About Me — Topher Bigelow
Come on, there are tater tots in that nebula!
How does one boil down a human life into a bite-size chunk for the consumption of strangers on the internet? Blah, blah, blah, I am vast and contain multitudes.
I like to say that, at the ripe age of twenty-seven, I’ve been at least five entirely different people. We all have, I’m just less tied to the myth and great lie of the stable identity and linear narrative autobiography.
Hi, I’m Topher, and I am a queer transmasculine enby (enby is slang for the umbrella term nonbinary). I use the word queer to denote that I am not straight or cis in any way, shape, or form. I have built my existence around interrogating cisheteronormative expectations of human beings in this society and have found them arbitrary and not at all conducive to joy in our short performances on this beautiful planet.
I left my rural hometown (population literally 1,100 — my graduating class was only twenty-seven students strong) at seventeen, bound for the brownstones and bustling of Harlem, NYC. I graduated from the City College of New York with a menagerie of degrees like the academic dragon that I am: majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing and a triple minor in political science, theater, and psychology.
In the ensuing years, I’ve managed to actually use all of those degrees while adding a new one (a Masters of Arts in Teaching English Language Arts) through my career as an activist, educator, mentor, and GSA (Gender & Sexuality Alliance) advisor. I am quite certain that I’ll be collecting at least two more degrees (a PhD someday because my academic heart wants one no matter how long it takes, and maybe an MSW or Masters of Clinical Psych) before it’s all over. 2021 will bring my very first co-authoring credit on a published academic article!
Right now, my day job is ninth grade ELA teacher at a small high school in Jamaica, Queens. I work very closely with my US History counterpart to develop cross-curricular lessons. We read diverse perspectives throughout American history. I try, as much as possible, to excerpt or forego the canon entirely in favor of highlighting voices that have historically been ignored. Each text we read and concept we cover we connect to and find through lines toward things happening in the US today. I find a focus on current events does wonders in increasing engagement.
Teaching through the pandemic has been incredibly hard. As a ninth grade teacher, I had the unfortunate responsibility of teaching students who are brand new to the school. A school as small as ours, all the teachers and students are at least a little familiar with one another — but not freshmen. The challenges of teaching curriculum to kids too afraid to turn on their cameras lest they be judged by the scary fourteen year olds on the other end of the connection compared to my GSA whose population has stayed largely stable through the pandemic has really thrown into clarity what direction my career may ultimately take and what parts of teaching I find the most fulfilling, which is the one on one, the mentoring, and the guidance that a teacher cannot always provide.
I’ve been a writer since I was first able to pick up a pen. I became an unstoppable writer when I “beat” the game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for Kids when I was five (shout out to Windows 95, y’all). I started out writing exactly what I read (and for the same reason): slipping into the haunted forests, ancient castles, and misty mountains of fantasy for comfort and protection. I always included characters who were different from the characters I was reading about: queer characters, trans characters, characters with alters and twins bonded by both circumstance and magic. These days, I do a lot of writing in my fiction genre of choice now, which is science fiction. The little kid who needed the promise of magic to stay alive is still within me, but is learning to cope and thrive in a complicated world where bodies and minds like mine are not always accepted. Science fiction allows for that blending, that molding, that melting to occur with a subtle but constant march into the future in the world outside the words. I also write a lot about my experiences as a queer person, as a teacher, and as an artist because I feel that there is no better way to inspire and prove to a kid who fears that there may not be a place for them in this world is to show them examples of people like them learning to thrive and to find beauty in the struggle itself. To show people with my words that there’s no such thing as the right way to be. Being is, like everything, completely relative.
If abandoned on a deserted island, all I would need to survive would be a Keurig with a magical self-replenishing store of K-Cups, an air fryer with a self-replenishing store of some kind of potato that can be cooked therein, and a laptop with a stable internet connection. That magical bean water is the font from which all creativity flows, if you ask me. Potatoes sustained my ancestors for centuries and I’ll be able to pump out novel after novel loosely inspired by the values of Star Trek.
Anyway, that’s me. Follow for musings on queerness, life in transition, education, social justice, science fiction, and the world according to someone with a chaotic good alignment.
