Nothing to Get Nostalgic About follows a man whos haunted past catches up to him and threatens his family. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

My father passed away in 2014 after being diagnosed a year prior with esophageal cancer.  We had a VERY contentious and toxic relationship. He was a very abusive person.  Our last phone call the evening before he died, instead of telling him how much he hurt me and how angry I was I started sobbing and told him I loved him. He called me the f-word and told me to call my mother.  2017 my oldest son was born, and when I realized I was going to be both a father and a father to a son…I couldn’t help but reflect on the traumas of my childhood and the abuse I endured from my father.  There was one day when I was showering and I had my oldest in a high chair in the bathroom. When I exited the shower he had this look on his face like he had just seen a ghost or some kind of spectral tormentor.  At the time I had become VERY superstitious and overzealous about protecting my son from both the physical and spiritual dangers in life.  I feared that maybe what my son saw was my father…it scared the crap out of me and strangely I started writing the crib scene based on this vulnerability I felt wanting to protect my future from my past.  

Charlie is an interesting and well developed character. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

Charlie is me.  Charlie was a character that manifested from my childhood memories and traumas.  I wanted to write a book about the abuse I endured and the abuse a lot of my friends endured as children.  In the 90s, we didn’t have smartphones or social media and most of our parents worked multiple jobs to keep the electricity on.  If we came home off the bus or walked home from school,  a lot of us walked into empty homes with nothing but a television and a full liquor cabinet that many abused.  I wanted to explore the world I grew up in and how it cultivated a generation of latchkey kids who were discovering life vicariously through what was on television or through their parents’ behavior and neglect.  If any of these characters resonate with readers, it’s because they were intended to be reflections of ourselves, friends we had, our people we knew.  Misfits, and very scared young people trying to make sense of a world that made no damn sense.  

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

I really wanted to remove the rose colored lenses of the 90s in the sense that people get really obsessed with the pop culture of that era and deify a lot of the most prominent figures of that time period.  The 90s I remember (while very fun, I was a kid) was very confusing and disturbing.  Divorce rates reached staggering heights, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear macabre tales about kids being sent to gay conversion camps or winding up as fodder in custody trials.  There are a staggering number of people who think that’s Kurt Cobain’s ubiquity in his fleeting four years as a generation’s spokesperson define that entire decade…but I grew up in the post 90s right after this man committed suicide and ending with Columbine and Woodstock 99.  There was this very decadent, contentious, and polarizing feeling and it didn’t reflect the wistful ideologies that nostalgia projects onto younger generations.  

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

At the beginning of the summer I finished a manuscript for a novel that I’m very excited about, but haven’t found representation for it yet.  While enduring the tedium of trying to find an agent or a publisher with any interest I also finished my first poetry manuscript which I’m very proud of.  I’ve mostly been trying to enter those into contests and querying agents about those projects. Recently I’ve started prepping for another novel and another poetry manuscript.  I submit my poems a lot.  So, I’m trying to come up with as much material as I can to hopefully catch the right pair of eyes.  

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