Lace Up Their Boots is a hybrid of hypertext nonfiction and prose poetry. This experience was created in Twine to take advantage of that program's branching interactive elements. The narrative itself follows a gauntlet-style
choice structure with a few deviations to explore during multiple sessions. There is some wrestling terminology used in the text itself, but the work as a whole is meant to be accessible to fans and non-fans of that medium.
This work was initially created to reflect and cope with my experience navigating transgender identity in the wake of the end of a fifteen-year partnership, and became much more as the process of writing continued. While there
is trauma evident in the narrative, the primary focus is the transformation of the work's speaker through the extended metaphor of a wrestling match. This is a direct reflection of the confidence gained through exploration
of gender, sexuality, and my identity as a whole during the process of crafting this interactive narrative. The ending of the wrestling match itself reflects catharsis after a struggle to be seen as equal, as both the speaker
and myself are reinvented over time.
