Writing is about communication. Even if we’re beating around the bush, painting with words and all that, the end goal is still the same: I want to take my feelings and put them into a language that you can understand, interpret, and make your own.

The stories that I go back to time and again are with me every day. The writers that I truly admire have changed my life by communicating modes of being and styles of life that on my own I could not have experienced. I would be lying to say that I aim to do any less than that for my readers.

I get up. I go to work. At the end of the day I come home and I sit in front of the keyboard and let out whatever I have inside. After I turn the lights off, the gears continue to turn. I dream of guns and knives. Rolling waves and desert sands. Neon and concrete and the sheen of oil. I see the world as it is just as well as it never was.

My credentials are few, and I lack a formal education. In their place I have memory and feeling and doggedness. A willingness to call things as they are.

- Portland OR, April 2024