A death march is what my teenaged students called it. In a literal-kind-of way, I guess they were right.

How does our mother tongue shape the stories we tell? What does it mean to switch languages in writing? Does simplification always lead to loss? Can I transform my limitations in English into opportunities for growth? Am I the same writer when I express myself in a foreign language? The same person? Who was I…

My novel Habitat started as a short story. I found myself curious about the world of that story and wanted to explore it more, so my focus shifted to writing more stories in that world.

Sitting in the back of my dad’s minivan, smelling the stench of my older brother’s hockey gear after a tournament in Buffalo or Neville Island, or some other place that boasted a hockey rink and nothing more, I didn’t know I was doing research for a novel that I would write three decades into the…

My novel Porthole took longer to write than any project I have worked on previously: the earliest scraps of it emerged fifteen years ago, or more, but it was interrupted by a couple of other books, which in their scope, were either more manageable or more immediate.

In those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the future was formless and dark, I wrote the first story in what would later become my debut short story collection, It’s No Fun Anymore (June 2025, Apprentice House Press), I called it “Thumb Stump,” and it was good.

My debut short story collection, Alternative Facts, features fictionalizations of real public figures like George W. Bush, B.F. Skinner, and Paris Hilton. Because writing these stories required significant research, I’m often asked about my process. What’s fact, and what’s fiction? Which parts are real and which made up?

In the 1969 postmodern Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles frequently positions his characters at historical junctures they’re ignorant of, inviting us to consider how this or that twitch of neurosis could anticipate the century to come.

Maybe the first collection of short stories published by a fifty-three year old writer who’s been writing since he was sixteen is bound to be pretty wide-ranging.

For my high school’s production of Sophocles’ Antigone, I went hard for the part of Haemon, Antigone’s boyfriend who dies because of his father’s hubris. I thought the role would both showcase my acting chops and give me an excuse to stop shaving my legs. It wasn’t until rehearsals, when I learned Tiresias’s backstory, that…

A chance discovery that the historical Macbeths were not as depicted by Shakespeare sent me on a long quest to find and write their stories, culminating in the release of Upon the Corner of the Moon in March. That meant a great deal of research, as my background was in journalism rather than history. Good…

At least the title of my second novel, What Do You Want from Me? hasn’t changed since I started working on it more than eight years ago. Pretty much everything else has, though.