Ghosts of Mr. Baker is a poignant exploration of time, space, and self that weaves together the tragic story of hockey legend Hobey Baker with themes of nostalgia, personal growth, and the connections between our past, present, and future. What inspired you to write this book?

When I first started writing and throughout the editing process, I honestly am not sure I even fully understood why I was so passionate about this project. It just felt like everything was coming out really naturally and just needed to get out on paper. But in hindsight I think the biggest inspiration in all of this that I didn’t really process until recently was just how both myself and everyone I’ve come across in my life has some element of shared experience in these senses. It was really fascinating for me to dive into Hobey Baker coming into this context just because he was always to me the pinnacle of who I wish I was, and getting to learn more of the hidden and dark details of his life story made me realize how nobody was immune to these struggles growing up and figuring out who they are. I often felt isolated in that process of trying certain things, failing, getting back up and trying something new – and then sometimes doing something really well but not being fully passionate about it and not understanding why. Just getting to relate to somebody like that who had so much success and fame at a young age but then still seemingly shared these feelings that I had always imagined were only those of me and my close friends made me realize how universal this experience was and was really life-changing for me emotionally to just feel more relatable and understood with people outside of that circle that I shared all these specific experiences with. I also definitely found a lot of value in my life being a hundred years after Baker’s and seeing that the emotional part of the human experience and trying to understand yourself and be happy with it really hasn’t changed as drastically as one might think and we can connect in certain areas more than we might think to older generations and even ones that we didn’t even meet.

The book touches on personal growth and self-reflection. How much of your own personal experiences and growth journey did you draw upon while writing this collection?

A large part of this draws on my personal experiences, primarily in trying to show why I felt connected to Hobey. This connection, though, when considering it from the view of a reader, really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with my personal life, nor Baker’s, but more just showing that really specific human connection on a deep emotional level and how common that is if we’re willing to lean into it. I imagine part of reading this is cool in the sense that you get to know both myself and him a lot better and look into a microscope on my personal feelings, but I also maintain that there’s a chance to take that and draw it back into your own life and somebody who you relate to or think about in the way that I think about Hobey. I truly believe that everyone has someone who they feel connected to in that sense, and for some people it may be similar to mine but I bet for most people it’s a different person or a different twist on those feelings. I think my goal in opening myself up personally in this book was hoping that it would start conversations for readers about their personal feelings that derive from thinking about this story.

Ghosts of Mr. Baker heavily emphasizes the connections between past, present, and future – how did you approach weaving these timelines together in your narrative?

I felt like the timeline on this was one of the more subtly fascinating parts for me to wrestle with just in the sense that I recognize the obscurity of feeling so close to someone who died eighty-two years before my birth. As much as I feel like an element of this revolves around current peers being able to relate in certain aspects, I think an equally interesting thing for me to think about is how we can relate to certain feelings that people we never met shared as well. In some ways it’s really inspiring to feel like specific feelings are more normal than we sometimes think but also a bit troubling to think that these aren’t really new for people and that someone, and probably a high percentage of people, living in the early 1900s shared these feelings and have tragic stories like Hobey Baker, but life goes on and the world keeps spinning and here we are a hundred years later still trying to figure it all out. While that might seem pessimistic, I think it just goes to show the importance of being there for people and how crucial it is to lean on each other to make life fulfilling.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

The next project I plan on releasing is most likely going to be a book I co-wrote with David Rosales. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he is an outstanding essayist who is absolutely worth checking out. He has a monthly newsletter that ranges a wide variety of zany but fascinating topics. He’s skilled at taking topics that everyone can relate to and successfully combining them with complex issues at hand and just helping readers be able to digest these complexities and get on track to thinking about them in logical and more accessible ways. We took a week-long road trip this past April, along with a screenwriter friend of ours, diving into 20^th-century American history. We were trying to first and foremost learn as much as possible, but also try to see what evokes powerful feelings in us learning about this and turn around and express those through poems and essays. David provides a lot of value in finding ways to relate these feelings back into extremely relevant, current topics which makes me really excited about how this is shaping up. While traditional literature is my primary area of focus right now, I also have begun a project with two classmates who I went through NYU with to try our hand at taking music more seriously so I think it’s more realistic to think that David and I will put our full energy into said manuscript once the music endeavors slow down. I think expecting it to be available in the next 12-15 months would be a very realistic outlook.

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