Every aspect of my artistic and personal identity hinges on dismantling false dichotomy.

By necessity, my artistic life is a creative ecosystem of different genres and formats. For all my love of the collaborative jungle of theatre production, I also revel in the splendorous solitude of writing fiction, and have composed hundreds of songs and instrumental pieces. My literary heroes gift the same influence to my plays as my fiction, and their dramatist counterparts loan equally to my novels. Beneath them all hums music.

I write plays that embrace the limitation mindset required of a theatre artist, while pushing said limitations to extremes. Due to the many ways one may define the word theatrical, my personal measure of success as a playwright is how well I engage with the diversity of the medium, and whether I've made art that feels like it belongs exclusively on a stage.

My scripts present actors, directors, designers, and technicians with prompts that require imagination and playfulness. I invite collaborators to conceive solutions for stage directions that describe, for instance, a glass light tube breaking over a character's head, or a bonfire that grows to the height of a house. In particular, my past experiences in sound design and production management inspire me to write plays that I would have enjoyed working on in those roles. However, this impulse does not relate solely to creating spectacle, as I hear high theatricality in dialogue, writing 'people sitting in a place and talking to each other plays' as often as more fantastical fare. This style engages a logical extreme, too: just how much of a story can we tell using dialogue and a naturalistic setting?

Although I seldom write stories that incorporate current social issues as primary plot points, my heart pumps proud anticapitalist, Nazi-punching blood through my white trash veins. Look for the political fury in my work and you will find it, alongside sincere reverence for the poetry of supposedly lowbrow art like deathmatch wrestling, video games, fantasy novels, professional sports, and hardcore punk music. My love for 'low' culture does not preclude an appreciation for classics and high art, though. As with my practice, my various creative influences exist symbiotically, despite any aesthetic disparity. I've had as sincere of social consciousness awakenings reading Kafka as viewing particularly dramatic episodes of Survivor, similar degrees of catharsis from throwing hands in the pit at a Callous Daoboys gig as an immersive production of Fefu and Her Friends.

My perspective as a working class, disabled trans woman on the autism spectrum permeates my writing. I author works that commune with other people like me. My queerness, and thus my work, do not abide by heterotropified expectations. I eschew cliches like 'queer trauma' and 'queer joy,' instead favoring a perspective of 'middling queerness' in my work. Like anyone else, queer people experience the mundane dramas of relationship woes, uncertainties in our careers and passions, existential dread, interpersonal malaise, etcetera. We aren't always artists, college graduates, intellectuals, city dwelling heartthrobs, or likable people. We deserve art that depicts us in all our striations.

While I believe the value of education for artists is near limitless, I refuse to succumb to the temptations of pretension. Some of the most creatively interesting people I've ever met have been to prison, dropped out from or never attended college, had kids in their teens or early twenties, or labor in non-artistic industries—at department stores, software companies, commercial kitchens, warehouses—and are content with not pursuing their art in any professional capacity. While the venue of scholarship suits my own strengths and gratifications, I pursue education with the express intention of dropkicking the notion that only one specific set of credentials may provide entry into the school of serious thought.