How Boys Learn is a collection of short stories that expose the challenges faced by boys from diverse backgrounds and their journeys into adulthood. What inspired you to write this collection?

Each story in the collection is at least loosely based on some sort of experience from my own life. I was interested in a key learning I had in those situations and how I could turn it into a story.

For example, the last story, “A Boy’s School,” is about a boy who gets in a car accident and is comatose throughout the school year. I had a very bad car accident my senior year of high school, but I was back in school two days later. So clearly, the story I wrote is a lot more dramatic than the real-life event. But I remember coming back to school and being appalled by how much love I received from my classmates. So it was that feeling of love that I wanted to evoke in the story, especially in a small all-boys high school where you otherwise have the students jockeying for social position over one another through mean jokes, homophobia, and what have you.

I originally wrote these stories for my senior thesis in college, and I thought it was appropriate to edit and publish them now, many years later, because of all the generalizations and assumptions we make about boys and men and how this negative message they are receiving is actually backfiring and radicalizing them. Boys need to see that there are many ways to be a man without sacrificing what it means to be masculine.

Is there anything from your own life you put into the characters in your stories?

Each story is based on some real-life event, and some more so than others. For example, “This Is the Story That I Wrote For This Week” is inspired by creative writing classes I took in college. The protagonist of that story is essentially me as a college student. I think self-deprecation is often effective, and the reality is that I was not always the most mature person back then. I made generalizations about others. What I think is interesting in that story is that the generalizations are not necessarily even wrong, they are just counter-productive for the protagonist in achieving his outcome of writing fiction that appeals to a broad audience. All of this to say, the learning is about being solutions-oriented.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I think the most important theme is that the boys in the story learn through their own experiences. We have this fixation these days on being virtuous and telling everyone what is right or wrong. That almost never works. People love to adopt their own ideas. And the best way to come to your own idea is to live or experience something that makes you believe what you believe. An example of this would be in the story “Kicking Stones,” where the white narrator talks about how he learned about racism by watching how his black friends were treated. That is a lot more powerful for him to see and witness than for someone on a college campus with a sign telling him what to believe.

Can readers look forward to more from you in the near future?

Yes! This was my second book, but the first work of fiction.