A Path Towards Pregnancy: Musings of 2023 by Aarron Sholar

 “At once candid and lyrical, A Path Towards Pregnancy: Musings of 2023 is a stunning journey through the embodied contradictions so often inherent to queer family planning. Sholar’s monthly vignettes deftly capture the duality of dysphoria and desire in trans masculine pregnancy and pre-parenthood.”

–Zoë Bossiere, author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir

A Path Towards Pregnancy takes an unflinching look at the difficulty of conception, of wrestling with one’s body, and with it, identity, in our stubbornly binary world. The opening entry provides what I think is the core of Sholar’s work: “We read to know we are not alone.” The book ends with an erasure of this opening entry, full of understanding and promise for what is to come: “this is the way I bring and pay an unexpected price for a baby.”  Because of Sholar’s brave prose, interspersed through 14 entries that read like journal excerpts, we know the oscillation between fear, hope, pain, relief, and grief of those who contemplate conception. And it is because of this that readers will know they are not alone. And that is the beating heart of art: community, safety, seeing and being seen and holding and being held. That we, as readers, can “crawl back into bed” and feel, as the speaker does, arms of comfort wrap around us through Sholar’s words.

–Nikki Ummel, author of Bloom, Bayou Sonata, and Hush