“It was good!” My girlfriend lied. “I really liked it!” How could she keep a straight face, telling me this? She’d read my most recent piece of writing and I knew it was bad, knew she was just being nice. I waved my hand in the air. “Eh,” I grunted…

Nique Craft was a force to reckon with, making national headlines as a protester in Pittsburgh — Interview from June 2020 Face to face, you’d be foolish to say Nique Craft looked vulnerable. You might wake up on the ground if you did. Yet as a Black, nonbinary metalhead, there aren’t many people in this city more marginized; because of this, Nique has been at the forefront of the Pittsburgh protest…

For a couple years now I’ve been working on a novel about train hoppers. It’s been a constant project in the sense that it’s the only thing I’m working on, but it’s only been worked on in fits and starts. I have a few chapters. I can say they’re fairly…

It’s like a radio stuck between stations. Static and half-thoughts. I’m nervous all of the time. I can’t stop picking and chewing at my skin. Yesterday I hung something on a wall and spent hours thinking about the fact that I didn’t center it properly. I try to unwind with…

You can always come back but you can’t come back all the way — Bob Dylan, “Mississippi” I’m walking along with Summer Lee, a progressive democrat running for state representative of District 34 of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. Lee and I are walking through Homestead, an area I’ve lived in…

I stare at the little bubble on Facebook Messenger. It does not move. The bubble does not descend. The messages I’m sending will not be seen. At least not on a phone or laptop or any other device. Messenger is the only reason I keep Facebook. It’s been the only…

How many pandemic novels do you think anyone actually finished? I would bet surprisingly few. Once it was clear I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while — that my job wasn’t reopening anytime soon and everything was shutting down— I knew for sure I’d finish my train hopping novel…

A look at the ways I’ve tricked myself into writing (or not) — I can’t write for shit. I don’t mean that the things I do write are bad but that, as a practice, I am horrible at this. Writing agonizes me in a way that, if I passed Kafka on the street, we’d high-five in recognition of each other’s inabilities, then we’d…

The cycle continues. I, of course, am going to miss a— let’s be real — somewhat self-imposed deadline for submitting a novel draft. For the past four months I’ve been trying to work on a project that an agent I greatly respect wanted to see, and I’ll still try to…