I am curious…

Famous last words that doomed the cat and numerous sea-faring Greek archetypes over the years and yet that’s where everything starts: Curiosity. I write because I am voraciously, and inconveniently, and unavoidably curious. 

I have no idea what great writing should be…

…and I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing that interests me. What I know is what I love: The way story braids itself into the narrative of my life.

I love stories abundant with possibility, inviting me to leap into the shadow lives quietly running parallel to my own, if only for a moment.

I love writing that reminds me how close we really are to one another; that if not for a chance sideways glance, a missed train, an alarm clock ignored, a last-minute left turn, an intuition followed, a collision of breath and stardust, we'd be living another life and not our own.

 I love writing that tells wider truths than fact makes space for and isn’t afraid to highlight what real-life makes small.

I love stories that reimagine the status quo, give life to what could be, and remind us all that in our deepest and most quiet longings we are the same. I love writing written because it is unavoidable, because one imagines something wild, and vital, and alive and must move it outside of oneself and into the world. 

I have always written. I started writing because of the sounds of the first words that blew my life wide open—

because when Janis Joplin went down the river Jordan

and Jefferson Airplane broke through the sound barrier

and Grace Slick followed the White Rabbit down, down, down for no other reason than to find Alice and ask her a question

 I wanted to go too.

I write because the lives of my imagination are bigger than a single human lifetime has space for. I write because of an unwavering conviction that when the money is gone and the grid has crashed, when there’s no more oil and the well is dry, those left standing will be the artists. I write because nearly every wound inflicted upon ourselves and each other and the land seems to come from a profound lack of imagination; and every flicker of magic sparked from a willingness towards it.

I write because twenty-six letters don't feel like enough, but maybe they could be. 

- An earlier version of this artist statement appears in ​CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing