true story
There are many fallacies at the base of American culture, but in my writing I focus on two of the most harmful: “Everything’s fine” and “Suck it up.”
People aren’t allowed to admit they’re struggling and, if they do admit they need help, are told either to get over it or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We’ve pathologized anyone who goes ahead and gets help anyway and marginalized them as weak, untrustworthy, and even frightening—when will they slip, and what will they be capable of?
The problem is, some of the strongest obstacles to being a truly authentic human being stem from these two fallacies. In fact, in order to find who we really are, we have to dive into those parts of ourselves denied by them, and that’s scary—those parts don’t have pretty faces.
There’s a reason we stuff them away the moment company shows up.
The only way to an authentic life, filled with meaningful connections, is through those dark, scary places. They include our wounds, our broken places…and the pieces of ourselves we created to survive what we’ve not been able to control. Those pieces were useful once—now they are our prison.
I put characters in positions where it becomes impossible not to face their inner landscapes. My stories point the way to new bedrock from which to create our own culture of authenticity. They move from “Everything’s fine” to “Not everything is fine, and that’s true for everyone you see around you”; from “Suck it up” to “You don’t have to go through this alone.”
Whether I’m putting characters at a point in their lives where they can no longer turn from the impacts of their trauma, or using the medium of erotic interaction, which I believe strips us down to our real psychology in a way few other human interactions do, I chart character recognition of and growth through their own psychological minefields to the hope of a better, deeper, and more intimate, in the true sense of that word, life.
In and through my stories, I hope to help people find their tribe.
