40 bones: letters from Newcastle to London
40 bones is a monthly letters series tracking the correspondence between D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour.
Two trans writers and artists trying to MAKE WORK IN THE HELLSCAPE. The letters are candid, humorous and cover a range of topics including medical transition, sex, gossip, money, shame, the act of writing, and the weirdness of being.
Follow along as Mortimer and Jalilipour somehow!!!!!!!!! get through the day
By D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour
25/08/2026 — Newcastle
Dear Marlo,
I have been visiting my parents in Newcastle this week. It always feels complicated to come here and I try to put it off as much as possible because I had such a bad time going to school here when I was a kid. It was only for a couple years, but I learnt so much about the worst of this country. Both in its racism, but also in its neglecting of vulnerable people. Sometimes when I walk around the centre of the city, where the goths and punks used to hang out, with their big hairs and piercings I used to envy, my eyes look for familiar faces. Not faces of people I liked, but people I tolerated. I often wonder about the kids I went to school with. I can’t imagine many positive things. There was a lot of pent-up hate and rage in that school. But the city itself has changed so much, it’s become much trendier, and more accepting of its diversity. I guess the university has been good for that. I still feel surprised when I see visibly queer people out and about in Newcastle. When I was a kid here there was very little of that. I guess places like Newcastle, which felt pretty grim to me in 2009, and lacked acceptance of individuality, also tend to become a hotbed for subcultures. It’s sad to see the lack of alternative styles, like the goths I was obsessed with. I wonder what became of them? Did they all get ’Snog, Marry, Avoid’ makeovers and get office jobs? Or did they migrate to the next grim city?
I have to say I feel a sense of untruthfulness calling Newcastle grim, because it does have some attractions, and when I do mention it to people they often react excitedly. But to me, it will always be the city where I experienced racism for the first time, and the worst of it too. The racism I experienced was worse outside of school, but in school I was somewhat of a protector to my only friend who wore hijab and received the worst of it. I think her hijab in a way became the centre of attention and made my difference more invisible. In Iran, bullying wasn’t much of a thing in my school, because we received the worst of it from law-abiding teachers, and it didn’t leave much time for kids to bully one another. But this type of intense bullying at my new British school was both shocking and unexpected to me. I remember a year seven boy once spat on my friend at lunch time and no one did anything. I marched to the principal's office and in my broken English asked her, "Is this a school or a Zoo?” At home I had to pretend I liked my school, because my parents had invested so much in my future.
Newcastle was also the first place I saw people expressing themselves in nontraditional ways, not just the goths but the queers too. One weekend after church I was out with my family and some church friends, when we came across a small pride march and when I say small it was approximately 10-15 people. I remember a person in a dress and a bright pink feather boa. I remember the church people making mocking remarks. I remember my fascination.
Speaking of feather boas, Tim Curry died today. I must say I had prepared myself for this for a few years. I know he was an icon to you too. Funnily enough, it was a fellow Christian friend who recommended The Rocky Horror Show to me, in my post Newcastle teen years. I was immediately obsessed and developed a massive crush on Frank ’N’ Furter. I’d never seen anything like it. My Christian friend and I even went to a live performance of it together. I remember us getting out of the taxi and immediately seeing an old man in his sixties or seventies, dressed as Frank ’N’ Furter in fishnets and all getting out of his car – a sight I’d never seen before. My mind was further blown by watching the men in fishnets dancing on stage. It’s probably true what they say about queer exposure to kids, and I’m so glad about it. Because without a film like Rocky Horror Show, I think it would have taken me much longer to understand that it’s ok to kiss girls and boys!
I love your analogy of feeling that your closet was made of mirrors. I wonder if that’s what icons like Tim Curry or Dolly Parton become too, magic mirrors for us to see reflections of ourselves or our desires onto, and we feel a deep closeness with them, like they’re our queer parents, or maybe even our dream crushes/lovers, we project onto them and they reflect back at us. I wonder how that feels for them, to hold so much.
I am reading a Jarman book, and it is making me think about revisiting the cottage. It’s been three years since I was there, and I think I need to go back and see what it feels like from the outside. I was there during the King’s coronation, which was a surreal sight. So many small cottages with union jacks on top. I still kick myself for not documenting some of them. But it did not feel safe back then, there were many of them and one of me. You asked me if I am writing outside these letters, I am, and I’ve been thinking for the past few years about how I can put the experience on paper. I know I did that in a way without letters, but there were feelings I was having when I was there that have taken me time to process. Feelings about this country and its nationalist ideals, my place in it, and the sea. I visited the sea every day when I was there. Even when I didn’t feel like leaving the cottage, I forced myself to, because it felt disrespectful not to. Not just to the sea but to myself too. The sea felt like an escape from the middle class and nationalist claustrophobia of the cottages. When you’re at the sea, you only look forwards. The sea doesn’t belong to anyone, and in a way it belongs to everyone. And now, every time I visit any sea, I think about the Dungeness sea. I think about how all water is linked, and how there is so much more of it than there is of us and the land, and how scary and comforting that is.
I went to see the Odyssey recently, and one particular line has stuck with me, it’s from the moment that the ship is going past the singing Sirens, and Odysseus, bound to the ship pillars, cries with this strange orgasmic pleasure in his face, and his voiceover says that the Sirens tell you a secret individual to you, and what they told him of his dreams, his wish, and what he wanted in the world, and what he most wanted in the world, is what he had already had and lost. It made me think about how I have always looked to the future, and wanted change, almost demanded it, or forced it. I know it’s only human to do this. I am a deeply nostalgic person too. So I am stuck in a place of wanting change, and wanting to go back in time. I have been trying to make peace with Newcastle, and thinking back to half a lifetime ago when I lived here. I’m trying to remember what parts of myself I miss, what parts I lost, and how I can gain them back, or if I even should.
Here’s a photo of a rock with multiple holes I found on the Northshields beach. Do you think this counts as a hagstone?
3/09/2026
To Kasra,
Definitely a hagstone. Makes me think of that Diane Di Prima quote: “It will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.” I think about all the slippery things working to make that hagstone full of holes. It also makes me think of this rash I get on my chest from either wearing a binder too much or being allergic to my own breasts, who knows. The rash blooms like the holes in your hagstone. It wants so desperately to connect with itself. I wonder if one day it will consume me.
How violent do your dreams get? The other night I dreamt I wrestled a gun from a man wearing too many clothes. Walking home from the gym yesterday it occurred to me that he may have been a character in the book I am writing, a guy who wears too many clothes to the doctors. I have never met him so it didn’t hit me right away. And anyway, you don’t always recognise people you know when you meet them in dreams, do you? That’s usual. But this was the first time I’d dreamed of a person I’d never met, but had written. That was unusual. And cool. I thought it was cool. I haven’t written this character in a while and I think he was asking me to pay him some attention.
The gun I took from him fit snug and felt right in my palm like how my guitar capo does. It was elegantly curled and gold, like my capo. I can’t explain but I knew I had held it before when I felt its shape.
I ask you about violence because I shot someone in the dream. I had to. I still don’t know if the revolver was really my guitar capo in disguise. I hope so because the girl hadn’t done anything wrong.
I think it’s true what you say about queer exposure. Queers make queers. And fan culture is how we reproduce and survive. A couple of weeks ago I went to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Have you seen it? There is a part in which the main character, filmmaker Chris, played by Hannah Einbinder, talks about her sexual awakening. Cue flashback to a kid in bottle thick glasses on her living room floor, bathed in light from the TV, and enthralled by a sex scene on the screen. The scene involves a young actress and the film is part of a horror franchise called Camp Miasma. As an adult the girl in glasses is tasked with reviving her beloved zombie franchise. She meets the final girl (now final woman, Gillian Anderson) responsible for her index fantasy and together they stage a reboot. It’s bloody and hot.
As I left the cinema I thought of Tim Curry, not because he died because he wasn’t dead yet, but because of my own girl in glasses moment. My friend Heather and I are 13, side by side on the sofa in the back room of my parent’s house. Rocky Horror plays on DVD. Somewhere circa ‘Sweet Transvestite’ my eyes get dishplate-big. Dolly Parton described first watching Johnny Cash like this: “I saw him on stage and I had all these feelings. Which now I know was just being horny”. Tim Curry as Frank n Furter left me similar. I was agog for his walk. The jut of his corset. His gender! The way he rhymed ‘satanic’ with ‘mechanic.’ His voice !! I adored his full, tumescent voice, itself as erotic as a boner in tights. I learned to sing all the words in his cadence, re-winding and fast-forwarding the DVD with my younger sister next to me, who I had converted to the misson of a life lived for the thriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiills.
A few years ago, we went to the singalong together. I was Rocky and she was Magenta. After the screening I entered the costume contest. I was in bandages: bandaged chest, bandages balled up to make a packer in gold lame hot pants stretched over my sizable ass. I remember the bandages falling off me on the tube home. I came third. I was elated.
Frank-N-Furter knows his body, he knows what it does, and what it can give to others.
My teenage body walked around in a fog. The mist of my transness, sure, but on top of that, a bad drug trip aged 14 left me with flashbacks that lasted for years. They would come and go without warning. I didn’t trust my mind or body not to upend me again, having already demonstrated reality to be a fabrication.
Demonstrate from Latin demonstratus, past participle of demonstrare "point out, indicate, demonstrate," figuratively, "prove, establish," from de- "entirely" (see de-) + monstrare "point out, show," from monstrum "divine omen, wonder" (see monster). I mean demonstrate. I mean it was monstrous. I mean it was not without wonder (see monster). I’ve been thinking about writing about this experience. I never have. It takes a while to conceive of the liberation in your own body horror.
In Camp Miasma Chris describes wanting to be reduced to flesh, pursued as flesh and pounded as a body and nothing more. The t-shirt slogan rings in my brain: I am not just a mind. I am a piece of meat. I understand the desire to be relieved of the unrelenting pressure of being an I. Film goes some way in facilitating this, books do too, or they always have done for me. The mind can’t live in the body all the time, it must, like the trans avenger Little Death, dig a hole in the ice. Dream in blood. Personally, I have always relied on the kindness of pathological dissociation.
Joyce Carol Oates said “blood is memory without consciousness.” I keep thinking about this. It’s terrifying like how sunflowers are. I don’t know why the idea of memory without consciousness frightens me so much. It is also freeing. According to Connor Habib horror represents the total removal of choice. I don’t know if the pleasure in watching horror is also a nostalgia for non-being, or the desire to return to 0 but it seems that way right? Return is the only plotline. From Rocky Horror to the Odyssey. Frank-N-Furter's last song is called ‘I’m going home.’ Your letter is a return too, to Newcastle and the sea. It’s also horror, the horror of white nationalism. Thank you for the image of you by the sea. I’ll think of you [a nuclear Kasra fusion] in Newcastle and Dungeness linked by water, both kid and now, looking forward and OUT.
I was in Hungary recently in a small town called Gyula. I found the suburban town stifling. Threat cobwebbed the trees. Not violence but its traces. One night, after we were refused service in a local bar, I guess we didn’t read local, we took our bikes out and found a river to swim in. Preternaturally warm and buggy, the river felt still; filmy. God, it was a relief to dip my whole body in. Riding there we passed a field of sunflowers. I suggested we stop for a minute and drink our elderflower beers. We pulled up for the sky show. It turned blue, red, purple over us. I went Ahh. I have never seen so many sunflowers. Weird as all hell. There were hundreds of seed-heavy heads facing the same way, which reminds me of how you write about the sea. The flowers dwarfed me in the dust-to-dust way I hear in your letter. I took my phone out, fumbling, and asked my new residency friend to take my picture. I took theirs first. They stood close to the yellow legion. Awkward smile on. Then, as a sweat bead formed on my head and I slowly sunk into the soil they took mine. Smile and flash. Bless us for the way we interact with what is beyond us. I love being made a fool by nature. Thought this about the eclipse too!!!! WHERE WERE YOU FOR THE ECLIPSE?
I am glad you are writing about the sea, nationalism and Dungeness. I can’t wait to hear more. Do you want to go to the sea together one time to feel small and full of holes? I was thinking even if the gun was only a capo I am grateful for my dream, it means somewhere I am preparing to take arms.
Marlo
Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, writer based in the East Midlands. In their creative writing practice they use methods of speculative and auto-fiction. They are interested in the re-imagining of histories through a queer lens, in particular the erotics in depictions of intimacy and violence.
D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London. His first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Speed Glum Hero, their monograph, came out with Sticky Fingers Publishing in 2024. They are currently working on their first novel.
