I’m interested in how identity is created through involvement in certain environments and generally through networks, electronic and otherwise. And how we are constantly shifting identities and juggling identities or versions of ourselves in different spaces. The stories are all tied up in characters feeling that they are very different people in different circumstances and with the transience/traces of relationships we believe to be permanent and therefore with the transience of selves. My first book of stories, People Who Disappear (released by Freehand this past April) balanced between urban and coastal/remote locations. This book is more rooted in urban places — neighbourhoods, the gym, the street…and the internet plays a huge part as a “location” of identity-creation/absence.

Short stories.

I’m also working on a book of prose poems; those pieces are slowly finding homes in journals, a couple pieces are in Descant soon.

Untrained amateur actors pretending to know what they’re doing.

You never know about people.

Too early to answer this question. Thus far I have worked with literary presses.

The manuscript is in progress. A story takes me about 2-3 months to complete, overlapping with my life/school/work/other project commitments and stories and poems being simultaneously written. I just finished editing two special issues that have just been released: the Queer issue of Poetry Is Dead and the Companion Animals issue of The Incongruous Quarterly, both of which were an overwhelming demand on my time. I looked at the number of emails I tagged in my email account as being correspondence related to the process of editing the Queer issue and it was over 400! So I’m just finishing up the final drafts of some stories for the manuscript and writing by hand again, which feels really good. My first collection was a mix of short and longer stories and this collection focuses more on longer pieces. I always have trouble quantifying short fiction writing because it’s piecework more than it is a feeling of knowing when something is done because you’ve come to the “end.” I think this is part of why I have felt more kinship with poets as opposed to novelists.

I have trouble with questions like this one because it feels vain to compare myself with work I admire. But, I admired the lyricism and ferocity in Justin Torres’s novel of vignettes, We The Animals, and his dense, dark, complex approach to the articulation of sibling relationships as a kind of pack mentality.

Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips. I’ve also felt myself returning to some of my roots in fiction-writing, stuff that motivated me early on, like Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The perfect blend of imagery and plot. Southern short fiction writers were formative influences.

The idea of an exterior source of inspiration is so problematic to me, because writing is more about resiliency than it is about topic/motivation. I’ve come to a point in my writing where I think the main thing inspiring me to write is the fact that I can’t stop. I think for a long time I justified writing by believing (or forcing myself to believe) that there is something intrinsic or lasting in the world that I believed I could EXPRESS more fully than others or that I could only express through language. I now approach my stories as gestated catalogues and juxtapositions of moments I want to capture — they are ongoing because I am ongoing. So what is inspiring me to keep going with this manuscript is a desire to make sense of contradictory/seemingly senseless/anxiety-inducing systems into which I’m inscribed. Things in the stories: a political protest experienced only through YouTube; a woman whose only recourse during grief is the gym; an art gallery that is a homeless shelter that is an art gallery.