Ink & Saltwater follows a transgender man aboard the Titanic in 1912 as he discovers friendship, love, and the freedom to live openly as himself while facing an uncertain future. Why did the Titanic feel like the right historical setting for Tom’s story?

I’ve been fascinated by the Titanic for as long as I can remember, but over time that fascination shifted away from the ship itself and toward the people aboard it. We know so much about the disaster, but there are hundreds of people whose names survived while their thoughts, relationships, fears, hopes, and private lives disappeared with them. I kept coming back to the question: who else don’t we get to know?

Eventually that became, “What might life have looked like for someone like me in 1912?” The Titanic also gave Tom something his old life could not: anonymity. He steps onto this enormous ship surrounded almost entirely by strangers, introduces himself as Thomas Bennett, and suddenly nobody there has a previous version of him to compare against. For a few days, he gets to experience what it feels like to simply exist as himself without having to explain how he got there.

That made the setting especially powerful to me because the reader knows something Tom doesn’t. He sees the voyage as the beginning of his life. We know how little time he actually has. I wanted the tragedy to come not only from the sinking, but from watching someone finally begin imagining a future just before history takes that future away.

The novel places a lot of emotional weight on small moments, such as Tom being called “lad” or hearing his chosen name. Why were those quiet moments important to you?

Because I think identity is often experienced through incredibly ordinary moments. For Tom, being called “lad” might seem meaningless to everyone else in the room. Nobody stops the conversation. Nobody realizes they have just done something profound for him. But to Tom, it means someone looked at him and saw exactly what he hoped they would see without needing an explanation.

I wanted those moments to matter because I didn’t want his identity to exist only in dramatic conversations about being transgender. His life is also eating breakfast with friends, getting teased, laughing too loudly, flirting badly, sharing a room with other men, hearing someone casually say his name. Those ordinary experiences are part of what allows him to realize that he isn’t pretending to have a life. He is actually living one.

There’s also something especially meaningful to me about his name. Tom has known who he is long before anyone aboard the Titanic meets him, so other people aren’t making him real by calling him Tom. But hearing that name reflected back at him lets him experience being recognized in a way he rarely has before. Sometimes the smallest acknowledgment can carry an enormous amount of weight when you’ve spent years wondering whether you’ll ever receive it.

Were there real historical people, passengers, or accounts that influenced the characters or events in the novel?

There wasn’t one specific Titanic passenger who became the model for Tom, Nora, or the other major characters. I actually wanted them to remain fictional because that gave me room to explore possibilities without putting thoughts, identities, or experiences onto a real person who can no longer speak for themselves.

What influenced me much more were the real accounts surrounding the Titanic: passenger experiences, third-class life aboard the ship, social expectations in 1912, the physical spaces passengers would have occupied, and the thousands of small historical details that make the world believable.

I was also influenced by what the historical record does not tell us. Queer and transgender people obviously did not suddenly begin existing once society developed modern language for them, but the records we have from earlier periods are often incomplete, filtered through other people, or simply silent. That silence fascinated me.

I didn’t want to write a modern trans character wearing Edwardian clothes, but I also didn’t want to treat an incomplete archive as proof that people like Tom could not have existed. There are things history can tell us with certainty, and then there are places where fiction has to admit, “We don’t know, but this life was possible.” That space between what we know and what may have been is really where Tom was born.

If you could ask readers one question after they finish Ink & Saltwater, what would you want it to be?

Whose stories are we still missing? That question goes beyond Tom and beyond queer history for me. History is very good at preserving certain people: the famous, the wealthy, the powerful, the people who left behind enough paperwork for us to reconstruct their lives. But human beings are more complicated than the archive.

After readers finish Tom’s story, I hope they find themselves wondering about the people whose names appear once on a passenger list, in a census record, in a photograph, or sometimes nowhere at all. Who did they love? What were they afraid of? Who did they become when nobody was documenting them?

We can’t know every lost story, and fiction shouldn’t pretend that we can. But I think there is value in remembering that silence in the historical record does not mean a life never existed. If Tom makes someone look at history and wonder, “Who else was there?” then I think the book has done what I hoped it would do.

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