I'm for poetry that haunts people when they try to sleep at night and fiction that makes people uncomfortable.
I am an Appalachian writer, which is funny because I didn't know I was “Appalachian†until I went to college. We never called ourselves that. We were people who worked hard, who led the lives we had to in order to get by. We were never inbred hillbillies as portrayed in movies like Deliverance. We did not dress in overhauls twenty-four seven like some romanticized greeting card pictorial of gentle mountainfolk plucking banjos on the front porch with an uncle named Burl and his little brown and tan jug. The Appalachia I remember was a melting pot of diversity from the urban streets of Knoxville to the many trailer parks on my road. I am a thinker, but I choose to apply my brain to rougher things. I find abandoned junkyards more intriguing than sunsets. I ride a motorcycle for the experience, but also to learn the difference between a carburetor and a fuel filter.