I grew up in Greene County, Pennsylvania. My first crush was Encyclopedia Brown. I wrote poems before I wrote fiction, and before that I wrote my name in water on the table. I think of myself as essentially a listener. I was never a punk or a witch, although I tried. My favorite writers are Larry Levis, Roberto Bolaño, Mary Ruefle, and Denis Johnson. I always order the onion rings. I am accustomed to calling myself an only child, but I have a half brother in Germany whom I’ve never met. I tend to take pictures of places that feel like the torn end of another dimension. I like emptiness and singers who sing like they’re talking. I believe in writing and I believe in believing, but I’m suspicious of too much clutching of the heart. A funny affliction for a poet, to doubt the veracity of other people’s feelings. Once an artist in Soho who hosted me and six of my poet friends on tour told me that I, like her, would never be able to quit smoking cigarettes because we needed it too badly. She cut her cigarettes in half with penny scissors, and it seemed very likely that she was a seer. I haven’t smoked since 2018. I’m the friend who always tells you to quit your job and break up, but I believe haircuts are generally a mistake. I have won multiple karaoke competitions (I’m an alto who’s actually a tenor, like Lou Reed.) I don’t believe in astrology anymore. I don’t believe in despair, a fixity of meaning. I honestly don’t think this is the worst time to be alive. My number one tip for life is to take a walk as soon as possible upon waking. I tend to feel the wrong things at the wrong times. A void is also a portal. Nothing is real, magic is real. I have a tattoo on my right shoulder that says that, plus a goat. My other tattoo is frequently invisible for years. If you’ve come this far I can tell you the truth: Truth lands like a ball of clay on a table. Lies take energy to keep upright. Probably the unit of truth in my writing is the image—rather than the sentence or the scene. Or the heart, even. An image can be an arid, chilly place. It jumps into existence, it spins lazily like ice cubes in a glass (see?). It begins and begins. It ends and ends. There is no quest in it because there is no time and there is no need. There are, of course, people in my fiction. But the people are image making people, either by means of refuge or because they have been shaped that way by their world. And, of course, things happen in my fiction. But they often happen in an imagelike way, as if the world of the story dreamed them. Which is to say, I’m not for everybody. But I don’t know how to do anything else. But every image allows an echolocation. It is the contours of the cave. If you listen, you can find the bat. If you pay attention very carefully, the image is a reverse projection. You can find the outline of the human who sees it and stand where they stand. Anything written is a system, a structure, a matrix meant to hold some material, a material which is tricky and liquid and difficult to otherwise transport. This is what I mean by a portal. Every image is a portal. And there is a story in every portal, rudimentary though true: GO THRU. You must use space to travel space. Space can be chilly, but it’s home. I have pretended to be otherwise, but it doesn’t work out. I’m not a very convincing sentimentalist. I don’t find any of my identities all that meaningful aesthetically or emotionally. I have a few pathologies but they no longer interest me either. Writing is a collaboration with an unseen partner. (“I’m a throat. It’s a song.”) (I also genuinely think it is possible to forgive everyone.) Songs that make me cry: “La Bamba,” “I Need Some Love in My Life,” “Touch ‘em With Love,” “Powderfinger.” To all the others like me, salutations. To all the others I puzzle: salutations. Everything I make I make with the greatest hope that when you read it, you will feel loved. Even if you don’t know why.