Tea Leaves is an astonishing collection of fables for our time by a young writer of tremendous power and promise.
Tea Leaves presents 16 speculative short stories that place queer characters in larger-than-life situations to emphasize the surreal experience of marginalization. A queer romance spans multiple incarnations, but only in doomed cities. A gay medieval scholar must testify for his life to the otherworldly octopus who traps him in a cafe bathroom. Ignoring their better judgment, a witch brings their mortal partner on a hunt for a dangerous sorcerer and must cope with the dire consequences.
Each of the stories within Tea Leaves explores the urgency of modern queer life in encounters between the otherworldly and the queer other. In juxtaposing queer narratives with new, larger-than-life myths, Tea Leaves both exalts and lampoons the queer experience while examining the sometimes surreal obstacles of marginalization.
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Jacob Budenz is a Baltimore-based writer, actor, director, musician, and performance artist. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and BAs in Writing Seminars and Spanish from Johns Hopkins University. Budenz’s work focuses heavily on dreams, storytelling, the occult, mysticism, queerness, the grotesque, and the unfamiliar. His work in all mediums seeks to empower audiences and move them to experience dramatic catharsis while exploring the lives of society’s outliers. His writing has been published in presses such as Assaracus and Polychrome Ink. His work has been commissioned or recognized by organizations such as The Writer’s Digest, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and Spark Creative Anthologies.