Gender Queer

"Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is a graphic novel that was adapted into a full cast performance. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to chat with the author and illustrator Maia Kobabe, who also narrated, and Nick Martorelli from Penguin Random House, who worked together with Maia on adapting it. It’s a fun story in many ways, because Maia is revisiting coming to terms with being non-binary a decade later. So having more time and more experience layered on top of that acceptance of self and this coming out of self is interesting. It allowed them to make some changes in the original text: not just to convert it to the audio format, but also to recognize a little bit of where they are today versus where they were when it was originally written. Yes, because they’ve got to take the amazing illustrations and put them into the audio soundscape, so that you understand what is happening. They’ve done that with music, with sound effects, with silence at times, and a full cast. Maia gets to play Maia, and Maia’s sibling is also in the piece. They have also come out as they. Then there are audiobook narrators playing parents and other characters, including Trini Alvarado, someone who Maia—who is an audiobook listener—had listened to and was excited about."