I am a breaker of boxes. I dislike labels and expectations. I fit nowhere. I write from my heart and my personal experience, not what is generically broad or socially respectable. I am argr, both in the old sense that I engage in gender transgressive behavior and in the modern sense of being angry or irritating. I am the metal front-man, the Byronic poet, the crusader who cries "Dei volunt." I am the voice from the crowd that declares the emperor is naked, though I am old and wise enough to know the implications and cost of doing so. And I am the wodbora, defined by the excellent scholar T. Shippey as 'one
[who] has poetry in him'...the first element of wod-bora is also the
word recorded in the god-name Wodin, or Othinn, and in the archaic
adjective 'wood', meaning 'crazy'; it refers to the mystic rage of
bard or shaman or (as we now say) berserker.”
My work most
often falls into the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and
erotica with elements of mysticism and influences from historical
fiction. I consider myself a versatile writer,
creating novels, short stories, poems, and essays. However, despite this diversity, there are some common
threads in the work I do, two main goals I strive to achieve: sensory
richness and the landscape of the mind. For the first, I aim to
produce work that contains vivid, surreal and stylized imagery and
even to select words that sound pleasing together. I believe the
experience of reading should involve the same kind of indulgent
pleasure as a gourmet meal, a spa treatment, or a night at the opera. In my philosophy, the other purpose of writing is to expand the mind
by presenting ideas and situations that don't occur in our daily
life, perhaps that have never occurred in our timeline of reality. This is my way of trying to get outside the boxes we make for ourselves or that society makes for us, to try to conceive of ways of being other than the way we are told "things are," including challenging modern western concepts and values regarding sexuality and gender, spirituality and religion, work and leisure, individuality and authenticity, emotion, attachment, and mental health.
The core inspiration for my writing comes from the great triumvirate of Tolkien, Tanith, and Teasdale (meaning, of course, the writers JRR Tolkien, Tanith Lee, and Sarah Teasdale). Other authors who have also influenced me, in no particular order, include Tove Jansson, William Morris, Peter Beagle, Evangeline
Walton, Richard Adams, George McDonald, Sigrid Undset, Angela Carter, Walter Wangerin, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, David Lindsay, Nikolai Tolstoy, Michael Ende, and Jessaca Amanda Salmonson, all of whom I greatly admire for their style, if not always for their content. As the above list of my influences shows, there is a strong division in me between the traditional, even (some would say) the old fashioned, and the progressive boundary pushing and this tension is at the core of my heart and my writing. I have never been able to accept the common idea that ancient values like courage, heroism, and devotion, are somehow inherently opposed to and cannot exist simultaneously with modern principles of inclusion, like more flexible possibilities for gender expression. Both are essential to who I am and to sacrifice either would be to lose half myself and so this division is the ultimate box I long to break, the box to end all boxes.
Have you ever had the experience where you discover an author you just love, you're completely blown away by the beauty, the intensity, the sheer heart and soul of their work, but you also feel disappointed, sad, at a loss because, for whatever reason, there seems to be no place for someone like you in the amazing world they've created? This happened to me for the first, but certainly not the last, time at a fairly young age (when I first read Lord of the Rings, naturally) and I've spent the rest of my life, first unconsciously and now consciously trying to correct this by gaining the skills and producing the works I wish had existed when I was younger. If you can relate to the above at all, if you ever had a similar experience that made you upset, maybe like you wanted to break something, then perhaps you might get some satisfaction from reading my tales of box smashing.
