How would you best describe your work?

I write dark, strange stories that circle the fabulist, the folkloric, and the horrifying. My debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, features twelve award-winning and never-before-seen tales of twisted games and childhood rituals: sinister CD-ROMs, creepy camp pranks, and cootie catchers with a mind of their own. Elsewhere, I’ve written about lovers experiencing erosion, demigods attending desert music festivals, spirits lurking in the backs of bathhouses, and seals granting wishes at the bottom of Lake Baikal. 

What was your first published work?

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is the first book-length project I’ll have out in the world. My first published work, period? That would have to be a poem in an early issue of sPARKLE + bLINK, the zine put out by this awesome San Francisco reading series called Quiet Lightning. I’d be surprised if they printed more than fifty copies, but there might still be a version floating around online somewhere. The poem is called “Milkless,” and it’s about migration and ancestral memory, topics I’m still fixated on today. I remember it starts, “I hate the word skyscraper. It sounds so mean.” I really stand by that!

Is there a story inside that you have seeds of but can’t seem to connect that’s dying to get out?

I recently drafted this werewolf story that’s part mixtape, part historical record, part, I don’t know, moon dust drifting through the beam of a lone stage light? It’s this weird, fragmented novella right now. Maybe someday it’ll be something else, and good. 

How do you handle a rejected story?

I have this spreadsheet I use to track story submissions. So when that happens, I mark “declined” in the appropriate row—at some point I decided for my personal well-being I ought to use the word “declined” instead of “rejected.” Then I close the spreadsheet and, with it, that whole portal of thought. If the story isn’t in another queue already, I’ll get it in one. Or two.

What does literary success look like to you?

Getting to write about my obsessions and letting those obsessions evolve over time. Being kind to my past selves as that evolution happens—that is, never looking back on my past writing with dismissal or shame, but embracing that, if my present writing feels stronger or more accomplished or even more “me” than my past writing, that’s good. That’s a mark of growth, of progress, and all is as it should be. 

To me, literary success also means being in the literary community. I could have every book reach the top of the New York Times whatever list, but if I ever stop reading and rooting loudly for my fellow writers, I’m not doing shit.

Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?

This only just started being an option for me, and I’m going to declare an early and insistent “Yeah, no thanks.” I got some sound advice from a writer friend who told me that all our favorite (and I mean shout-from-the-rooftops, life-changing) books have 3.5 stars on Goodreads, and I looked it up and found that to be true. I’ve also heard of writers combing through reviews for one another, and picking out only the positive ones to share back—so the person they’re sharing with basically gets to live in a filtered world filled with readers who connected with their book/s, and bad reviews don’t exist. I think that’s as close to utopia as we’re ever going to get. So if anyone wants to go tradesies on that, let me know. 

What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?

Protecting it from the dreaded time/responsibility creep. Like…the administrative stuff. I love being in touch with folks, but I’m a slow corresponder. I can lose a whole day responding to emails. 

As in most times, the truth is stranger than fiction. What has been the hardest scene or chapter you’ve had to write, if you were channeling personal experience?

I have a story in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine called “Mel for Melissa,” my first real experiment in autofiction. In some ways, it’s the easiest kind of writing there is. I didn’t have to think very hard about what this character would do, or how they would respond to something done to them: it was right there, in my history, in my heart. At the same time, it’s terribly uncomfortable, because the armor of fiction that I’ve happily grown accustomed to hiding behind— “Names, characters, businesses, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner”—is suddenly less armor, more the thinnest, gauziest veil. I remember workshopping this story in a classroom and wanting to claw through the tile floor and dig till no one could see me anymore. That’s okay. I love autofiction; it helps me get at something I can’t otherwise. And anyway, all my fiction, even the stuff with mermaids and dragons, is a true story. 

What inspired your latest work?

Travel always does, especially international travel—bittersweet, since I can only do so much of it. Part of this is how much walking I do when I travel, I’m sure (last year in Seoul, I walked nearly 100 miles over ten days). And part of it is just that I tend to feel more at home when not “at home.” I always come back with my Notes app flooded with ideas, some set in that place or having to do with something I saw there, but oftentimes not. 

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

One completely unexpected benefit of putting a book out is that you’re going to talk to so many people in so many avenues and be perceived from so many angles and humbled (and supported, too) at such a high frequency that suddenly, all at once, through sheer exposure, you’re going to care less what anybody thinks. It’s not going to go away entirely: you’re still who you are. But there won’t be time or energy enough for all of it, and some of the pressure you’ve been carrying around for ages will melt away, and it’ll be a shock and a relief.

What’s the best advice you’ve gotten from a fellow writer?

GennaRose Nethercott once advised me to find the spaces that no one else wants to occupy, inattentive to their potential—then, when you use those spaces, you won’t have to worry about other people kicking you out. She was talking about this in the context of writing residencies, but I think it applies elsewhere, too. 

M. L. Krishnan told me to be so fucking weird, and I’ll never forget it.

What is your go-to comfort horror/Sci-Fi book?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. John Dies at the End. Anything Terry Pratchett. Anything Stephen Graham Jones. Fantasy-specific shoutout to Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness series. I think we don’t talk nearly enough about Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger. 

If you were to genre-hop, which genres would you most like to try writing?

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is basically one big game of genre hopscotch. I’d like to figure out how to pull off a novel-in-stories—like Sequoia Nagamatsu’s great How High We Go in the Dark, or Case Q. Kerns’ new Habitat. I’d love to write a slasher someday, too, or better yet a comedy slasher. Better better yet, a sports comedy slasher.

A STRANGE AND SINISTER DEBUT
The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A declining empire, in its last desperate gasp, designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you. 
Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control.
Forthcoming October 7, 2025 from Stillhouse Press.​

Preorder Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine here!