was going to launch me into the stratosphere. Only it didn’t. I took classes on how to pitch a novel, on how to write a query letter. Nothing happened. The pandemic raged, and I knew that the window for this book was closing. If I didn’t publish myself, the book would be another casualty of my writing life.

You know what? It went gangbusters. Well, not really. I had some events where strangers came and told me how much they loved the book. Sometimes the rogue TikTok review pops up and really makes my day. People want to talk about intentional living and community. It’s exactly what I wanted. I’m a real writer.

Sure, older people look down their noses at me. Recently, I went to a brunch where people had actually read my book. We talked about the process and what it’s like to live intentionally for an hour. The only sour spot was when this woman, another author, sniffed and said, “Well, it’s indie-published.”

And I looked at her, smiled, and said, “Yes, yes, it is. I’m an indie author. Emphasis on author.”

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Every writer needs a village to succeed. I’d been spoon-fed the idea that writing is a solitary work from the moment I started working on my bachelor’s degree. I didn’t realize that everyone needs a community to mold them, support them, and celebrate their work. By the time I got to grad school, it was too late. I didn’t know how to network. When I moved to Boston, I tried to find a writing group, but none of them resonated. People were either hobby writers or else had their heads so far up their own asses that it would have taken a search and rescue team to find them.

The resource I wish I’d known about didn’t exist until I made it. The Bi+ Book Gang is all of the things I needed ten years ago. Friends, critique partners, champions. When one of us finds out about a contest, they let everyone else know. When someone reads a great book, they drop it in the chat. There is an accountability group that meets twice a week for folks to work together in silence for an hour.

I desperately needed this sort of support when I was younger, and I hope to bring it to other bi+ authors.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.baileymerlin.com/
• Instagram: @bamaram_merlin
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bailey-merlin/
• Other: Bi+ Book Gang Interest: https://forms.gle/RPHJ2ALZs9UN4gks5