In my early twenties, I began writing out of intensity rather than understanding; poetry shaped by heartbreak, excess, and the belief that experience itself could substitute for knowledge. I followed instinct, tested physical and emotional limits, and treated writing as a record of immersion: journals, fragments, and reflections written without discernment. For a time, saying yes to everything felt like the only way to learn who I was.

Over years of sustained writing—much of it produced on a typewriter—I began to recognize the limits of this approach. Accumulation alone did not yield insight. What mattered was attention: to language, to structure, to context, and to the ways memory distorts and revises itself. Research, etymology, and revision became as central to my practice as lived experience had once been. I learned to question my own narratives, to listen for what was missing, and to treat fallibility as a tool rather than an obstacle.

That shift—from immersion into inquiry—continues to shape my work. Writing became not a means of confession, but a method of knowing: a way to hold multiple registers at once, to test perception, and to ask better questions of both the self and the world. My process still begins in excess, but meaning emerges through restraint.

Writing is the method I have chosen for knowing myself—not to summon definitive answers, but to practice the art of asking better questions. The page is both a laboratory and an ocean: through sentences, I test who I am and where belief happens. Writing allows me to inhabit three registers simultaneously—submerged in memory’s dark architecture, buoyant on the quicksilver of the present, or briefly airborne when lifted by a new perspective. That multiplicity is not a flaw but a practice. I want to keep the whole field open.

My work navigates the balance between experimental narration and psychological realism. I am drawn to fragments and forms that mirror memory’s fractures and the slips in identity that trauma can leave behind. In A Portrait of the Subject, a recent project, I follow a protagonist whose mind splinters across voices and time frames as he reckons with grief, guilt, and the violence he carries forward from his past. At its center, the work asks a question about integration: how we metabolize what has happened without being caught in its loops. Its recursive, layered, self-referential structure is my way of testing whether language can be not only an act of representation but also a form of healing.

One reason I am writing a memoir is that most attempts to summarize my formative years succinctly unravel into either a spiral of debilitating emotion or a ramble of incomprehensible imagery. My interest lies in how the facts of a circumstance and the felt truths about it can tell different stories—and very often contradict one another. I am drawn to that tension, and to the ethical work required to hold it without resolving it prematurely.

My father was a Pentecostal minister, and my four siblings and I were raised in the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a religious organization recently exposed for its misconduct and cult practices in the documentary Shiny Happy People. In my early twenties, I set myself the task of knowing the world for what it is, not what I want it to be. That effort—to remain open, to doubt my own certainties, and to resist inherited narratives—has become central to my work as a writer and to the way I try to understand belief, authority, and selfhood.

My path to this point has also been shaped by years of self-directed study in literature, philosophy, and narrative theory, as well as by work that required me to read people as closely as texts. I have learned that tone, rhythm, silence, and gesture can shift meaning as much as language. Once, in an essay course with Jeremiah Chamberlin, I saw how a single reframing of a sentence could unlock an entirely new sense of voice. That moment clarified for me that teaching and writing share a discipline: listening closely, asking the right questions, and refusing easy answers. These are lessons I carry forward as I temper solitude with rigorous workshopping, translating private discovery into public craft.

Academically, my trajectory has been shaped as much by constraint as by intention. I was accepted into the School of Information at the University of Michigan, but quickly realized I am not a coder. I was later admitted to the Stamps School of Art & Design, but was unable to afford the required study-abroad program. Were it not for LSA’s foreign-language requirement, I would have graduated with a major in English and Literature, a minor in Philosophy, and honors. Instead, the Bachelor of General Studies program became my path—an imperfect but honest route that allowed me to design a curriculum around the questions that matter most to me.

Three years ago, I legally changed my last name, formalizing a process of self-authorship that had been unfolding for some time. In establishing my own family, I have become newly attentive to lineage, naming, and inheritance—not as fixed identities, but as structures we actively construct. This attention to self-definition informs both my memoir work and my understanding of how lives are shaped by the stories we accept or refuse.

I write immersive memoir, creative nonfiction, autofiction, poetry, and literary criticism. My range of topics extends to, and is not limited by, auto-mythography, narrative experimentation, class consciousness, shamanism, cultural criticism, religious occultism, protestant extremism, substance use, homelessness, recovery, Kerouac-esque travel in the USA, aesthetics, and philosophy. Like Fitzgerald, I do not write because I want to say something; I write because I have something to say. 

I stand in a long conversation that stretches from Anaximander to Montaigne, T.S. Eliot, W.G. Sebald, Denis Johnson, Virginia Holman, Nick Flynn, Helen DeWitt, Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, and Roberto Bolaño. These voices form part of my internal scaffolding. They have taught me to hold paradox, to think in networks of fragments, and to treat life as an evolving form rather than a resolved narrative. My project is to carry forward that attention—to practice rigorous revision, and to pursue structures capable of revealing truth by making space for vulnerability.

I need to continue my work. I am seeking a graduate program that values academic rigor, imaginative pedagogy, and writing that participates in a civic conversation. I bring devotion to craft, curiosity across forms, and an ethic of honest risk to any workshop. I read carefully, respond generously, and revise relentlessly. My long-term goal is to publish widely and teach writing at the college level, helping students discover their voices while learning how form shapes thought. Most of all, I seek a community that insists on sincerity, patience, and shared inquiry—one that holds questions open, together, for as long as necessary.