Q. How did this work come about?

“The Subway Station” is from a project I’ve been working on that I jokingly refer to as my “sex labyrinths.” I wanted to attempt to self-consciously write something driven more by sentences, acoustics and images than by character and plot. Around the same time, I started looking at my published pieces to see whether there were any I wanted to build upon toward a larger project. So the “sex labyrinths” are also an outgrowth of my story, “Two Truths and a Lie,” which appeared in Wigleaf. These pieces are somewhat influenced by Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen,” and are about a contemporary flaneur-type character, a voyeur who wanders labyrinthine city spaces and finds himself drawn into a number of phantasmatic sexual encounters. They are also, I think, about this narrator negotiating desires that are themselves labyrinthine, as well as his own fear of actual bodies and physical intimacy.

Q. What song would you pair with The Subway Station?

A song I’d choose to accompany these is “Strange Man,” by my friend Emily Bezar, from her most recent album “Exchange.” Emily’s work straddles avant garde/contemporary composition, jazz, progressive rock and pop. She’s an excellent artist who deserves to be better-known. I choose “Strange Man” not because of any correspondence between my text and its lyrics, but more because its atmosphere and surface are ambient and intricate and because it haunts and unsettles as much as it soothes.

Q. Why is fiction necessary for you?

Fiction already is, and narrative is, is perhaps fundamental and inescapable, and I think narrative is critical to how we communicate with one another and understand our experiences, and narratives also maintain dominant power, injustice, all that ugly crap. Some folks might say writing our own narratives is the ultimate manifestation of ego, and maybe that’s true, but it can also be a badass way claiming power and agency, of causing disruption, and sometimes that is necessary.