Most of the concrete details incorporated in the poems are factually true, even though many of the characters/voices I’ve created are fictional and the comic book landscape of monsters, supervillains, and superheroes is frequently fantastic.
Every story begins somewhere different for me, which means I often have to be alert to what pulls me in.
Every writer has to find perspective on—and an appropriate position in—the narrative they want to recount.
Who the hell knows what we will do in our lives?
Can we speak for anyone else? Are writers only ever speaking for themselves? Always never speaking? Always always speaking?
I rarely begin a story knowing where it will lead or if a character will hold up against a situation.
Other people’s tragedies often look uniformly grim and depressing, but the stories of our own tragedies usually look much more complicated—truly terrible events juxtaposed with absurdity and sometimes even joy.
I do think it’s important for writers to help other writers. In no way is writing or publishing a zero-sum game or a competition.
It also made me realize how unreliable our memory is—how it’s full of poorly remembered incidents, of memories that may not even be our own, and how hard the work of remembering is.
I think the stories reflect the purpose for which they were written, which was: to be read aloud to a room full of other writers at a community open mic.
