Beginning a New Body of Work

Over the past few years, I’ve been developing a new body of work that moves through the forms of writing, image-making, photography, research, and personal mythology.

After closing long-running projects like How to Kill a Superhero and LED Queens, I found myself wanting to work more slowly and more integratively—allowing different media to speak to one another rather than treating each outcome as a discrete product. In other words, I am more than just a writer, I am an artist that works in various media. That amalgamation has now taken shape as Our Lord of the Flowers, my newest work.

At its center, Our Lord of the Flowers is a literary novel. But the project extends beyond the book itself. It draws on ancient gods, symbolic systems, grief, gender, and devotion, unfolding across text, images, and essays that together form a single conceptual terrain. This book embodies my own original photography, my essays, and also my own queer body and its personal history to make something new.

This week, I published the first permanent excerpt from the novel on its own site. I chose to share this passage not as a preview or marketing artifact, but as a standalone piece of writing—one element within a larger, evolving structure.

If you’re curious to encounter the project at this stage, the excerpt is available here:

→ Read an excerpt from Our Lord of the Flowers

As Our Lord of the Flowers moves toward its paperback release in 2026, the project will continue to expand through visual work, reflective writing, and additional excerpts. This site will remain a place where the different strands of my practice—photography, writing, and performance—intersect and inform one another. I do this as a way to honor my ancestors.

Cesar Torres
Chicago