Blog Archives
Art Is For The Creator
All the Things I Want to Tell You transforms the emotional intensity of adolescence into poetry that explores what it means to feel deeply in a complicated world. What inspired you to begin writing poetry, and how did that passion develop into this collection?
In all honesty, I have no idea why I began writing poetry. I pretty much just sat down at my dining room table one day and started a journal entry that somehow became a poem. After that, I continued writing because I had a few people tell me that my poetry was good and I realized I enjoyed writing it. It became a collection by accident, really. My publisher, Nick, happens to be a long-time friend of the family, so when my mom mentioned to him that I’d begun writing, he asked to see it and I sent some stuff over. He liked it a lot and asked if I’d be willing to work with him to publish my writing and of course I said yes, and here we are!
What have you learned about accepting contradictions within yourself, such as feeling confident and uncertain at the same time?
I’ve learned that it isn’t necessarily bad to feel multiple or even opposing feelings toward someone or something. Emotions are complex and often intense, and that’s okay; they’re part of what makes us human. Some of us feel things more deeply than others, or at least are able to better show or communicate their feelings, but I think I can safely assume we’ve all had mixed emotions about something at one time or another. Labeling feelings as either good or bad doesn’t get me anywhere. Mostly I just try to be aware of when I’m feeling negatively about an emotion and do my best not to feel guilty or think of my emotions as wrong in any way. It’s hard, but I’m getting better at it.
How can poetry and other creative outlets help encourage empathy and more open conversations about mental health?
If people choose to share their poetry or other art, it can be helpful for others to see that they aren’t alone in their struggles. Often, when people have depression or other mental illnesses, they feel like they are the only ones experiencing that type of hardship and it gets very isolating. Just being able to see themselves in someone else can be helpful. Art is also a great way to help people who don’t have mental health issues understand what it’s like for those who do. There have been multiple times when I’ve shown a poem to one of my parents and they’ve been like wow, I had no idea that was true for you or that was what you were dealing with and they’ve been better able to support me because of the conversations my poetry has started.
What advice would you give teenagers who want to express themselves creatively but feel hesitant about sharing their work?
First of all, you don’t have to share anything! Art is for the creator, not the audience, and you should never be pressured into showing off something that you don’t feel comfortable sharing. If you do want to show someone, start with someone you know will react well to it. For me, that was my mom and a close friend. They were both people that I had a lot of deep conversations with, and as a result, they already knew me very well. I knew that if they liked my writing, they wouldn’t be shy about complimenting it, and if they didn’t, that they would say so kindly. From there, I slowly expanded that circle of people I shared my work with until I’d had enough people tell me that my writing was good that I could mostly ignore the people who inevitably disagreed. Also keep in mind that it is okay if someone doesn’t like your art—not everyone will, and that’s okay. Again, your art should be made because you enjoyed creating it, not because you wanted others to like it.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
All The Things I Want To Tell You: A Window Into the Life of an American High Schooler Through Poetry
C.J. Canino’s All the Things I Want to Tell You is a poetry and prose collection about growing up with a busy mind, strong feelings, and a demanding set of expectations for yourself. Written during her teenage years, it brings together reflections on friendship, first love, family, faith, and mental health, alongside responses to the dangers and injustices young people see around them. What drew me in was the tension between understanding yourself and knowing how to live with that understanding. Canino’s speakers can recognize their own patterns and still struggle to change them. They want closeness, worry about being too much, and question whether their achievements make them worthy of affection. That mix gives the collection an intimate, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. You’re reading someone trying to find words precise enough to explain feelings that keep shifting.
Canino has a knack for giving emotions bodies, personalities, and competing agendas. Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Love become creatures whose behavior makes inner conflict easier to picture. Oceans, fire, flowers, and broken glass also recur throughout the collection, creating connections between poems about very different experiences. I especially appreciated the smaller, everyday observations: remembering something a loved one wanted in a shop, noticing the comfort of a familiar sweatshirt, or finding reassurance in someone’s touch. Those details give the writing texture and make its affection feel personal. The poems move between loose rhyme and conversational free verse, often using short lines to slow down a thought or emphasize a question. There’s a directness to the voice that makes it easy to follow, even when the emotions being explored are complicated.
The collection’s intensity is both a strength and a source of repetition. Images of burning, breaking, and drowning appear frequently, and some longer poems explain feelings that their strongest images have already communicated. I found the writing most effective when Canino trusted a concrete detail or allowed a contradiction to stand without resolving it. A little more restraint in those passages would give individual lines more room to register. The prose adds a welcome change of pace and develops the relationship between religious belief, queer identity, and the desire to be loved. The closing interview and glimpses of early drafts are worthwhile additions, too. They let you see how writing fits into Canino’s life and how she uses it to examine her reactions. That context makes the book feel like an invitation to take young people’s creative work seriously.
I recommend All the Things I Want to Tell You to older teens and young adults who enjoy personal, emotionally direct poetry, particularly readers familiar with perfectionism, intense friendships, or questions about faith and sexuality. Parents and educators willing to listen closely to a teenager’s perspective could also find a lot to consider here. The collection includes explicit depictions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, and school shootings, so its emotional weight matters when choosing a reading audience. Alongside that distress, there’s considerable tenderness: gratitude for friends, love for family, attention to animals, and pleasure in small moments. Canino’s willingness to put all those feelings on the page is the book’s strongest quality. It gives readers plenty to recognize, question, and talk about.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0HLJFZCGT
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head, by Ben Dylan, is a contemporary LGBTQ+ coming-of-age novel about grief, identity, and the difficult work of choosing to live. University student Reuben Fletcher is already struggling with anxiety, suicidal thoughts, family pressure, and his hidden sexuality when his close friend Ava dies by suicide. Her death leaves him replaying every missed warning sign and unanswered call. From there, the story follows Reuben as he carries his guilt through lectures, orchestra rehearsals, friendships, and a campus culture that can be both cruel and unexpectedly supportive.
As mental health fiction, the novel is intensely direct about depression, disordered eating, panic, and bereavement. Reuben’s first-person narration keeps the reader close to his spiraling thoughts, especially when ordinary moments become loaded with fear or regret. The recurring images of rooftops, photographs, and chemical reactions give shape to emotions he can’t easily explain. Ava’s Polaroid camera becomes the book’s strongest symbol, connecting memory with her final request that Reuben keep looking for “the good stuff.”
The queer coming-of-age story develops alongside Reuben’s grief, particularly through his relationship with Nathan and his frightening experience of being publicly outed by Xan. Dylan captures the exhausting calculations that come with hiding, as well as the relief Reuben gradually finds in being known. The supporting cast gives the campus novel a generous emotional range. Ryan, Sophia, Taylor, and even Reuben’s abrasive classmate Nadia are carrying private pain of their own. Their stories reinforce the book’s central idea that kindness often begins when someone takes the time to look beneath another person’s performance.
The prose favors emotional clarity and repeated motifs, occasionally restating Reuben’s guilt and fear more often than the moment requires. That repetition also reflects a mind caught in rumination, making his eventual return to music feel genuinely earned. This is a grief and healing novel with a tender gay romance, a strong awareness of student mental health, and a sincere belief in human connection. Remember, It’s Just in Your Head offers an openhearted portrait of survival as something built slowly through friendship, creativity, accountability, and the decision to keep showing up.
Pages: 243 | ASIN : B0HCTPJ9YV
Flawed Interviews
Queer Justice follows a defense lawyer whose young client’s explosive claim about a Supreme Court Justice draws him into a web of FBI surveillance, political coercion, and buried truths. What inspired the setup of your story?
The FBI memo I received after 13 years of FOIA litigation against the Bureau. It was buried in Director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Official and Confidential” files that he stored under lock and key in his personal office. In 1983, the FBI claimed in a letter to me that it had no files on the Supreme Court. After suing them, I unearthed tens of thousands of pages of files including the blackmail memo accusing Justice Abe Fortas of a homosexual encounter. Such an allegation, if disclosed, would destroy his career, true or not. The FBI protected Justice Fortas to gain leverage over him.
How did you decide where documented fact should end and informed imagination should begin?
The jumping-off point for the fiction was where my factual investigation ended.
What did characters such as Cake and Max allow you to explore about queer life that the official records could not capture?
The FBI files were written in Bureau speak based on an informant’s report. Nothing about their target’s humanity was included. Cake and Max allowed me to show professionals living their lives in secret because to do otherwise would subject them to prosecution and the loss of their professions.
Why was it important to extend the story into 2016 and 2021 through Mitch Jr.’s investigation?
I wanted to show how flawed interviews conducted decades after the fact might be. Also, I wanted to make the FBI own the blackmail of a sitting justice in a powerful way. A modern queer attorney picking up the investigation seemed a good way to uncover further secrets.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
What May Have Been
Ink & Saltwater follows a transgender man aboard the Titanic in 1912 as he discovers friendship, love, and the freedom to live openly as himself while facing an uncertain future. Why did the Titanic feel like the right historical setting for Tom’s story?
I’ve been fascinated by the Titanic for as long as I can remember, but over time that fascination shifted away from the ship itself and toward the people aboard it. We know so much about the disaster, but there are hundreds of people whose names survived while their thoughts, relationships, fears, hopes, and private lives disappeared with them. I kept coming back to the question: who else don’t we get to know?
Eventually that became, “What might life have looked like for someone like me in 1912?” The Titanic also gave Tom something his old life could not: anonymity. He steps onto this enormous ship surrounded almost entirely by strangers, introduces himself as Thomas Bennett, and suddenly nobody there has a previous version of him to compare against. For a few days, he gets to experience what it feels like to simply exist as himself without having to explain how he got there.
That made the setting especially powerful to me because the reader knows something Tom doesn’t. He sees the voyage as the beginning of his life. We know how little time he actually has. I wanted the tragedy to come not only from the sinking, but from watching someone finally begin imagining a future just before history takes that future away.
The novel places a lot of emotional weight on small moments, such as Tom being called “lad” or hearing his chosen name. Why were those quiet moments important to you?
Because I think identity is often experienced through incredibly ordinary moments. For Tom, being called “lad” might seem meaningless to everyone else in the room. Nobody stops the conversation. Nobody realizes they have just done something profound for him. But to Tom, it means someone looked at him and saw exactly what he hoped they would see without needing an explanation.
I wanted those moments to matter because I didn’t want his identity to exist only in dramatic conversations about being transgender. His life is also eating breakfast with friends, getting teased, laughing too loudly, flirting badly, sharing a room with other men, hearing someone casually say his name. Those ordinary experiences are part of what allows him to realize that he isn’t pretending to have a life. He is actually living one.
There’s also something especially meaningful to me about his name. Tom has known who he is long before anyone aboard the Titanic meets him, so other people aren’t making him real by calling him Tom. But hearing that name reflected back at him lets him experience being recognized in a way he rarely has before. Sometimes the smallest acknowledgment can carry an enormous amount of weight when you’ve spent years wondering whether you’ll ever receive it.
Were there real historical people, passengers, or accounts that influenced the characters or events in the novel?
There wasn’t one specific Titanic passenger who became the model for Tom, Nora, or the other major characters. I actually wanted them to remain fictional because that gave me room to explore possibilities without putting thoughts, identities, or experiences onto a real person who can no longer speak for themselves.
What influenced me much more were the real accounts surrounding the Titanic: passenger experiences, third-class life aboard the ship, social expectations in 1912, the physical spaces passengers would have occupied, and the thousands of small historical details that make the world believable.
I was also influenced by what the historical record does not tell us. Queer and transgender people obviously did not suddenly begin existing once society developed modern language for them, but the records we have from earlier periods are often incomplete, filtered through other people, or simply silent. That silence fascinated me.
I didn’t want to write a modern trans character wearing Edwardian clothes, but I also didn’t want to treat an incomplete archive as proof that people like Tom could not have existed. There are things history can tell us with certainty, and then there are places where fiction has to admit, “We don’t know, but this life was possible.” That space between what we know and what may have been is really where Tom was born.
If you could ask readers one question after they finish Ink & Saltwater, what would you want it to be?
Whose stories are we still missing? That question goes beyond Tom and beyond queer history for me. History is very good at preserving certain people: the famous, the wealthy, the powerful, the people who left behind enough paperwork for us to reconstruct their lives. But human beings are more complicated than the archive.
After readers finish Tom’s story, I hope they find themselves wondering about the people whose names appear once on a passenger list, in a census record, in a photograph, or sometimes nowhere at all. Who did they love? What were they afraid of? Who did they become when nobody was documenting them?
We can’t know every lost story, and fiction shouldn’t pretend that we can. But I think there is value in remembering that silence in the historical record does not mean a life never existed. If Tom makes someone look at history and wonder, “Who else was there?” then I think the book has done what I hoped it would do.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Southampton, 1912.
Thomas Bennett has spent most of his life just getting by. After years of hiding who he is and carefully navigating a world that allows little room for people like him, he receives an unexpected gift: a third-class ticket aboard the RMS Titanic and a chance to start anew in America under his chosen name.
For the first time, no one on the great ship knows his past. To his fellow passengers, he is simply Tom. As the Titanic takes him farther from England and closer to the future he has always dreamed of, he begins to discover something he never thought possible: friendship, belonging, and the chance for a life that feels like his own.
Among the crowded decks and lively third-class gatherings, Tom is drawn to Nora, a sharp-witted young woman whose confidence pushes him and whose kindness slowly earns his trust. What starts as chance meetings soon becomes something neither of them expected. But love is hard enough without secrets, and Tom must decide if he is willing to risk the life he has built for the chance to be truly known.
Set against the backdrop of the Titanic’s maiden voyage, Ink & Saltwater is a sweeping historical romance about identity, bravery, found family, and the people who show us how to take up space in the world. Heartfelt, hopeful, and ultimately heartbreaking, it is a story of survival, love, and the lives forever changed aboard the most famous ship in history.
Desire, Love, and Respect
Brighter Than the Sun follows an ambitious performer dreaming of opening a club and a cautious business student learning to trust desire as they build a romance and a community where dignity and passion share the spotlight. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One of the first images that came to me was Blake as a young boy, singing and dancing for his mother and dreaming of being a star. Because he struggled in school with undiagnosed learning disabilities, he grew into a man who reached for the performance venues that felt accessible to him – adult entertainment and exotic dancing.
I wanted to explore what happens when a man who has been celebrated for being sexually desirable starts to wonder whether people can see the artist underneath. Could he be admired for his body and still be taken seriously as a performer?
I drew a lot of inspiration from the TV show Girls5Eva. Like the girl group at the center of that show, Blake’s story is about reinvention. His evolution doesn’t involve rejecting his past as a sex worker – it’s about integrating that experience into his performance style. His burlesque club allows him to showcase all his talents: singing, dancing, costume design, theatricality, humor, and sex appeal. He creates a venue where he can be sexy on his own terms, while finally building the kind of stage he always dreamed of having.
Ethan’s journey involves shame, family expectations, and learning to trust his own desires. What did you want readers to understand about his growth?
I wanted readers to understand that Ethan isn’t prudish or judgmental. His caution around sex comes partly from his father’s belief that Ethan has to be “respectable” to succeed as a gay man, and partly from self-preservation. When he met his friend Zane and tried being more sexually adventurous, he was hurt by a disrespectful hookup. That experience reinforced his father’s message that sexual freedom and self-respect were at odds with each other.
Then Ethan meets Blake, a man who is the opposite of everything his father considers respectable, and discovers that Blake is clever, sensitive, generous, and caring. That forces Ethan to confront the beliefs he’s internalized. He finally realizes he’s been making himself smaller in order to earn his father’s approval.
Ethan’s growth is about rejecting the idea that there is one “correct” way to be gay. He gets to decide what desire, love, and respect look like for him. In the end, he learns that true respect doesn’t come from performing an acceptable version of yourself – it comes from living honestly.
The transformation of The Firehouse into Siren gives the romance a strong community-centered backbone. How did the club storyline evolve as you wrote the book?
When I began writing the novel, The Firehouse was mostly the launchpad for Blake’s dream. It was where he honed his skill as a dancer, and where he got his first taste of performing for a live audience. When the club was threatened by a developer, it gave Blake something concrete to fight for: a beloved space he could transform into Siren, the burlesque club he’d always wanted to open.
As the story developed, though, The Firehouse became a character in its own right. At one time, it had been the beating heart of a vibrant gay community. But as dating apps changed the way men met and socialized, the club fell into disrepair. Although the building is a little worse for wear, it’s alive with a rich history stretching back over a century. Blake’s vision for Siren honors the building’s historic role in the gay community while giving the club a future: a place where men can once again gather to watch a show, have fun, and maybe fall in love.
The men Blake works with also came into clearer focus as the story progressed. Although they began as incidental side characters, they eventually became a quirky found family: a ragtag group of men with big personalities who love Blake and support his dream of opening Siren. Virgil, the salty owner of The Firehouse, surprised me the most. He started as more of a comic relief character, but as my understanding of the club deepened, he became a father figure to the dancers – someone who loves his boys, even when he’s grumbling at them through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Blake’s dyslexia is woven into his daily life without defining him entirely. How did you approach writing that aspect of his character?
Because he struggled in school, Blake spent most of his life thinking he wasn’t smart enough for the things he wanted. Over time, he became very good at using self- deprecating humor as a shield. He beats people to the punchline so they can laugh with him instead of at him. Playing the himbo hurts less than letting people see how much he struggles.
But he’s also charming, sexy, funny, and resourceful. Ethan sees that right away. Ethan doesn’t try to “fix” Blake. He recognizes Blake’s struggle, and gives him the language to understand something he’s been experiencing his entire life. Blake’s diagnoses of dyslexia and dyscalculia don’t change who he is – they change the story he tells about himself.
I wanted his diagnosis to feel less like an impairment and more like a door opening. Once Blake understands that his brain just works differently from other people, he’s free. He can finally stop making his dreams smaller to fit inside his old, limited idea of himself.
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By day, Blake’s a mild-mannered bartender. By night, he’s porn legend Dirk Slocum, heating up the runway as an exotic dancer at The Firehouse, San Francisco’s hottest club. When a developer threatens to gut the building and erase everything he loves, Blake makes a daring counteroffer: he’ll take over the lease and transform The Firehouse into the burlesque club of his dreams.
There’s only one catch – Blake can sell a fantasy, but he has no idea how to run a business.
Enter Ethan: a brainy business student with boy-next-door charm who has no idea who he just asked out. Ethan likes taking things slow – cuddling on a blanket under the stars slow – the kind of sweet, get-to-know-you romance Blake hasn’t had in a long time.
As they throw themselves into saving The Firehouse, their business partnership deepens into something more. Blake wants to come clean about his past, but the truth might cost him the first man who’s seen him as more than a hot body and a pretty face.
Can he risk losing the love he never thought he’d get to have?
Brighter Than The Sun is a spicy, opposites-attract romance about found family, big dreams, and the kind of love that asks you to step into the light… even when you’re afraid of what it will reveal.
Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is let yourself be seen.
(Brighter Than The Sun is book 2 in the San Francisco Sex Gods series. Each book follows a different couple and can be read as a standalone story.)
King of the Sky: Choosing to Listen to God as a Path to Sobriety, Happiness, and Purpose
King of the Sky is Gregory R. Gilmore’s candid account of addiction, identity, collapse, and spiritual recovery, tracing his path from a small-town Indiana childhood shaped by silence and conformity to a glittering but increasingly lonely life in Miami, then into the chaos of substance abuse and, finally, toward sobriety through faith, self-inquiry, and connection. The book moves through painful terrain with unusual openness: a hidden sexuality, a marriage that couldn’t survive the truth he was avoiding, professional success that never quite became peace, and the haunting image of a man living high above Miami while becoming more and more unreachable to himself. What begins in fog over Mobile Bay becomes a story about learning to listen, not only to God, but to the quieter, steadier voice beneath fear.
What stayed with me most was the book’s willingness to sit inside contradiction. Gilmore doesn’t present himself as neatly heroic, and that gives the memoir its pulse. He can be tender and self-protective, generous and enabling, spiritually hungry and still caught in the same destructive loops. I appreciated the way he lets certain images carry the emotional weight: the Rolex that has become less a symbol of achievement than a relic, the art room in high school that offers brief sanctuary, Sophie the dog as a small daily grace, the Miami condo that looks like success from the outside while becoming a kind of beautiful prison. The nickname “King of the Sky” is especially piercing because it sounds grand until you understand the loneliness beneath it. That tension gives the book its strongest emotional truth. It’s not only about addiction but about the ache of performing a life so convincingly that even you begin to confuse the costume for the self.
The writing is at its best when Gilmore trusts memory, scene, and vulnerability. His reflections on shame, belonging, and the hunger to be accepted feel deeply lived, and his voice has a plainspoken intimacy that makes the spiritual material feel personal rather than abstract. The book leans into explanation, especially when it turns toward teachings from A Course in Miracles, Abraham Hicks, Marisa Peer, and other sources of transformation. I found the ideas sincere and often moving. The central argument, that alignment with love and truth can become stronger than escape, could sound simple in another writer’s hands, but here it has been earned through humiliation, relapse, fear, and gradual repair. The book’s spirituality doesn’t erase the mess. It rises from it.
I came away from King of the Sky feeling that I had read the testimony of someone who had to lose nearly every false shelter before finding a real one. It’s reflective, emotionally naked, and sometimes raw in ways that made me pause before turning the page. The most convincing part of the book is not that Gilmore found answers, but that he kept learning how to ask better questions of his pain. This is a thoughtful and compassionate memoir for readers drawn to recovery stories, spiritual growth, LGBTQ+ self-acceptance, and books about rebuilding a life from the inside out.
Pages: 207 | ASIN : B0DM3FSZBY
Freedom Boulevard
Freedom Boulevard, by Yusuf Blanton, is a raw, fast-moving novel about two people who arrive in Cordova looking for reinvention and instead find a city that tests every weak seam in their lives. Andy Blackwell comes west chasing music, nightlife, and queer belonging, admitting early on, “I was a rapper that yearned for recognition and a lost Queer in search of his proverbial tribe.” Sakeenah Bailey arrives with her own mix of fear, faith, ambition, and exhaustion, hoping the city might give her room to become someone new. Their stories unfold in alternating first-person chapters, giving the book the feel of two confessions running beside each other until their lives begin to rhyme in painful ways.
Cordova is the book’s real engine. Freedom Boulevard isn’t just a street full of clubs, motels, drugs, performers, creeps, hustlers, and neon. It’s a place that sells people the fantasy of freedom while charging them for every mistake they make. Blanton writes the city as a trap and a stage at the same time, where people come to be seen, to disappear, to make money, to get high, to pray, to perform, and to survive the night. The setting has a sweaty, lived-in quality, and the best scenes make you feel the cheap rooms, bad lighting, stale smoke, and nervous hope pressing in from every side.
Andy’s half of the novel follows an artist who wants recognition but keeps finding transactions where community should be. His world of clubs, promoters, hookups, landlords, clients, and empty promises is loud, funny, ugly, and increasingly dangerous. Sakeenah’s half is more inward but just as urgent. Her chapters wrestle with Islam, anxiety, family disappointment, weed, surveillance, abusive relationships, and the constant need to find shelter without losing herself. Together, they make the book feel less like a single plot and more like a map of two people trying to stay human in a city built to use them up.
Blanton’s style is big, profane, theatrical, and often funny in a bruised sort of way. The prose swings hard, sometimes piling image on image until the narration feels like a spoken-word performance, a panic attack, and a diary entry all at once. That intensity fits the characters, especially because both Andy and Sakeenah are trying to turn chaos into meaning. The book is full of sex, drugs, faith, poverty, ambition, and damage, but its deeper subject is storytelling itself: who gets reduced to a case file, who gets remembered, and who gets to turn pain into testimony.
Freedom Boulevard is a novel about survival as an act of authorship. Sakeenah’s journey gives the book its final shape, especially when she decides that “The pen was my new prayer mat and justice was my new singular aim.” That line captures what the novel is reaching for: not easy healing, but a way to make witness feel like purpose. It’s a harsh, messy, passionate book about people chasing freedom through places that rarely offer it cleanly, and it leaves behind the feeling of someone writing because silence would be another kind of death. I recommend this book to readers who like powerful, emotional stories about survival, resistance, and finding purpose through telling one’s truth.
Pages: 207 | ASIN : B0GSSR7FX4
