Thanks to Sybil Lamb and Carly Bodnar for teaming up to art battle on a gorgeous fucking cover. Thanks to Kate Friggle for the joke about hormones being bullshit. Thanks to Imogen Binnie for the phrasing of starting as one cis person and ending up another. Thanks to Erika Lopez for that hairbrush idea, Flaming Iguanas forever. Thanks to Jeff Randall for saying in a key moment, “You give so much and you get so little.” Thanks to Cat Fitzpatrick once more, as we pondered a memory, and you gave me the phrase “excitement and embattlement.” Thanks to loveandcrossbones’s Threadless for an excellent I JUST WANT TO BE GAY IN SPACE WITH YOU T-shirt that I still wear. Thanks to the crew at Biblioasis, who understood I had to go. And thanks to Joni Pedersen for the Biophilia Party—there was no better way to be unknowingly sent off into quarantine.

In “Enough Trouble,” the Miriam Toews quote is from Swing Low: “It’s just something that happens sometimes, a story as old as time, and this time it happened to me.” The Megan Nash song they all listen to is “Summer”; it’s Prairie Voices singing Eric Whitacre’s “A Boy and a Girl.” And the show they’re watching is Party Down—big ups to Kellen Cozzens and Dillon Flynn for turning me on to that one. Thanks, too, to Sherri Klassen for your essay “Four Mennonite Morality Tales and a Revolution in Russia.”

I must obviously beg apologies from the Winklerites—if you made it this far, you know I write with love! And thanks to my mom, my dad, and Harold, three very different people who all never cease to ask nor answer questions.

To the Oregon crew of Olde, how could I even begin … you were all my first adopted home. If I even tried to name you all, I’d run out of page space so fast. So I’ll just say: Sarah, I love you, I miss you. Shads, Eric, Russell, Em, I love you all always. Tara and Glo, 2009 changed my life and I’ll never forget it. Ashley and Jess, let’s bathe in a fountain sometime. Everyone else, you know who you are <3.

Shout-out to the hilarious, caring, wild, beautiful, dreamy denizens of Instar Books Radio. I’m so glad I didn’t have to experience pandemic life without you.

And thanks once more to the housemates who put up with me. Gwen, Kiki, Sybil, the results are in and the House of Lamb Sandwich will live forever. As for everyone else, if you’re ever rolling through Windsor, stop at Villains for karaoke and the DH for a meal. Get the Wake Up! burger.

CASEY PLETT is the author of the novel Little Fish and the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love. She is the winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. She co-edited (with Cat Fitzpatrick) Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and she has written for the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Maclean’s, and them, among others.