Why do you write? No one ever asks me this but I repeat this every morning while taking a walk in my neighborhood. I write to save nature and reduce animal suffering.

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.

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.