The human experience can be a strange undertaking, especially when one tries to accept it and become immersed. Through my writings, both poetry and prose, I try to show the struggle of humanity and accepting all that comes with it from a variety of angles. It seems that there is a big movement amongst groups of people to find a common ground that is rooted in a restrictive system of rules and regulations and I want to explore the idea of the primal being breaking free of their societal bonds in different ways while still maintaining some sense of grounding to the necessities of existence. I also do not want to preach any particular labeled school of thought or anything that could be construed as sending a “-ist” message, but in doing so also realize that I am likely categorizing myself in that pursuit.

My experiences have led me to discover that many of the most ‘put together’ and ‘successful’ people are some of the most miserable and most terrible people in regards to their personal lives. On paper, they are good people. On paper, where their dollars and cents are directly indicative of their effectiveness. I want to show people on paper that the ‘on paper’ standard for life is not how things unfold off of it. Often I write of fringe, ridiculous, and debaucherous events and I try to describe them with some level of ‘sophisticated’ or ‘refined’ verbage so as to make them more… valid, or legitimate, in the eyes of the reader. Or perhaps to tap into two different thought centers that don’t typically intertwine. Something awful expressed beautifully can take the reader to a place they’d never been, a place their knowledge does not prepare them for, and can throw a wrench into their patterns of thinking. When I write, my words tend to have a sort of flow to them but I do not meticulously toil over my manuscripts to make it so. I’m unsure as to the effect it has in the reader’s mind, but I’ve been told it’s something different. That being said, my main goal is to tell stories that people haven’t heard before- whether it be in the delivery style or the story itself- and to make them think about something in a different light that they had perhaps never shone on these subjects.

The audience that I hope to reach is the one that will likely never seek out the things that I write. Ideally, I would be read by the average 9-5’er as well as the overnight security guard, the CFO of a local business, the manager at a fast-food chain, or the literary junky who just can’t get enough of words. I do not write for any ‘type’ of person, I do not write at any particular group or interest- I write what I see, what I think, and I believe that to tailor it to a specific audience would belittle the message and also the interpretation. Some authors have messages that they want to get across, morals, values, politics, religion, and some write with ‘between-the-lines’ intentions, some write words for the sake of doing so. I write because I cannot help myself but to do so. Verbal expression has never been a strong suit of mine. Whether due to anxiety, depression, self-consciousness, or some other sort of mental malady, I cannot seem to express myself fully or effectively when I am in conversation with someone- I fumble my words, lose my train of thought, go off on a tangent, or simply say nothing. However when I write, my thoughts flow, the words seem to know how to land on the paper and where, and the ‘thought block’ dissipates. I want to break down the human experience to a level that allows people to come back into contact with their humanistic, primal beings and remember that they are living creatures, not just the ideas that they toil day in and day out to uphold. Many of my characters hit some sort of ‘rock bottom’ or an event unfolds that leaves them forever changed, something unforeseen and something that would, ‘on paper’, never happen. They are the victims of their environment, as so many of us are, and they are ill-equipped to deal with it, ‘on paper’, but they find a way. As we all do.