Welcome to my Substack!
I suppose the most important thing about me, for purposes of this Substack, is that I’m a writer. I’ve written, and I’ve wanted to be a writer, since I was in middle school, although my original dream was to be a poet — very practical, right? I published poems in my high school literary magazine, and then in my collage literary magazine, where I was even on the editorial board. Then I went to law school, and my writing life was suspended for a while — honestly, it felt as though my entire life was suspended for a while, as I worked and tried to pay off my law school loans. As soon as they were paid off, I went back to school for a graduate degree in English literature. That gave me time, during the summers, to attend the Odyssey Writing Workshop and then the Clarion Writing Workshop, where I made my first professional sale to a fantasy magazine. Since then, I’ve published the Athena Club trilogy of novels (about the adventures and misadventures of Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Catherine Moreau, Beatrice Rappaccini, and Justine Frankenstein in late 19th century London), short story and poetry collections, and several edited volumes. I’ve taught in the Stonecoast MFA Program and at Boston University, where I’m currently a master lecturer in rhetoric in the College of General Studies.
I started this Substack because I write a lot of things that aren’t written to make money — honestly, making money is probably the part of writing I’m worst at. (Hopefully, the actual writing part is what I’m best at.) I write blog posts, poems, essays for various magazines . . . And I wanted a central place to post those things. So that’s what you’ll see here — my thoughts on various topics, as well as poetry that I’m not trying to publish, just to post for anyone who would like to see it. I write primarily because I love to do it — I love words, and I love to put them in the right order, or the other right order. I love to feel the magic of making a bunch of squiggles on a page come to life, singing and moving and being. And, of course, I would like to change the world by telling stories. That is the oldest and most traditional, and ultimately the most effective, way of changing the world. If we can tell new stories, we can imagine new possibilities for ourselves on this beautiful planet of ours, and I think we are living in a time when we need new stories, new possibilities.
So here goes . . . let’s tell stories, let’s change the world.
