TIA MORGEN is a freelance writer, radio play author, and artist. Her work explores the ambivalences of intimacy, desire, and power. Her latest audio drama, NIXE (WDR, 2025), explores violence in lesbian relationships. Her debut novel, Was wir lieber für uns behalten (What We'd Rather Keep to Ourselves), will be published by Suhrkamp in February 2027.

Shame, writing, and hyperfemininity all seem to run through your work in a very intimate way. How do those three things meet for you?

For me, they meet in the body. Shame often tells women to become smaller, quieter, less visible. Hyperfemininity does the opposite: it takes up space, impossible to ignore… It is about being seen on purpose. I investigate that tension in my writing. I’m interested in what happens when the things you were told to hide become the things you can dissect, make visible and heard.

A lot of people treat shame like a stop sign. When did it start feeling more like a clue?

The moment I realized that my most intense shame was always located right next to my most intense desires. If I felt ashamed, it meant I was close to something I was supposed to be silent about but desperately wanted. Shame gathers around desire, hunger, contradiction, pain. Once I understood that, I stopped avoiding it and got curious.

When something feels hard to say, do you usually trust that feeling and write toward it?

I've learned to treat resistance as a signal. If something feels hard to say, it usually means there's something important there, something worth examining rather than avoiding. So I try to be suspicious of my own avoidance: if I find myself reaching for abstraction when the specific thing is right there, I try to catch it. If a sentence scares me a little, I pay attention. Because if something is easy to say, it's probably already been said.

What happens to shame once you put it into words? Does it soften, sharpen, or just change shape?

It changes shape. Once it's on the page, it's no longer a ghost in my body, it becomes an object I can look at. Sometimes it shrinks, sometimes it becomes sharper, more precise. But either way, it stops controlling me in that invisible way it does when it remains unspoken. It becomes a material I can actually work with. Maybe the shame itself doesn't disappear but it loses some of its power.

How do you know when a piece of writing is hiding something, and when it is finally telling the truth?

When it sounds too polished, too certain, too clever. You can feel the ego trying to protect itself. Truth usually feels embarrassing. It contains friction. It contradicts itself. But the clearest signal for me is this: if I'm already thinking about other people's judgment while I'm writing, I'm hiding. The moment I catch myself editing for an imagined audience instead of following the thought, I know I've left the truth behind. When the writing stings a little, makes me nervous to share it, that’s when I know I’m getting closer to the truth.

Do you think the body remembers shame differently from the mind?

Completely differently. The mind can rationalize, rewrite, narrate its way out of almost anything. The body holds it in its posture, breath, tension–– sometimes for years after the story has officially been resolved. The mind can say "I'm over it" while the body still feels that heat in the stomach or that tightness in the chest. Writing is my way of catching up to what my body knows.

Your work often moves through intimacy and power at the same time. Do those two things always belong together for you?

I think they're almost never fully independent. Intimacy is always a negotiation of exposure, and exposure always involves power. To let someone see you is to give them power; to see someone deeply is to claim it. That power can be simultaneously subtle, tender, erotic, or cruel. I don’t find that unsettling. I’m interested in the space where you find many of those things at once.

What has shame shown you that confidence never could?

Confidence can be a shield. It tells a good story about you. But shame breaks that story open. It shows me my hidden desires, my fear and limits, where I haven’t finished the work to become who I say I am, and ultimately, how to be empathetic toward others. It forces me to be honest about my vulnerabilities in a way that "being confident" just doesn’t require. In that sense it's not an obstacle, it's a raw material. One of the most useful ones I have.

Your relationship to hyperfemininity feels joyful, deliberate, and very self-made. Was it always a source of strength, or did you have to reclaim it?

I definitely had to reclaim it. For a long time, I thought I had to tone myself down to be taken seriously as an intellectual or an artist — that my love for makeup, lace, heels or the color pink was a distraction from my depth rather than an extension of it. I grew up thinking hyperfemininity was frivolous, even weak. And then there was queerness: I believed for a long time that my femininity and my queerness were irreconcilable contradictions. That to be legible as queer, I had to look a certain way, and the way I actually was couldn’t fit. I felt invisible in that, and not taken seriously. I believed femininity and intellect were in competition, femininity and queerness were in competition, and that I had to choose.

Reclaiming it meant that I had to decide  that wasn't true. For me, hyperfemininity is a body practice: a set of choices I make visible on myself, directly challenging my own shame. It means understanding that in a society that only tolerates femininity when it's quiet, delicate, made for the male gaze; being loudly, deliberately, excessively femme is its own form of rebellion. Queer femmes are loud, playful, and consciously too much. We don't wait for permission to be visible. We take it. Choosing femininity on my own terms changed my way of moving through the world.

What does being hyperfemme make possible for you as an artist?

It allows me to play with subversion. When you present yourself as hyperfemme, people will make assumptions. They often expect something soft or superficial, someone that won’t push back. I can work inside or against those assumptions because they offer me the element of surprise. When I subvert their expectations, I can keep the audience on their toes. I love that tension. It also just feels true to how I am, and this matters creatively. When your exterior and your interiority are speaking the same language, the work gets more honest.

Do you think hyperfemininity is still too often dismissed as surface?

Constantly. People mistake hyperfemme for empty, trivial or superficial. But there is so much labor and intention in it. It’s a performance, yes, but so is everything else. Surface is never just surface. It can be language, strategy, armor, pleasure, critique. The way someone constructs their appearance is a whole argument about the world.

Has being visibly femme ever made people underestimate your work?

Yes. And I've stopped trying to correct that. My work does it eventually, or it doesn't, but I'm not interested in pre-defending myself anymore. That energy goes into my work, my art, my writing. I’m also learning to enjoy the moment when people realize they were wrong.

What kind of power is there in being “too much”?

You stop being manageable. And once people can't manage you, they have to actually deal with you. "Too much" is just code for "more than others can handle," but that is their problem to name, not mine to solve. There's a freedom in that refusal. A freedom from respectability, from being convenient, from shrinking to fit into something you were never meant to fit into anyway. I refuse to be invisible, and I’m not here to be digestible.

What do people still misunderstand about women who write openly about desire, shame, and self-exposure?

That it's confessional in the diminutive sense, like diary-keeping, or emotional overflow that can’t be contained. The craft disappears, because people mistake vulnerability for a lack of control, and disclosure for simplicity. But writing openly is not the same as telling everything. It's construction, selection, perspective. There's a difference between being vulnerable and being unfiltered. What I do is highly constructed. And I'd argue it's also a service. Not narcissism, not exhibitionism, but the work of shaping experience into something someone else can actually enter.

If shame is not an obstacle but a doorway, where has it led you?

Into the specific, out of the general. Shame is always about something exact: a particular body, a particular wanting, a particular moment of being seen wrong. Following it has made my work less interested in universals and more precise. It led me toward work I would not have made if I had avoided shame. And it led me to community, because when you name the things you were told to keep quiet, you find out you were never alone. Shame kept me isolated. Writing through it connected me. And once you've walked through the door of your worst fears about yourself and realized you're still standing, there's nothing left to be used against you. 

Quick Quiz

Writing or crashing out?
Writing is my crashing out.

Shame or no shame?
Shame. It’s my fuel.

Soft girl or hard face?
Soft girl with a sharp tongue.

Control freak, main character or beautiful mess?
Beautifully controlled mess.

Girlhood or diva mode?
Diva mode is just girlhood with a budget.

Overshare or performance art?
It’s only an overshare if it’s boring.

Horny or devoted?
Devoted to my desire.

What’s femininity giving right now?
High-stakes vulnerability.

Confession or curated chaos?
Curated chaos.

Desire or obsession?
Obsession. I don't do things halfway.

What does freedom look like on your body?
Ease. Presence. No apology. 

Digital Editor: Kathe Pouli

Photos: Fritzi Schwarzbauer