If an after-school special is the artistic equivalent of forcing an audience to take their medicine,
my writing is like a body pushing its temperature to a madness-inducing fever to kill an invading
pathogen. As a follower of the news and a student of history who grew up gay in Idaho, I have always
had a morbid interest in often sexually repressed right-wing extremists whom I find repellant. In my
writing most of my protagonists are bewitched, diseased, and destroyed by their worst impulses—or
else they are menaced by people who are. I want to understand these people and push their ideologies
to their most natural, horrible conclusions so to expose us to them and so disarm them of their power.
Many of my pieces fall into some vaguely disreputable genre or are at least not strictly naturalistic. I aim
to use such stylization to suspend the audience’s disbelief, and to make my audience feel in its bones
the seductive appeal of reactionary thought as well as its terrifying consequences. This approach helps
demystify the subjects for me, makes them explicable and less frightening; I should hope it does the
same for my audience. The goal of exposing us to sickness, after all, is inoculation.