My story is one of those “character wakes up in a strange place with no memory of where he was before” type tales, because I don’t really remember when I came into writing. There must have been some particular moment, but I no longer remember what it was. I remember writing short stories, poems, and such at least as far back as fourth grade including a western mystery novel centering on the perpetrator possessing a brass knife that left a very distinctive wound, which fell apart when I couldn’t figure out at age 9 how a knife would leave a very distinctive wound. 

For a long time though, it was bad. Very bad. I was into a lot of science fiction and horror at the time, so I wanted to write it. That’s all fine. I adore a lot of science fiction and fantasy out there, but it has to be good. Mine wasn’t…for a very long time. Still, I kept at it. I submitted my first short story my junior year in high school, done up on a typewriter sitting in a spare room of the foster home I was at for a year. I had a lot to learn. For example, I learned that postal submissions wanted return envelopes and didn’t care for single spacing. I also learned that the science fiction and fantasy I was writing wasn’t coming out anything like the science fiction and fantasy I was reading. My Lovecraft pieces were the worst.


My tastes started leaning more literary as I focused more on trying to figure out why my stories weren’t working. I figured I had to get the elements down before I could build interesting things with those elements, since building interesting things alone hadn’t been working so well. I picked up a few writers’ workshop courses in undergrad. Those seemed to help what was wrong in my stories, so I decided to go back for more. Once I had my law degree down, I went back for a BA in English as preparation for an MFA. Going through both of those, I finally started seeing my stories come up to where they needed to be to function.

However, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, though it fit that model of interesting things enhancing a solid story, was a bit of a frolic from my main path. Joseph Michael Owens recommended Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist and I got this really odd, greatly mistaken idea what the book was about. I told Joe about my mistake, and he told me to write that. I did, and it turned out to be one of the oddest writing projects I’ve ever gotten involved in, a young woman who may or may not be endlessly trapped in a Village Inn with her ex boyfriend and her ex-best friend, his current girlfriend.