Since Riley is nonbinary, they use they/them pronouns throughout the novel.Īccording to the Trevor Project, one in four LGBTQ+ people use pronouns other than she/her and he/him, so it’s likely you will encounter someone like Riley Jay in your life who uses they/them pronouns. Thus, it was important to me that Riley be nonbinary so my friends could see a representation of their gender identity in a genre we all love. It’s always nice to see yourself represented in the media, and while I’ve had that in spades as a cisgender woman, my nonbinary friends haven’t had the same luxury.

So the narrator of that story became nonbinary and eventually got a name - Riley Jay. We realized pretty quickly that precious few novels had nonbinary characters, let alone nonbinary leads. I started writing this story during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with so many people out of work and getting sick, community is all the more important - even if we can’t physically be in the same room.Īt the time I was starting to develop this novel, one of my best friends began coming out as nonbinary. This one theme has remained the same from this original story concept - the importance of supporting and caring for the ones we love. This was because the story was told through a nameless character’s perspective, and the most important thing to them was their chosen family, their community. Initially, only three people in this family had names - Sergio, Ian, and Jen. Jericho began as a story about a family driving through the desert during the apocalypse. Then an insurgency swallowed the US capitol on January 6, 2021.

Then federal officers were deployed to Portland’s streets. When I started working on Jericho, I just wanted to write a story with a nonbinary lead about a family in a dieselpunk dystopian world.

Jericho by Rachel Mumaw