I'm Dyer Oxley and on the latest episode of Meet Me Here, we debate whether it's a good idea to name your baby after a character in pop culture.

I'm a bit partial to Fox from the X-Files or Cooper from Twin Peaks, a little local flavor.

In this very personal episode, two baby name experts join me and my pregnant wife, Nina, to help us make the biggest

decision yet in our unborn child's life. Listen to meet me here on the KUOW app or wherever you get

your podcast. Hey, good morning, Patricia Murphy here. It's Saturday. This is Seattle now. Today we're

bringing you the best from another KUOW podcast. Meet Me Here. This is the biggest weekend for pride celebrations in Seattle as June comes to a close. We talked on casual Friday about queer movies and representation in media. Meet Me Here as Katie Campbell spoke to local author Corinne Manning about their new

collection of short stories. We had no rules about being a queer author telling queer stories

and why the LGBTQ shelf is the best shelf in the bookstore. Here's Katie and Corinne.

We started by talking about what exactly it means to write queer literature today.

It's a question they explore in the second story in We Had No Rules,

in which the narrator is finding themselves romantically and creatively.

They break the fourth wall several times, wondering aloud if the reader will keep reading if they write quote-unquote lesbian fiction or, quote-unquote, queer fiction. They're figuring out

what these distinctions even mean. So I asked

Corinne, what are the subgenres of queer literature today? And what does it mean to them to be a

queer writer? Oh my gosh. What an intense question to jump in. Sorry. I have the habit of that.

I'm like, whoa, are you a Pisces?

Scorpio, actually. Okay, there we go. All right. That was the very first story that I wrote that ended up becoming this collection. And it came about after having worked on a novel, like that focused around like a trans parent and a family for years and years and years.

And then I got feedback that. And this was, you know, 2012, something like that. I got feedback that it had too many queer characters and that it would be put in the like the LGBTQ shelf.

Now I'm like, that's the best shelf.

In the bookstore, it's the best shelf in the library.

But in that moment I had this reckoning because I realized that I had been trying to write a mainstream book and trying to write queerness or gayness in a way that was like digestible in a mainstream standard and I had failed.

And so I actually went through this period of not writing at all. Then finally I sat down to write and I wrote those first words, oh, fuck it. I'm writing lesbian fiction. And I realized that I had been

...