Connecting a Village by ‘Nathan Burgoine
When it comes to stories centered around the holidays, I often find myself removed. Sometimes, I mean that literally: when was the last time you saw one of those Hallmark-esque movies including a queer person at all, let alone a queer person with a chosen family of queer people surrounding them? Sometimes, I mean it figuratively: even when you do find the occasional story with a queer main character, if there’s any strain from a familial sense, it’s often resolved with a bow, snowflakes, and tinsel before the credits roll or the epilogue concludes. It’s a yearly frustration, and it very much led to my first foray into queer holiday romance, Handmade Holidays.
Handmade Holidays is all about a chosen family, and how they gather, sometimes part, support each other, sometimes unknowingly fail each other, and grow. As it’s a romance, there’s also a core relationship developing throughout the novella, but my main goal was to show these queer people for what they were: as a real a family as any biological one might be, and no less the loving for it.
I honestly thought I was done with holiday stories after that. I tend to write stories with a dash of speculative fiction, but Handmade Holidays didn’t have a speculative element. I had knowingly set it in my fictional Village—a version of Ottawa’s own gay Village, only with that dash of magic and less gentrification—and the Village was definitely a place I wanted to revisit again and again. The Village is, after all, another metaphor for chosen family, and the magic thereof, and takes center stage in my first collection, Of Echoes Born, including what more-or-less sparks off the rebirth of the Village in the included novelette, “A Little Village Magic.”
But another holiday story? No. Unlikely.
Except…
One of the great things about writing romances is the grand love of various tropes. There are shorthand discussion points to the romance genre that grant whole skeletal frameworks to telling a story, and if there’s one I’ve always loved, it’s the fake relationship trope. There’s just something about people only realizing how they feel when they’re pretending to feel it that really makes my little queer heart go pitter-pat, and part of that, I think, is inherent to the queerness: so many of us spend so much time pretending we’re not what we are. A reversal of that, where pretending leads to a truth? It just feels good.
Also? Fake relationship stories are often funny, and I wanted to write something funny to get myself out of a year-long funk. It turned out to be a good idea on that front, and so Faux Ho Ho, contains some moments I hope will tickle the reader: super-awkward dates, some Dungeons & Dragons cartoon cosplay, and maybe a flung jock strap. A pink one, of course.
Faux Ho Ho grew from the notion of wanting to explore a fake relationship trope plot, coupled with wanting to explore chosen family again, but in a slightly different way. I’d seen a queer friend posting a tribute to “those of us who look at the holidays like a chore of endurance” or something similar, about spending time with families that weren’t outright hostile, but weren’t welcoming, either. Or a mixed bag, where there were family members who were great and loving worth withstanding other family members, who weren’t.
Those two thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone, and it occurred to me that having a fake partner to take home for the holidays would be like bringing a small piece of a chosen family home as backup to get through a difficult time. After that, Faux Ho Ho began to fall into place.
Chosen family meant connections, and so I found myself back in the Village, eyeing the characters who’d come before, looking for an entry point. I knew I wanted someone gregarious for the role of fake boyfriend, and the most outgoing character I’d written thus far was Fiona, an outspoken lesbian who—like Handmade Holidays main character Nick—had been disowned and disconnected from her own family when she came out. In Handmade Holidays, Fiona eventually opens up her own gym, Body Positive, where the mandate is to make sure everyone, no matter how they feel about their body, has a place to foster a more positive relationship with their body and their health.
Having a trainer who worked for Fiona be the fake boyfriend became the first piece of the puzzle, and Dino was born.
Connecting Dino to Handmade Holidays and the Village in general meant I could ground the hero of Faux Ho Ho in the close-knit community I’d already crafted, which as a writer felt akin to putting on a warm sweater I already knew would fit. Silas, a geeky computer programmer type, wasn’t going to be a person who was naturally outgoing, so I eyed my stable of characters and almost immediately decided he’d be connected to Ru, the love interest of Handmade Holidays, who is blunt, outgoing, and doesn’t stand for letting a friend stay on the sidelines when they deserve to be front and center.
During Handmade Holidays, Ru leaves Ottawa to look after his father for a few years, and then returns. When he returns, it’s a quick decision, and he has nowhere to stay immediately, though it’s intimated he couch-surfs with the rest of the characters for a while. At that point, it struck me I had a great way to introduce Silas, and to create the very reason for Silas and Dino to know each other: Silas would be Ru’s roommate, and given the concluding events of Handmade Holidays, Silas would at some point be looking for a new roommate, once Ru moved out.
That became my starting point. Silas and Dino, have been living together as roommates for nine months at the start of Faux Ho Ho, and when Silas is faced with going home for a Thanksgiving event he really, really doesn’t want to attend, Dino jumps in and pretends to be his boyfriend, citing a prior commitment to his own family, and Silas has a graceful out. Neither thinks much of it after that, except when an invitation shows up later for Silas’s sister’s Christmas wedding.
Which is when the whole “fake boyfriend” thing really takes off. Like, in a plane, all the way back to Alberta where Silas’s family lives.
In a similar way to how Handmade Holidays moves through time, a year or two between each chapter, Faux Ho Ho alternates between the present in Alberta and the past nine months that Silas and Dino have spent together as roommates. So much of their time together involves the chosen family of the Village, not just Fiona and Ru, but also Nick, and Phoebe (a trans woman first introduced in Handmade Holidays, who owns and operates a consignment fashion shop we’ve seen before in Saving the Date), Fiona’s wife Jenn and their two kids, Reed and Melody, as well as a few new faces, most importantly Felix and Owen, who make up a quartet alongside Ru and Silas of friends who hang out at Bittersweets (the Village coffee shop) on a weekly basis to catch each other up on their lives.
They also play D&D and board games, because if I’m going to write queer stories, I’m going to include queer nerds out of solidarity for my people. Silas also plays the cleric, which, for my fellow D&D nerds, was a conscious choice that says a lot about who he is.
The chapters where Silas is at home, surrounded by his Village friends and living the life he’s chosen for himself are full of connections. The chapters where Silas is back in Alberta, with his family (but with Dino for backup) are an opportunity to show what those connections have done for him, and how he’s changed in his time in the Village. That was the facet of Chosen Family I really wanted to focus on this time with Faux Ho Ho: how much we grow when we finally get to be the person we are, when we finally find back-up and support.
And although Faux Ho Ho can absolutely be read as a standalone, I don’t think it’s a story I could have written without all the other stories that came before. The short fictions in Of Echoes Born, and the novellas Handmade Holidays and Saving the Date, gave me the confidence to write a character completely bolstered by the support of a good, loving, accepting community because I could picture all of them so clearly. I had a Village, so to speak.
Like Handmade Holidays, I made the choice to stick to something completely contemporary, though the fellas do hang out in Bittersweets and they do mention going to Avery’s chocolate shop from “Vanilla” (another short story set in the Village, where the proprietor has a habit of adding a mystical oomph to anything he crafts by hand, including his chocolates). Faux Ho Ho doesn’t have a speculative element, but that’s not to say there’s no magic. It’s just this time the magic is the kind found in the strength of support and community, pride, and a really well-timed kickboxing lesson or two.
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’Nathan Burgoine grew up a reader and studied literature in university while making a living as a bookseller. His first published short story was “Heart” in the collection Fool for Love: New Gay Fiction. Since then, he’s had dozens of shorter fictions published, including releasing his first collection Of Echoes Born. He does sometimes write longer things, including novellas (In Memoriam, Handmade Holidays, and Saving the Date) and has crossed the line into novel-writing, too. His debut novel, Light, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and since then he’s released two urban paranormal novels, Triad Blood and Triad Soul, and a contemporary speculative YA novel, Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks. He lives in Ottawa, Canada with his husband and their rescued husky. You can find him online at NathanBurgoine.com.
