I write about the things we all try to avoid.

A woman drinking her son’s death away. A little girl abandoned by her mother at birth. A man sleeping with his sister’s boyfriend to try and feel something. A group of strangers battling each other to the death. The worlds of my plays are filled to the brim with passionate people that have been f*cked up in more ways than one and still fight to come out on top. My work strives to depict life as confusing, difficult, bleak, but, ultimately, worth living.

In my personal life, I am a mess of contradictions. I am careful, yet carefree. A self-proclaimed chef who gets sidetracked and burns dinner. An energetic, optimistic human who has gone through hell and lived to tell the tale. A trauma survivor who knows first-hand that it gets better. I work to create characters who know the world better than I do, characters I (and all of us, for that matter) can learn from. Characters who are different from me: brave, sharp, emotionally open. And people who are just like me: strong, aware, clumsy, empathetic. Above all, my characters are people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

I set out to represent queer people as whole people, rather than the exhausted “yas queen” trope that straight creators throw at us and call “representation”. My characters may be misunderstood at times, slightly off-putting, terribly cynical, and blunt in the worst possible ways; but one thing they are not is a stereotype. They are portraits of people who simply just exist.

Over are the days of uncomfortable stories being pushed aside for frilly pleasure (though there will always be a need for frilly pleasure). Over are the days where any of us need to be subjected to the same vanilla, heterosexual-led tales of white woe. It is time for new voices. It is time for new stories. It is time to change the world of theater, so it reflects the world in which it exists and the people who need it the most.