Emily St. James
Emily St. James is an TV critic, journalist, podcaster, television writer, and author. She writes for the TV show Yellowjackets and her bylines have been seen in the A.V. Club, and New York Times. She is also the founder and Editor in Chief of Episodes, a newsletter focused on smart longform writing about the moments that make pop culture. Her debut novel, WOODWORKING, was published in 2025.
Q: How did the idea for WOODWORKING come about?
A: I had seen the movie “Booksmart,” a natural starting point for this, and was very much like, I wish there was basically a teen sex comedy set where I grew up in rural America, rural South Dakota. One of the things that people loved about “Booksmart” is one of the characters there is queer. And I was like, ‘Well, what if one of the teens was trans?’ Basically because I was newly out. It was right before I came out publicly, and ‘what if this was trans’ was my creative process at that time.
I never could figure it out. My wife and I write screenplays together, and she was not that interested in the idea of a teen sex comedy set where we grew up, and I didn't have ideas for it beyond what if one of them was trans—but that kind of like got lodged in my brain is like wanting to do something about an unusual relationship between teen girls and one of them is trans in South Dakota. Somewhere in the process of that, I had the thought of, ‘Oh, what if one of them is a teacher’ and then, of course, you can't do a teen sex comedy if one of them is 35 but when you newly come out—as trans but as any kind of queer— I think you're just kind of grasping around for anybody who knows what they're doing.
So it just struck me as a really interesting inversion of the mentor-mentee relationship. It just the second I sort of landed on a teacher needs her student to help her transition. I was like, I just knew there was something there that I was curious in exploring, and then it was just a process of figuring out how to write a novel.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by Founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our January 2026 author. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
