What keeps you motivated to create? Do you have any big dreams or goals for your work?

For me, if something (an emotion, an idea, an opinion) is not written down, then it doesn’t exist. So I create in order to keep myself alive. My anxious mind is always working too fast for me to keep up, and writing is the only way for me to think.

I began writing when I was fifteen in order to understand the onslaught of hormonal emotions I felt at the time. In college I wrote to debate philosophies and religions, to figure out the meaning of life and what the idea of a love meant to me.

In my later twenties, after I figured everything out and knew what I believed, I stopped writing for a few years. I feared that writing had served its purpose and I’d never pick up the pen again. But existence continues on, and fresh traumas and tragedies continue to occur. So now I write as a form of therapy and coping.

I also regained the spark to write since switching to speculative poetry. For the first sixteen years of my poetry career, I existed in the spoken word arena. We were looked down on if we wanted to talk about the stars or science fiction. And I can only write so many autobiographical poems before it gets boring. Speculative poetry lets you still take the emotional and immensely personal topics to the page, but you can create fictional narratives that are fertile ground for creativity and expression. There is no limitation to this genre and it is amazingly freeing.

I have big dreams for my work, like most writers. If they come to fruition we’ll have to see. I’m currently working as part of the SFWA Poetry Committee to bring speculative poetry to the 2025 Nebula Awards. It would be a life dream to have one of my poems nominated one year.

Beyond that, I hope to bring science fiction poetry into the mainstream bookstore and convince the populace that poetry is not inherently rhyming, boring, shitty, or only for 1700s dead guys. It is modern, fresh, emotional, and urgent. Check back with me in a year to see if I’ve finished my full-length poetry book and found an agent.

How does music incorporate into your writing?

Absolutely integral. I require music in order to create a sphere of sound around me and cut me off from the rest of the world. Only in this bubble can I look inward and connect with myself emotionally and then create from the heart.

I’m picky about what music I choose. It’s almost always emo music, because I want music to make me as sad and introverted as possible in order to get me into the perfect headspace for writing. If I’m angry, I’ll switch to screamo and ride that clean and unclean vocal combination to sweet, sweet catharsis.

Some authors can’t use music with words, but I have to. Otherwise, the music doesn’t convey its emotion well enough. It’s easy enough for me to not listen to the specific words and focus on the singer’s tone and passion which carry me as I write.

Currently I’m addicted to the new band called Bike Routes. I discovered them when they opened for Hawthorne Heights in DC a few weeks back. They’re everything I want in an emo-punk band: Can barely play guitar or sing but belts his words out with an urgent passion because he believes in them and has to get the emotions out. That rawness is what I aspire to become and what I love to listen to and write alongside.

Give us some background on the poem “Cyberpunk Romance.”

My poem is a science fiction reimagining of a previous poem I wrote for my wife while we were dating.

I used to be a love poet in my younger days. But in my later twenties I stopped after writing my magnum opus on the topic and after having a series of terrible wedding engagements with women who were diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and (hidden from me) alcoholism. It all left me abused, traumatized, and wondering if love existed after all.

I was lucky to have found my wife in a graduate science fiction course and she has shown me single-handedly what honest, passionate adult love can be.

I’m careful with my love poems these days, typically only writing one a year for my wife. She is not very big into poetry, ironically enough, but I still aim to make her cry happy tears (and usually succeed).

For this poem, I opened with “let’s reinvent [. . .] love” because for me at the time I was dating her, we were both re-learning how to love someone else. We were casting aside our youthful, naïve notions of romantic relationships, and entering into one that was mature and long-lasting.

Our first date was at an anarcho-punk show with the band Enter Shikari, and I introduced her to moshing for the first time. The image of us getting caught inside the pit as it opened up is one that sticks with me, and I keep going back to for metaphors.

The rest of the poem incorporates dates we went on together throughout our courtship. From museums, art shows, getting tattoos together, joining protests, going to river walks and libraries, and so on. Though we didn’t join a white hat hacking collective, as much as I would have loved to.

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