Chicago, 1935
Where desire and damage cannot be kept apart
A queer literary historical novel
Enter the TrapLondon-trained and established at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Dr. Eleanor Wentworth has made discretion the source of her authority. She is also a familiar presence at the Velvet Trap.
Eddie Langley knows the Trap, too. She comes to Eleanor as a patient, though the club has already made them part of the same hidden world.
What begins as treatment becomes an intimacy the consulting room can no longer contain.
Red leather and red lights. Perfume and smoke. A turntable gives the room its pulse: Duke Ellington’s Solitude, maybe Billie Holiday's What a Little Moonlight Can Do. Behind the Red Bar is Vivian’s office, where she runs a small empire of legitimate businesses, and a few that are not.
Brass and wood. Cool lights and deep couches. Sam is always ready to pour. Behind him hangs a rack of keys for those Vivian trusts. Beyond the door marked “Private” are the Prometheus, the Hades, and the Arcadian: rooms arranged for particular appetites. Across the corridor waits a library of exceptional art and unacceptable books.
A psychoanalyst whose authority depends on discretion. In her Hyde Park office, she helps patients survive what her profession would rather pathologize.
Dangerous. Not cruel. A working-class reporter with a hunger to watch and a taste for restraint. In the Velvet Trap, her compulsion finds its rooms.
Proprietress of the Velvet Trap. The club is only one of her businesses. Secrets are another.
Sweet. Not innocent. With wealth and a taste for risk, she eases between Gold Coast drawing rooms and the hidden world of the Velvet Trap.
A cabinet of atmosphere, gathering historical images, music, texts, and artwork of Depression-era Chicago to fill in the world of The Velvet Trap.
Enter the archive
Teresa Wymore writes literary, historical, speculative, and queer fiction shaped by psychoanalysis, secrecy, transgression, and the private costs of desire. Her work is especially interested in women whose lives exceed the language available to describe them.
Original portraits and illustrations by Teresa Wymore. Digital backgrounds developed with AI-assisted tools from author-directed concepts.
The Velvet Trap is her queer literary historical novel set in 1935 Chicago, where psychoanalysis, nightlife, and forbidden desire converge beneath the surface of respectable life. The novel is currently seeking representation.
