Author of “Grave Thoughts” (Volume XXX, 2026)

When did you realize you wanted to write? 

I always dabbled with writing. I remember as a kid starting novels on an old typewriter. I’d write a few pages or a chapter and then forget about them forever, whatever they were. I started writing poetry and my first novel manuscript in my last year of high school and finished the latter during my first year of college (it was crap). That first year of college, though, my poems began to get accepted to small horror and sci-fi magazines, and that drove me on. A year or two later, I turned to more literary poetry and prose, and that’s when I really felt it, believed it, wanted to continue that for the rest of my life.

Is what you write now the same as what you wanted to write when you started?

Oh no. No no no. I started out writing genre fiction and awful rhyming poetry. I moved through experimental and Beat-inspired work, spent some time writing comedic stuff, and finally found my place writing literary work that not only moved me but I was much better at creating. Even that style has evolved many times over the years.

What is a favorite piece that you wrote? What is a favorite piece that you’ve read?

As for mine, the one that always comes to mind is “Watching the Wizard of Oz” in prison, which you can find on the Rattle website. Favorite poems include Stephen Dobyns’s “Uprising,” Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Julie Sheehan’s “Hate Poem,” and the entire books The Evening Sun by David Lehman and Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts.

How have other authors influenced your own writing and style?

I can look back and trace a litany of authors and books that, the first time I read them, changed my entire perspective. There are far too many to list, but here are a few. The first time I read Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, it opened my mind to possibilities. Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair taught me beauty. Lehman’s book The Evening Sun and Zagajewski’s Without End came into my life at exactly the right time to shift my focus in ways that still linger in my writing. That’s just a few. I read too much, really: novels, poetry collections, journals, whatever I can get my hands on (and afford, which is often the problem, being an unemployed ex-con). I read all the Best American things: poetry, short stories, debut fiction, short fictions. It all moves me.

How does using technology—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or even just your phone—influence how you write?

I use Facebook and Twitter, mostly to keep up with what others are doing and post about my publications. It’s grown my audience, but I don’t really use it for my writing unless some random thing inspires me to write some other random thing. Google Search is the main technology I use. I often get paranoid that I’m misspelling something or not using a word correctly despite having used it that way for more than thirty years, so I’m always searching to make sure I’ve got things right (and sometimes don’t). I don’t use AI for anything to do with writing. I have contempt for it—not AI itself, but for having it in any way connected to the arts. Nor do I write on my phone, although I do use it to take notes on things I see occasionally. That’s handy.

What advice would you give an aspiring writer who wants to put their work “out there”? 

I say some version of this all the time to young writers discouraged by rejections. The whole process is a crapshoot. It’s not just about getting the poems or stories right; it’s about getting the right pieces to the right editors on the right days when nobody yelled at them over the phone or ran over their dog in the driveway. Just keep submitting and the acceptances will come. Also, keep tightening the screws on your work.

What have your experiences been like interacting with the publishing world? How about with student editors working on literary journals? 

I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve had good experiences and bad ones with every type of editors and literary journals. Some journals I’ve expected to be small and obscure turned out to be glorious incarnations, while some I thought would be among the best mishandled my work or misspelled my name (which happens far more than I’d expect). I’ve dealt with publishers that really cared for my books and did everything they could for them, and others that put the book out and then promptly folded or quickly moved on to the next book without any support. I’ve had five-minute acceptances and rejections that took two years.

Where do you typically seek inspiration and guidance for your work?

Inspiration comes from everywhere. I write about everything I see or experience, dreams, all the weird or twisted thoughts that go through my head. The best way to find inspiration is just to live and have interesting moments, good and bad. As for guidance, I’m self-taught, especially with poetry. My guides are other poems. I read way too much. I consume books and journals as much as my limited finances allow. With prose, I had one class as an undergrad, but I had already written three novels before I took the class (all in different styles, two of them terrible). The main thing I learned in that class was not about writing but just to read better. That’s the main thing anyone should learn. Read as much as you can of what you want to write. Read other things, too, just to get a feel for possibilities, but mainly read what does the sort of thing you want to do. You gain a lot from that simple act.

How do you feel about having your writing appear and read alongside other works in a literary collection? 

I love it. It gives me things to read (for free) from people I might connect with, especially now in the age of social media. I crave moments of discovery when I read someone new and think, goddamn that’s good!

If you could have a drink or a chat with any living author, who would it be? Why? 

Christopher Moore. He’s the one author from my early days of writing horror and comedy that I still read everything he writes. He tells good stories and, especially when you read them aloud with a companion, those stories often result in many spit takes. Picture chunks of lamb korma flying uncontrollably across the room. I did chat with him a few times back in the days of America Online. What a different world that was. He was always friendly. I talked with Tom Clancy on there too, but always found him to be a bit of a dick.

Do you have any professional advice for prospective authors seeking to be published? What did the process of getting your first published work look like?

Oh, hell. That’s a long story. I wrote mostly novels for the fist fifteen years of my life. About a book a year. I couldn’t sell them. I had a reputable agent, and she couldn’t sell them. It was a very self-destructive time in my life, and the feelings of failure were a big part of my drug problems, crime, and ultimately imprisonment, which—again, Fate—led to the writing of my best book, a collection of poetry called The Prisoners that was accepted on the day I made it out. My first published book was a couple years before prison, though. It was a small poetry book called The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. The publisher was the editor of a magazine who published many of my poems over the preceding years and had me up to do several readings in central and eastern Pennsylvania. She decided one day that she wanted to publish a book of my poems, so I put a manuscript together for her, and she released it. It was a gorgeous little book, and it was one of the most exciting times of my life. Unfortunately, I was already too far gone by that point, between the self-doubt and the drug habit. I didn’t appreciate it nearly as much as I should’ve.

How do you manage writer’s block?

I don’t have it. Never have. I always write something when it’s time to write. If nothing exciting is happening to write about, then I’ll write about a shoe or a deer or a layer of dust on my baseboards. It doesn’t matter. I’ll write something. Maybe it’ll be great, maybe awful. But that’s a decision for later. I can always edit it or discard it. My history is littered with the corpses of discarded poems. I’d put their bodies on pikes like a paper Vlad the Impaler, but there’d be so many that it might ward off other poems.

What do you think makes a story or poem “good”?

The main thing for me is a sense of connection to the strange. I want to feel what the author is feeling and live their lives in a way that what they’ve been through, happy or sad, common or unique, seems like something I can understand and experience as I was there, a part of it, and in that sense, a part of the poet as well. It’s what I aim for in my writing, too. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Is there a book, story, or poem that changed your perspective on the world? If so, did it influence your writing and/or the way you write?

I already answered this in one of the questions above, so I’m going to go in a different direction and tell you a story about why I love Clackamas Literary Review and always submit here: Around the turn of the millennium, I went with a friend to an alternative club in Huntington, West Virginia, which had replaced a previous alternative club on the same spot. We sat there listening to a band and had a great chat about how the new bar brought up so much nostalgia for the old one, and how things change, and what that meant for our lives. I went home and wrote a poem called “Ghost Club” that I submitted to CLR (my first time submitting here). It was accepted, and about eight months later, published in a gorgeous edition. Meanwhile, my friend was headed off to Alaska for some job or other. He flew cross-country to, I believe, Washington, but I’ve forgotten the details. Anyway, he sent me an e-mail from there. He had walked into a bookstore while there, spotted CLR on the shelf, thought it looked good so picked it up, saw my name, read the poem, and wrote to tell me how crazy it was, and how cool, to go all the way across the country and pick up a random journal only to read a poem with me in it. That’s big-F Fate. I have loved CLR ever since.