While the story isn’t autobiographical, it is set in the landscape of my childhood. The summers were humid, gluey and close. Most everywhere was without central air conditioning.

Ilya Lyashevsky, whose short story At the Seaside is featured in Epiphany’s Fall/ Winter 2011-2012 issue, didn’t reach consciousness until he was twenty-five.

After reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History my last year of high school, I wanted to run off to Vermont to befriend a clique of elitist classics students and participate in modern-day Bacchic rites.

My first publication was a short story about a professional suicide note writer entitled “Assisted Living” published in Umbrella Factory, September 2013.

“What happens when you narrativize something that has that initiatory burden of transness, you take these steps to bring that narrative into actuality—to bring the inside outside.”

It's been cubbyholed for years at a time, but I always knew I would finish it. At times the story was in a form that can hardly be called a draft, it was more in pieces, lying around like a jigsaw puzzle.

I’m interested in the way in which memory—the way that we think about the past—is a re-creation of the past, how the past keeps happening.

I’m definitely methodical and imagine the metaphor as building paper mâché. I have these delicate sentences that layer atop each other until there’s something solid.

I’m deeply committed to not knowing what kind of writer I am. I rely on spontaneity and my habits change constantly. In that way I hope I’m evading stale, pat poems.