Today we’d like to introduce you to V.f. Thompson.
Hi v.f., we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Storytelling has always been as natural to me as breathing. When i was a little kid, toys were always a gateway to constructing narratives; when i played with Legos, more than building with them, i loved to use the characters and props to build worlds and adventures. As i got older, i fell into writing hard, and as an early teenager knew that i wanted to be an author—so i became one. i started writing as much as i could, learning how to put together plots and watch them play out. In those early days a lot of my writing was based on existing media i enjoyed, but as i got a little older i learned to take those models and use them to tell original stories. Horror was my main area of interest from an early age—first, because i was terrified of everything as a little kid, and then because i wanted to learn to master my fears. In high school i began writing speculative fiction in earnest, and at the same time discovered a love of theatre and the performing arts. i was heavily involved in many high school and community theatre projects as a teenager, and when i first started college i was enrolled in both an acting and creative writing program and believed that would be my degree path.
It wasn’t until i kept struggling to find my footing in mainstream artistic spaces that i realized that as much as i love the stage, i was more interested in the arts from a sociological and critical perspective than as pure entertainment. As a young adult, i lived in both Kalamazoo and Lansing, Michigan, soaking up as much theatre, music, poetry, and writing as i could and trying to use it to better understand both myself and our shared world and the communities within it. It was during that period that i stopped waiting for life to give me permission to be the artist i wanted to be, and i simply became her. i had started publishing my short fiction in 2015, and i realized if i could do that without a degree than i could make theatre without a degree too. i dropped out of my acting program, bought a silver wig and makeup, and became a living statue for the next year. Through the connections i made doing this, i fell into the punk and d.i.y. scenes, which allowed me to continue to sharpen my creative skills and make connections with other scrappy little artists like me. i started going to house shows and reading zines and my whole conception of what it meant to be successful as a creative person changed—it became more about internal validation and immediate community than about widespread recognition or a “traditional” career.
In 2018, following a near death experience arising from a car accident, i realized i needed some kind of way to rationalize my survival, and so turned to clowning. My main background in theatre was Shakespeare and period drama, and i was no stranger to play the fool. i began to experiment with my persona through drag, burlesque, and karaoke, trying out different stage names and characters before eventually settling on myself, “v.f. thompson”. i had by this point already been publishing under my own name for several years, and it made sense to me to just allow the print and performance arenas of my life to be united under one banner. This is how the v.f. thompson i am now came to be; no matter if i’m writing, reciting poetry, doing stand-up, or facilitating a play or a party, i’m always myself. It took a lot, but i’ve learned that myself is really the only thing i have any idea how to be.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Being both on the autistic spectrum and very visibly queer from an early age, i often had trouble connecting my peers. i struggled a lot with meltdowns in early and middle childhood, which lead to me being a kind of pariah for much of elementary and middle school; no one wanted to be friends with the girl who could only wear sweatpants because of sensory issues and started sobbing on the floor when she became triggered or overstimulated. As i got a bit older, the arts allowed my to both express myself more authentically and begin to understand my burgeoning queerness and to begin to control my physical reactions to emotional and sensory overstimulation. Acting was invaluable to learning to put myself together, but it also had its pitfalls; in some ways, i became overreliant on masking in order to move through the world, and when my trauma began to catch up with me as an adult, the mask began to slip and i again began to struggle with emotional regulation and meltdowns on top of the garden variety depression and anxiety which had aflicted me since puberty.
i eventully came to understand that the primary root of this trauma was abuse i experienced as a child, first at the hands of a close family member as a very young girl and then later by predators online during my adolescence. This existing damage was compounded by an on-campus assault i experienced from another student in 2018. i was taught that i was broken by other broken people who needed me to be broken, and i believed it for a long, long time. It wasn’t until these struggles culminated in a moment of distraction while driving during a thunderstorm in 2018 that i experienced the shock to the system that really made me realize i was alive and that my body moving through the world has weight. i was lucky enough that neither myself nor those in the opposing vehicle sustained anything beyong minor injuries in a crash that should have killed us all, and i became determined to truly learn to live. i still struggle greatly with the anxiety and depression, but i have learned through the art of storytelling that you can always find reasons to keep going even when the going feels impossible to push through.
Things became more difficult again when COVID happened; i was working full-time as a d.i.y. event organizer in the Lansing area when suddenly there were no more events to organize. i tried my hand at putting together some shows online, but it just wasn’t quite the same. i really internalized a lot of the external grief in the world around me at the beginning of the pandemic, and this sparked the reemergence of all that buried trauma which had been hidden just under the surface for so long. Still, with those points of trauma and hurt identified, i was able to begin to respond to them and heal more effectively. The hardest thing i’ve ever had to learn is the only way to recover from trauma is to live it all over again—to sit with it, hold space for it, and eventually, learn to let it go. The arts helped me do that, but it was something i had to do myself.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
As stated, i was working comfortably as an event facilitator in early 2020, building on all of the previous experiences i’ve laid out, as well as continuing to write, perform, and edit on the side. In October of 2018, i had made the leap from just trying to get my own work published to publishing myself, working with the artist Levi C. to create the zine x/y: a junk drawer of trans voices, which evolved into a project i called The Queen Mab Collective, hosting monthly open mics at different venues around town to celebrate the release of each issue. When the pandemic happened and the future became incredibly uncertain, i decided it was finally time to take all of that boots-on-the-ground practical experience and go back to school. i reenrolled at Western Michigan University where i had studied previously, now studying sociology as my major and minoring in theatre and classics (which changed to world religion halfway through my degree path). More than creating art, i wanted to understand it—why we create it, why we share it, and what it means to build community through it. i had always believed in the power of the arts to inspire powerful social dialogue, but now i was working to start and facilitate those conversations myself.
Through all of it, i continued both my writing and my clowning, publishing my fiction, poetry, and critical writing regularly in anthologies and indepedent literary magazines. As a clown, i perfom both comedy and poetry, though i prefer to think of myself as a “tragedian” than a comedian, which is to say my work is deeply concerned with finding the joy in all of the horror and identifying the horror lurking in the cracks of the joy. As a writer, i primarily worked to sharpen my pen telling tales of things that go bump in the night, with publications from Dark Matter INK, Neon Hemlock Press, Last Girls Club, and many more.
Once the pandemic lightened enough to allow public gatherings to again be feasible, i began organizing shows again under the Queen Mab Collective banner, with this prototype transitioning into the art collective The Dionysian Public Library at the end of 2021. The duality at the heart of the Dionysus story, the battle between temperance and indulgance, has always reflected to me that struggle between suffering an delight, agony and ecstacy, death and life, that we so often find ourselves caught between as these strange creatures we have decided to call human beans. It was for this reason i erected the Library in his honor—not as a physical building, but a state of mind. It started out with resuming the publication of the x/y zine from a new #1 and beginning a new, ongoing unthemed literature zine called The Vineyard. We produced our first live show in 2022, hosting the touring musicians Jo Rodriguez and Skeleton Drive on campus at Western, and hosted several more shows before beginning our first official “season” with our first annual Halloween party in 2023, the From Above/From Below Ball, a release celebration for our first anthology, Trans Rites: A Collection of Genderf*cked Horror. In the years since, we have continued to produce zines, anthologies, plays, stand-up shows, concerts, poetry readings, and more, with the Library acting as a space to both foster creative play across mediums and disciplines as well as to encourage critical inquiry into its impact and importance, and we just finished our third full season of shows in summer 2026.
In autumn 2025, afrter almost a decade of ecclectic experience, i graduated with my degree in sociology from Western with my focus in feminist studies, and now work full-time as the outreach specialist for The Connection Youth Services, a family crisis and resource center which exists to provide struggling adolescents and their families with extra levels of critical support in navigating crises. This work exists in tandem with both my continued creative work and scholarly studies in sociology, which is itself the foundation of my creative work. To me, the arts are only as useful as they allow us to understand ourselves, each other, and how we relate to each other across divides in identity, culture, and communication; entertainment without pedagogy is just anasthesia, and while that has its place, my place is with my hands in the guts of it, doing the dirty work of utilizing the arts to educate, edify, and connect.
What were you like growing up?
i grew up surrounded by the trees and by nature, and even though i have become a city girl as an adult, my heart will always belong to the woods.
Contact Info:
- Website: dionysianpubliclibrary@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/v.f.thompson/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vivian.fey.thompson
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-f-thompson/
- Twitter: https://x.com/VF_Thompson
