What first drew you to writing?
Since I was twelve, writing has been a treacherous friend. Writing started as make-believe for a lonely kid from Ohio. Writing could be uninhibited and wild and give so much joy. As I matured, the mornings after began to feel wrong and even sometimes ugly. Self-conscious reminders of immaturity and mimicry of the authors I read. I can’t say that I loved every second of it, but it has always been a friend.
I haven’t even answered the question yet. What drew me to writing was Mr. Kohut’s middle school Language Arts class at Lowellville Local School. He assigned Roger Zelazny’s A Night in Lonesome October, and it was the first time I read something fun in a classroom. It felt kind of dangerous for this twelve-year-old. The Wolf Man, grave robbers, and Jack the Ripper! After school, I rambled for so long to Mr. Kohut about it that he suggested I write my own pastiche with characters I love—fanfiction before I knew what it was. On my family’s first computer, an eMachines desktop, I wrote a mystery story about Batman and Jonny Quest finding a lost civilization that worshipped bats. That was the first time I wrote for fun. Later that year, Mr. Kohut gave me a box of books, but a battered mass-market paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes was so important. I’ve read it 24 times since—every year except for two. That book bit me. William Carlos Williams once called writing a disease, and that book both infects and inspires me.
Which part of writing comes most naturally to you? Which part makes you work for it?
The story always comes first, but the monster changes its shape the more I write it. I usually know where to start, and sometimes I know a few points along the way. But best-laid plans and all that— As is natural with monsters, the story surprises me, and I veer off into the unknown. Once the first draft is over, so is the natural part. The editing is what feels like work. I can tear through a first draft with reckless abandon, leaving behind a trail of ashes, but ashes eventually need cleaned up. Maybe it would be different if I outlined.
What's a favorite line or character from something you've published? Tell us why, and where readers can find it.
I’m breaking the rules and selecting two. I wish there was some grand reason to pair them, but I simply can’t decide on one.
“I am too dead for home. Too alive to float away.”
From “Alive and Dead in Ohio” published at Flash Frog. So much of my fiction and poetry deals with liminality, belonging, grief, and metaphysical intrusion. This story shows just that.
“Some play music for art. Others, for transformation. But Pan played for all creation, for the exhumation of ancestral ache.”
From “One of Us Carries the Flute” published at Small Wonders. I wrote this line in October 2023, and this story started a creative flood. I had quit writing five-or-so years earlier because the rejections became too much. That story pulled me back in, and I haven’t stopped since.
Finish the sentence: A good story should ________.
hurt
What's inspiring you right now?
I keep a zibaldone notebook, and the things I keep mentioning as inspiration lately are:
The art of Odilon Redon
Frightened Rabbit’s 2013 album Pedestrian Verse
Behr’s paint color of the year called Grounded. It is this dark, olive moss color that makes me think of playing in a creek bed
My daughter starting first grade
The Devonian Sea
Dentistry
Describe Neon & Smoke in five words or fewer.
There’s beautiful poison in smoke.