"Girl Haven is a very special book to me because it's one of the first things I've ever written that came from a place of total honesty and vulnerability," she said. "I started working on it right after I transitioned in 2016, so a lot of feelings in there are very raw for me." Sturges says she wanted to create a book that depicted the Trans experience in a way she felt other media just doesn't seem to grasp.

"I think there's a misconception that there is one overriding narrative in the media about Trans people, which is that we're four years old, we're praying to God to turn us into a girl, we've always known this all our lives, then one day we finally decide, okay I'm going to transition, then all at once you're a new person, you get surgery then suddenly boom! You're a woman. It's not like that at all for everyone, some people don't figure it out until much later, some people figure it out during puberty, which is when Ash, our main character starts having questions, and one of the things that's so important to me is understanding Transness for so many people is a process that takes a great deal of time and thought. It's rare that Trans people wake up one day and go, "oh I'm Trans and I'm going to transition.' It's more a question of like, I'm having these feelings and I'm not sure what they mean and what is gender anyway, and am I like this, am I like that? What does it all mean?"

Including the process of questioning was important for Sturges. "A lot of the confusion and fear and frustration that the main character is experiencing are feelings I was processing at the time and that is something I have never really done before as a writer," she says. Writing Ash's character was a way for her to explore her own character.

Her understanding of gender was also shifting as Sturges worked on the book. "The initial script and the final printed form of the book have significant differences because I was learning how to understand myself and I was learning how to understand gender as a whole, better," she says. "There's a passage at the end where one of the characters asks another character 'what does it mean to be a girl?' and I had to spend a long time thinking about what I think it means to be a girl, so that I could answer that question."

All four of her main characters are based on different aspects of Sturges' own personality and identity. "Eleanor is my desire to help and console and comfort. Chloe is my desire to be in charge and be protective. Junebug is my silliness, whereas Ash is just much closer to being my own self, my raw self, ego, whatever."

After realizing she wanted to transition, Sturges knew she also wanted to create something that might help young people like her understand their feelings and experiences with gender. "Transitioning gave me the opportunity to really talk about myself in honest and vulnerable ways like I never could before, because I didn't feel like I had to hide anything anymore," she says. "When I started thinking about what kind of book I wanted to write, the thing that struck me was I wished I would have had a book when I was in middle school that would have explained to me, given me some kind of model or path as to what I was feeling and what I was going through because I didn't have any idea how to process those feelings and there was no support for me, even if I had understood them."

Her work on Lumberjanes helped her understand the importance of language and feelings when it comes to communicating with middle grade readers. "It was important to me to use a lot of feeling language in [Girl Haven], that gives kids the ability to give names to their feelings. I learned that writing Lumberjanes, one of the things we talked about a lot was a process that was already put in place. When we tell a Lumberjanes story, we show readers that if they can learn how to say what they're feeling then it helps us resolve our problems. So much of what we're trying to do at that age is we're feeling stuff and don't know what it is but if we can attach language to it, that helps."

She also wanted to make sure that the story was relatable to children on all parts of the gender identity spectrum. While, of course, Sturges wrote with her own experiences and perspectives in mind, she also brought in other Trans women to help make sure the story was universal.

"We hired a Trans sensitivity reader who did an amazing job and made the book so much better by reading through it all and giving her own perspective on the story and saying, 'this thing here might be a little too specific, or a little too general, or maybe not everyone feels this way.' I took all her suggestions so I should give her a writing credit," she joked.

It takes many creative minds to produce a graphic novel, and each step in the process was overseen by Sturges. While she had no idea what she wanted the art style to look like, she did know she wanted to find someone who could convey the emotions of the characters through their work. "Girl Haven is drawn by Megan Carter who is a fantastic Canadian comic book illustrator," she gushed. "I had no idea what I wanted [the book] to look like, but I knew I didn't want it to be too realistic because if things are too hyper realistic it can be a little too real, and that can be off-putting, and it can also be unrelatable." Carter and Sturges eventually settled on a cartoonish style that allows the reader to fill in details from their experiences, making the books feel even more universal.

As the novel came together, Sturges reflected on her career, and the many steps it took for her to get to a place where she could publish such a raw and personal story. She admitted to me that she did not always plan on creating LGBTQ work. "When I first started writing comics, I was not even out to myself yet, let alone to the world, so I was doing, I think, very serviceable imitations of other creators at the beginning of my career. I knew I wanted to tell stories, but I didn't know how to make those stories personal because I didn't even know myself that well."

The closest she came to telling her own story was in her 2008 book House of Mystery, a story that centered on a female protagonist. "If you read the book now in retrospect it's clear there is a woman who is saying, 'let me out!' but I couldn't really see that at the time," she says.

When she finally finished the book in 2012, she realized she was Trans, but, even then, she found it difficult to talk about it. "For several years I was too scared to admit it, talk about it, and certainly not to write about it."
When she finally got to a place where she was ready to talk about her identity and experiences, Sturges felt guilty. She says she could have contributed more, earlier on, to the cultural conversation that was starting to happen about LGBTQ rights.

"When I came out, I tried to make up for lost time by saying, let's only do LGBTQ forever. My mission as a writer now is to create primarily books for LGBTQIA youth to help them feel accepted and loved and connected. That's the primary goal, if I'm known for something, I'd like it to be that."

Now, Sturges is working on her next novel, The Science of Ghosts, a thrilling mystery that centers a Trans woman, without making the story innately about out her transness. "The book that I have coming out in February is called The Science of Ghosts and it's an adult graphic novel — it's not porn, it's just like for adults — and it's about a Trans women named Joy Ravenna who is a psychologist who specializes in forensic parapsychology, which means that she records the behavior of ghosts and then uses her training to analyze the behavior to understand what they're trying to say and then she uses that to solve crimes."

The story blends the paranormal with mystery, all while putting a Trans woman at the front of the scene. "One of the things I love about this story is it's got a Trans woman protagonist who is in a healthy, happy relationship with another woman, and her Transness is not the focus of the story. It's a ghost detective story, not a Trans story," she says.

She also hopes to create a sci-fi novel down the line. "One of my other big loves is science fiction. I would love to create a big science fiction epic."

She says her plans for this story, which are nowhere near finalized, are to center a pair of Trans Lesbian archeologists on a spaceship. "They are searching for the last remaining copy of the internet that is just on this old spaceship that crashed, and they want to find it because they have heard that Tumblr discourse contains some of the most entertaining stuff ever written," she laughed.

Aside from sci-fi and Tumblr discourse, Sturges also admitted her secret passion is Hallmark movies. "I absolutely love Hallmark Christmas movies. I can watch them all day long. They're so formulaic," she said. "They make no bones about it, they're just like, this is how the world is, it's straight and it's white and people are wealthy and Black people are a fun friend, and it's all put out there so there's no guesswork about where people stand, and it's just like, this is kind of racist, and kind of classist, and kind of sexist, and that's what we're doing here. If you can work past that, the formula of it is always the same and it feels really good because you always know how the story is going to end."

Her favorite Hallmark actress is Lacey Chabert from Party of Five and Mean Girls fame. "There's one where Lacey Chabert is a baker and she enters into this big gingerbread competition that's held in this small little town where she lives, and that's her dream is to win this gingerbread contest, and I just love that that's her dream, it's not to do anything positive or make the world a better place, you know, she just wants to bake cookies and just be the best darn cookie baker there is. It's not controversial, it's just a sugar cookie, that's what the movie is, it has no nutritional value but it's delicious."

Despite her love for "sugar cookie movies," Sturges has a knack for creating feel-good media that also makes the world a better place. She hopes to someday transfer her talents from the page to the screen. "I'm sick of it always being straight people, for one thing," she says of her guilty pleasure, Hallmark movies. "I'm sick of it always being white people, I'm sick of it always being cis people, as much as I like them, I'm very aware that these movies are pushing a very strong normative stance and I am not included in that stance. I don't exist in the world of a Hallmark Christmas movie. I literally don't exist. I could never be the heroine of one, and so that's really despicable and I think there is so much space, and I keep threatening to write a Christmas romcom that is just super Queer, because someone needs to. It would have all the same sort of formulaic aesthetics but minus all the cis/het normativity. I think that would be a very magical thing to have," she laughed.

While the world waits for the Lilah Sturges Hallmark collaboration (starring Lacey Chabert, for sure) Girl Haven continues to reassure and inspire young kids (and plenty of Trans women in the 40s on Twitter, according to Sturges) that the world has enough space for all our feelings. Pick up a copy of Girl Haven from your local Seattle Book store and read along with us this week.