About My Writing

I've lived my whole life in the northern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

It's a weird place.

The Appalachians are some of the oldest mountains on the planet. They used to be part of a much bigger range before Pangea split up. Some of those mountains ended up in Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia; the rest are now the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. While Central New York can seem like a neglected backwater sometimes, it's hard to feel isolated when you've got neighbors on three different continents, geologically speaking. It's an interesting place to be if you're thinking about the metaphysical connections between land and people.

I wasn't thinking about any of that while I was growing up in the Southern Tier.

I've often spoken unkindly about my hometown. As far as I could see at the time, the place was plagued with tragic stories. We were living in the epilogue of a glorious industrial past. People had once come to the Triple Cities from all over the world to find a better life, looking for work in the factories that built the place. By the time I was old enough to care, that chapter of our history was closed, with no sequel forthcoming. From the bleachers of my high school—surrounded by the dust and rust and emptiness of a once-thriving city—you could watch the mistreated Susquehanna River struggling past the football field, trying to escape to the ocean.

That's probably a big part of my interest in solarpunk as a genre: growing up in a place that needed to imagine a better future for itself; sifting through the pieces of the past, hoping to wire something worthwhile together from salvaged parts.

My own bid for freedom brought me north, just over the Valley Heads Moraine, where the earth had been shoved into a line of hills by the glaciers that carved the Finger Lakes. I'd intended to get farther away from where I grew up. But there was a whole new world on the other side of that glacial divide, and so I stayed.

It's weird here too.

If you dig a little bit below the surface of the beautiful farmland and the wine country and the colleges and the tourism, you find a place built on Haudenosaunee burial grounds—a Great Swamp filled in with old bones, where the new pavement isn’t enough to keep things from bubbling up.

The whole region was once known as the Burned-Over District. Not for the torching of indigenous villages in the frontier days (although that happened all too often) but because of the incendiary spiritual fervor that swept through in the early 19th Century. This place gave the world a whole crop of new strangeness: apocalyptic preachers and table-rappers, mystics and anarchists. Makes you wonder about the long-term influence of desecrated graves and broken mountains on a population of unsuspecting pioneers. It's a great backdrop for writing about animist fiction, magical realism, and general spookiness.

That's where I'm coming from.