About Daniel Lavery
The Chatner is a twice-weekly newsletter about literature, humor, folklore, religion, resentment, doing the dishes, the magical heist Now You See Me franchise, being misunderstood, and maladaptive transmasculine coping strategies by Daniel M. Lavery.
Topics include (but are not limited to):
Family estrangement
Frost festivals
Transitioning unobtrusively, like trying to open a candy-bar wrapper in a crowded movie theater
Occasional short fiction
Signs a fantasy novel you’ve just picked up is going to be good, aside from “having a map in the front”
The weirdly transmasculine history of the Old West
Classical music riots
Things my elderly Italian neighbors have said to my little dogs
Interviews with former Medieval Times employees
Dives into small presses like The Furrowed Middlebrow and Greyladies Books
The best old movies where a wicked little man gets a straight-razor shave from a barber paying a house call to his hotel room
Some light (nothing strenuous) biblical exegesis
Formerly the Shatner Chatner; William Shatner is litigious.
Probably best described as a longstanding blogger, at this point. I co-founded The Toast, a daily literary humor site that operated from 2013 to 2016, with Nicole Cliffe. It was mostly read by gay archivists and the kind of people who buy sci-fi paperbacks that feature two or three moons on the cover, and maybe a beautiful woman in a long white robe.