1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first novel, which has long been shelved, was a monumental accomplishment. Before I finished it, I wasn’t sure I could plan and execute a large and complicated project without external pressure. The novels that followed haven’t necessarily been easier to write, but I no longer doubted whether I could complete them. It was just a matter of juggling time, life responsibilities, and writing cadence.
As I consider it, I’m not sure there’s a clear throughline connecting my projects. Each one expresses a different stylistic impulse and dimension of self. Honeydew, which was published by Radiant Press on October 7, 2025, is a wacky dystopian satire with an ensemble cast. In contrast, Only by the Grace of the Wind, which I serialized on Substack in 2024, is introspective and lyrical. It draws from my own medical training experiences, which I sieved through a surreal mesh.
Honeydew’s tone is probably my default, and I wrote it quickly in the wee hours of morning before clinic. I find that humour is a ready prism, especially when my guiding preoccupation—in this case, the rise of big tech—is so baffling and infuriating. How does this one feel different? Well, Honeydew is my traditional publishing debut, so it will be the first of my novels to have wings, so to speak, and make its way into the world. It will be the conduit through which readers meet me. And there is certainly something daunting about that.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Fiction is my first love, and I’ve always been drawn to the novel as a form. But I also have an affinity for essays and long-form non-fiction, which continually scrub and refocus my perspective. In a past life, I worked in journalism and entertained atavistic and extravagant fantasies about being a man-of-letters and writing for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. These days, I read a lot of nonfiction as research for my novels, which I feel demand an up-to-date cache of knowledge about big tech, cultural history, and current events. But when I sit down to write, I chafe against anything I perceive as a restraint, and so I return to storyland, where I’ve always wanted to be. With the exception of Robert Caro’s doorstopper biographies, which I believe to contain some of the finest prose ever published, fiction has furnished my most treasured reading experiences. It’s where I always land, if that makes sense.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m quick. Once I have an idea, it dilates and unfurls itself, and I have to wrestle it into an outline. As I write, I continually compile notes, some of which I actually use. When the story is finished, I edit and revise like a fanatic. The image that comes to my mind is of a crazed painter ransacking a room they’ve just finished. They shave some of the paint off the rear wall and repaint the segment over and over. Then, in a fit of pique, they kick a hole in the drywall. And after a bit of reflection, they return to the room and sheepishly repair the damage they’ve done. The cycle continues until the exhausted and chastened painter throws up their hands, removes the blue tape from the baseboards and ceiling, and says, “good enough.”
4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Though I enjoy short stories and admire writers who have mastered the geometry and mystery of the form, I have always found myself planning long-form projects from the outset. I love long, arcing, unwieldy stories, and though I tend to want to make my stories really ponderous, I eventually pare them down. They begin, I suppose, with a germ—either an image, an idea, or even a phrase. And the process of writing is iterative. Even when I have a tidy, complete outline, I still add and remove elements. A sort of Frankenstein’s monster emerges in the margins that (I hope) only I can see. Somehow, it gets carved into a bounded, coherent story.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like doing readings, though I’ve never publicly shared anything unfinished. I can see the benefit of doing so, however, and would certainly consider it in the future. For anyone who might come to one of my book launches in October, I do voices!
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
This is such a good question. Ultimately, I’m interested in why, as the great cultural critic, Thomas Frank, wrote in an essay for The Baffler magazine in the early 90s, Johnny still can’t dissent. The machinery that organizes and immures our lives (read: late-stage capitalism) seems to foreclose political imagination and coopt any attempts at resistance. My primary preoccupation is how that shapes the inner lives of would-be rebels. This could just be a reflection of a personal psychological quirk, but a current of fecklessness runs through my stories. The desire to change oneself or the world is ultimately stymied by something, or someone, more powerful. More often than not, my characters tend to suffer for their clear thinking. In my next novel, however, a victory of sorts is on the horizon.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To be honest, I don’t know if a truly shared culture still exists in North America. At least, not in the way we might have discussed it in previous decades. The eminent historian Daniel Rodgers describes our current era as “fractured.” We’re atomized, isolated, siloed. Depending on our social locations and unique configurations of identity and ideology, we all seem to inhabit different currents in the slipstream. It’s kind of scary, I think.
My idealized writer archetype nettles, metabolizes, challenges, enthralls, dazzles, and poetically witnesses. In an interview with Bill Moyers years and years ago, the late political scientist and all-around lucid thinker Sheldon Wolin remarked that the humanities’ most important role is to help us make sense of what’s being done to us. I’d add only that I believe it’s also the task of writers and other artists to irrigate their corners of reality with aesthetic novelty, light, and energy. After all, what is justice without beauty?
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Like all intimate relationships, editorial arrangements can be tumultuous, rewarding, infuriating, illuminating. Robert Caro and his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, were close friends and enthusiastic opponents. Their shouting matches were legendary. But Caro has been quick to credit much of his success to Gottlieb, who’s perspicacity and farsightedness helped to shape Caro’s epic biographies of so-called great men and the historical periods in which they were ensconced. Theirs was a relationship backstopped with mutual trust. I also suspect that Gottlieb’s understanding of Caro, what we might view as a sort of writerly empathy, guided his textual sculpting. It’s delicate work.
I have had both good and bad experiences with editors. If a writer finds an editor who really gets them and their project, it’s a special feeling.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Be curious and make conclusions sparingly.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I tend to do almost all my writing in the early hours of morning, before I head to clinic. I set a goal, usually 500-1000 words, and I meet it come hell or high water. Sometimes, this means I write 500 tortured and flaccid words. But I always meet my quota. Coffee is involved.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My bookshelves. When I’m stuck, I go back to the bigs.
12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
I can’t remember the last time I properly celebrated Halloween, but my most memorable costume came from a mail-order catalogue in the mid-90s. When I wore it, it appeared that I was a small elderly man on the back of an pucker-faced elderly woman wearing a wedding dress and veil. I had a convincing bald old man mask that I wore as well. It was a smash hit with adults and my fellow teens alike.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I have found tremendous inspiration in graphic novels, comics, and animated films, especially in depicting the lineaments of human faces and expressions.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m grateful for radical thinking and unfettered imagination, which have been recorded and preserved by intrepid, courageous publishers. These include novelists, scholars, anti-capitalists/free-thinkers, poets, and mystics. Books have always been my portal into the universe outside of (and in some cases, inside of) my head. I tend to see their influence as a gestalt, a meshwork, and it’s difficult for me to tug on one thread without bringing all the others with it.
Some novelists who continue to inspire me include John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, China Mieville, Willa Cather, Olaf Stapledon, Mervyn Peake, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Iain Banks, John Kennedy Toole, Ursula Le Guin, W. Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip K.Dick, Ralph Ellison, Terry Pratchett, Michael Chabon, Philip Pullman, Roald Dahl, Jules Feiffer, and Stanislaw Lem.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In my writing life, I’d like to tackle a really big story, an epic whose arc spans a trilogy or perhaps a really big book with a bowed binding.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
As I get older, I can imagine so many alternative paths. My life trajectory has been a bit meandering, with factotum stops in some unusual corners of the work world, so I wonder what it would be like to fulfill a monomaniacal mission. I’ve fantasized about all sorts of occupations—historian, scientist, professional athlete, astronaut, freedom fighter, bagel baker.
I come from a family of professional classical musicians, so I can also imagine a symphonic life.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My mom says I started talking at 9 months (and never really stopped). I’ve always admired visual artists, performers, and other “creatives,” and I can imagine alternate realities in which fate endowed me with more ability and discernment in these areas. But my preferred mode of expression has always been language. I seek out stories others have written and I’m compelled by some inner fire to put my own into the ether.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
In the past several months, I’ve been in research mode, so I’ve had the good fortune to thumb through a number of truly excellent nonfiction books. But the last great novel, which I read and savoured for its prose and imagination, was Mervyn Peake’s 1946 masterpiece, Titus Groan.
As for films, I was astonished by the emotional sophistication of Anatomy of a Fall and the manic comic energy of Bottoms.
19- What are you currently working on?
It’s a sort of follow-up to Honeydew, but not quite a sequel. I don’t want to say too much, but we will see much more of Mo Honeydew, whose story will be one strand of a three-part braided narrative that will expose new cracks and crevices in Bonneville City, which is once again at the centre of a tectonic technological shift.
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