What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

I Love Milk (2008) | Joe Shlabotnik / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Megan Milks’s portrait-in-essays Mega Milk (Feminist Press, 2026) has a straightforward premise: It’s a book about milk. But beneath the surface, it’s a multi-dimensional look at American dairy and all its associations. This collection is about transness, queerness, whiteness, family, farming, and much more. It takes the staid category of the “thing biography” and lights a firecracker beneath it.

Milks’s body of work experiments with both genre and gender. They are also the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body (Feminist Press, 2021), the otherworldly short story collection Slug and Other Stories (Feminist Press, 2021), and a personal history of early online music fandom Tori Amos Bootleg Webring (Instar Books, 2021). 

Mega Milk is organized as a series of essays on a single subject, but it possesses the narrative propulsion of a memoir, as Milks looks to themself and their family to examine the contemporary meaning of milk. They show us moments from their 1980s “prototypically suburban American” childhood, their research trips to animal sanctuaries and farms, and even their own imagined transformation into a bull.

Milks’s writing style is conversational and funny, but the work is also characterized by its rigor. They write chapters that go deep on everything from Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen to “the state-supported conflation of cow milk with health.” This rigor is also present in the book’s emotional excavations, as Milks examines familial relationships with a mixture of openness and determination, unwilling to accept the easy answer to anything.

In an interview with Cleo Levin, Megan Milks discusses the inspirations and craft decisions that brought this collection to life.  

Cleo Levin: Can you start by telling me where the idea to write this book began?

Megan Milks: The obvious origin point was just my name and the different jokes that people have made about it, different associations that have been kind of imposed on me. And that actually led me to develop this column for a Chicago news quarterly in I think it was 2010 that I called “Name Tags,” which was a column devoted to issues around names and naming.

For my first column, I wrote this kind of experimental essay that doubled as a column about my name and also was a call for submissions. There were a lot of questions posed and ideas explored just around names and naming. Then in the intervening years, I published two books with Feminist Press. That whole time, I was kind of thinking about changing my name, and I tried out a few different things, and nothing quite stuck.

I just kept going back to this essay that I had written in 2010 and thinking about all the other things that had come up about milk and names as a trans person since then. I thought, Oh, this maybe is a book.

Levin: In the very initial stages, what was your idea for the book? Or how did you explain it to people? And then did that idea grow or change as you went through the process of writing the book?

Milks: I always imagined it as a collection of essays, and I was really wanting to work with milk as a kind of conceptual model for how I might do the book. By that, I mean thinking about milk as very fluid, very malleable—flowing in all these different directions. It has all this capacity for transformation. It can take these different forms. I had that in mind as the formal and structural inspiration for how I might approach the book. I think initially I had conceived of the book having a stronger narrative arc that was around my name and kind of forcing myself into a new name. But in fact, it went the opposite way. I kind of locked myself into this one by virtue of calling it Mega Milk. Ultimately, it just was not that interesting to me to produce that kind of narrative. I let that go and just followed the milk where it led me.

Levin: Going off that, one of my questions was about your approach to nonfiction. I found that the writing ranged from almost academic to something much more playful in the sort of speculative sections. It sounds like that was something that came naturally to you? 

Milks: I think so. Again, I was just permitting myself to take on the essay in whatever form the subjects seem to want to take on. Like milk, I would say that the essay is similarly malleable and fluid, and there’s all this potential for it to take different forms. Some of those forms were more academic leaning, and some were more personal, some were more diaristic. And yeah, there are these moments that swerve into the speculative.

One of the constraints that I gave myself, I borrowed from Brian Blanchfield in his book, Proxies, where he has two constraints: one is related to research and knowledge, and the other is related to personal vulnerability. And that’s the one that I wanted to take for myself. The constraint being something about each essay needing to break open into some space of personal vulnerability. That was a rule that I used as a guide for which essays fit in. Because there’s so much research you could do for a book like this, so many different subjects one could explore. Committing to personal vulnerability helped me narrow down the possible milk flows I might follow.

Levin: Your last answer kind of speaks to this, but I’m curious what else you feel you—as an individual, as a writer—were bringing to the subject matter that differentiated your milk book from the other ones that existed?

Milks: There’s such a vast library of milk books in the world. One that was very important for me early on was Mark Kurlansky’s book on milk. But it’s a really broad historical overview of milk and its different cultural meanings, and also it has a lot of recipes in it. That was a great starting point for me to get a sense of the vastness of the subject. I read a lot of scholarship on milk. Especially cultural history of milk in New York. And a lot about infant feeding debates, lactation, wet nursing.

I was really interested in bringing a trans perspective to milk and kind of approaching it with a certain level of ambivalence: both acknowledging the ways that milk is about extraction and exploitation but also about nourishment, but also thinking about the trans potential of milk and kind of using that as a counterpoint to some of the ways that milk has been instrumentalized by white nationalism and eugenicist thinking.

I could also say queerness. Bringing a certain amount of queerness and queer perspective to milk was really important, both in thinking about fluidity and also queer perspectives on the family. Because milk is so strongly associated with the family, at first, I was kind of like, What business do I have as someone a little bit distant from family, someone who hasn’t lactated, who’s never given birth or, you know, nursed a child. Like what business do I have writing about milk? But then I started thinking about all these other ways in: through queer perspectives on family making and also lactation kink and the queer erotics of milk. 

Levin: You write in the book about how some of the associations with milk were uncomfortable. I’m curious, were those associations things that felt difficult to write into, or was the discomfort part of what was interesting to you?

I’m thinking specifically about the very beginning, in the first essay, when you write about how there’s these obvious associations like breasts, udders, and then you get into white nationalism and stuff. But I was thinking more specifically about being an adolescent and the more bodily aspect of it.

Milks: I am a writer who tends to go straight to the discomfort. The things that were uncomfortable then as a kid, they definitely seemed ripe for exploration in this book as a writer. I say that, but at the same time, the essay on lactation, “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” that was one of the last things I wrote for the book because I was, I don’t know, I guess I was reluctant to get into it. To get into my relationship to breasts and nipples and tits and also my relationship to my mom and breastfeeding and chestfeeding and all of that stuff. I mean, even as I’m using this language, I’m a little uncomfortable. That was one of the most challenging essays for me to write, but I think it’s one of the strongest and most important for the book.

I think there could definitely be more semen in the book. That was something that was like, I know I need to bring in this bodily substance because it’s so relevant. I think it’s interesting—I was talking to some of my family members who are also named Milks, and I think the cis men in my family have had much different experiences of being made fun of for the name that are more related to, like, dicks and semen and things than the kind of comments that I might receive.

Levin: We’ve touched on this as well, but you did a lot of research for this book about the history of breastfeeding, the milk industry’s political influence, and such. I’m curious if there was anything that really surprised you or led you in an unexpected direction?

Milks: Very early on in my research process, I learned that at one time human breast milk was thought of as white blood, which was so fascinating to me. I think I read that first in Kurlansky’s book. And then—I think it was actually the same day I read about it—I met Josh Cohen at a friend’s party. He is a religious studies scholar and has been working on this dissertation about the cultural power of breast milk. He’s particularly focused on the Spanish Inquisition era. Talking to him, I learned about how this fact—that human breast milk used to be thought of as white blood—was so meaningful in the context of blood purity laws of the time. It was actually really instrumental in codifying racism against Jewish and Muslim people. In an attempt to consolidate Christian power, the idea that Christian babies would be breastfed by Jewish or Muslim wet nurses was seen as threatening because it would cause impurities for the child, impure blood. That was a really fascinating line of inquiry that I did not expect to go down but became very important to one of the essays.

Levin: You write about your research process as part of the book’s narrative, especially the reporting trips you took. Like, “I decided to go to this animal sanctuary so I could finally meet a cow.” I’m curious, was that transparency about the process always part of the book?

Milks: I guess it was. I teach a class at The New School on creative inquiry for Lang’s first-year writing program. I’m always thinking and teaching about creative approaches to doing research. I really wanted to, with this book, challenge myself to do that kind of work. I knew that I wanted to avoid writing a book where the research takes place entirely behind the screen, or entirely in the pages of books. I definitely wanted to do a lot of on-the-ground research and bring that process into the book as a way to bring scene into the book. And also to see where the research would take me as a way of expanding my learning.

I knew that it would be irresponsible to write a book about milk without talking to people who produce milk—both people who have made the milk in their bodies and also people who are part of dairy production. It was a goal of the book to give myself opportunities to have those conversations and bring those conversations into the book.