The mailbag comes back to life! This week’s reader question comes from Ricky T. in Chicago, Illinois.

Are there any specific experiences in your life that inform the perspective of certain characters or plot lines?

A great question from Big Rick. This is going to be a bit long-winded, so buckle in.

Ages ago, in the beforetimes, I was a young, bright-eyed artist entering college as a theater major. I always wanted to be a storyteller in some medium, but I didn’t find my way to the written word until I accepted that 6am workouts weren’t my cup of tea and I had a better face for fiction. 

During one memorable acting class, one of my colleagues broke down in the middle of a scene. As I understand it, whatever prep work they had done for the performance unearthed some unhealed trauma that they weren’t quite ready to use so publicly. I’ll never forget my acting teacher’s stone-faced look of disgust. She ended the scene, sent the poor girl out of the theater, and proceeded to warn the rest of us that “art isn’t therapy.”

Although I still take some exception with her handling of the situation, I also took her lecture to heart. In the context of acting, if you haven’t digested a life experience then you aren’t ready to use it on the stage. A corollary to this principle applies in writing. Setting aside the genre of memoir and any other Gonzo CNF, no one wants to read your diary. This is particularly true in fiction. It’s always glaringly apparent when an author constructs a self-insert character to move about the plot, and except in rare cases, I think this tends to throw readers out of the experience.

So while I’m never fictionalizing entire personas or experiences from my life, I do draw on my experience of the world in the assembly of characters and conflicts. None of my characters are me or anyone I know, but they all contain elements that reflect my lived experience. The game is to render all the furniture of your life down to its component parts and reassemble them in interesting ways.

Returning to the question at hand, I can put my finger on a few specific elements from my life that inform these books. I like to think that I can be circumspect about my own strengths and shortcomings, and these virtues and vices do surface in fictional characters alongside a mix of other personality traits that I’ve observed in others in my time as a living human on this planet. Effie Strait from the Tales of Ciel is bright and resourceful, but she grapples with impulsivity and an inflated sense of self. Lanagan from The Compact Cycle struggles with avoidance and has a tendency to hyperfocus on small tasks to the exclusion of the bigger problems metastasizing around him. The world of The Divine Heretic is inspired by a variety of Iron Age Semitic cultures and Jewish mysticism that I grew up with. And Oraluna from Shattered follows a spiritual journey that maps onto my own quasi-religious evolution.

One of my MFA committee members once observed that my work seems overly concerned with spiritual questions, the nature of doubt, and various paths to wisdom. I think that’s right, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. If you had to draw a through-line between the High Trestle Press series, each one explores these questions through a very different lens. Probably because they are questions that live rent-free in the back of my mind. I’ve never attached myself to an organized faith community, but I’m an academic consumer of sacred texts. I’m fascinated by the variety of cultural paths to morality and the ways in which we grapple with existential questions that confound empirical investigation. I think my own belief in the supernatural is probably what draws me to science fiction and fantasy. I’ve never struggled to conceive of a fantastical world, because I believe our consensus reality is fantastical.