RE: The New York Times

Literary “experts” have called my books “phantasmagoric.” I have no idea what it means. I write images that exist in shadows, whispers, explorations as to what the word “identity” really means.

In America, identity is also thematic. This throws Americans off balance as they are used to and expect hype to be the actual story, and usually, sadly, it is.

Phantasmagoric implies you cannot enter the human mind easily. Not without a guidebook or an editor who understands the language, and how it drives a curiosity that asks a lot of questions. This can validate experience only through the shared stereotypes of language itself.

Supposedly, the Southern writer has an accent and is obsessed with his or her mother.

Supposedly, the middle class personifies as the obliquity of a wet blanket, a sense of alienation, embracing a dystopia boxed up by its own stereotype complete with rules and regulations that might stretch the reader’s understanding of grammar and the world, but probably won’t as most stereotypes are contained only by the bubbles that exist inside any reader’s gut.

Not unlike the way language can paint either the structures of literacy or its twin which is indifference.

Indifference, too, is often a literary trick that allows a protagonist to play a literary game of chicken, chicken, who’s got the chicken.