Missing Possibilities gives readers sixteen short stories embracing different themes you feel are key components of what it means to be human. What was the inspiration for this collection of stories?

There’s a range of topics in this collection, and each one came with its own inspiration. Each story has its own origin. “Cain Crouching at the Door” was the first story I wrote in this collection. At the time, I was feeling the competing societal forces pulling at our country, and I imagined what might happen if everything continued to progress with such balkanized ‘us vs. them’ mentalities. “Raziel’s Last Enchantment” was in response to a boy named Yonatan here in Los Angeles, who was found deceased at home, with signs of malnutrition and abuse, and the police charged his mother in the case. The muses wouldn’t let me write anything else until I finished that story as a sort of memorial to the boy. “Love Divine” was the most fun to write, and in it, I was looking for a way to give a course correction to strict ways of being often found in certain denominations. Each story connects the reader to some event or condition that hit me personally, and I felt needed some form of artistic expression. Short stories are ideal for that.

What were the morals you were trying to capture while creating your characters?

I wasn’t attempting to capture morals when creating the characters in Missing Possibilities. I suppose it’s empathy, rather than morals, that is the north star of character development for me. Each character finds themselves in a situation I think it is safe to say most of us would not want to be in. Rather than attempt to create a moral universe or ethical impulse with my characters, I tried to cultivate a sense of empathy. One way to go about this is to think about whose stories get overlooked and try to write them into the story arc. Any situation involving more than one person has more than one point of view.  In “Lazarus,” I imagined what that biblical story must have been like from his perspective. Time and again, that biblical story is told as a way to bolster faith in whatever orthodoxy is current at the time. But I don’t know of anyone attempting to tell the story from Lazarus’ perspective, which, it seems to me, is a hugely important gap. In that way, the story is similar to “Missing Possibilities,” where I made it about the one person we’d never meet, the sort of Dulcinea character that we’re always searching for, and used that as a way to sift through the perspectives of loss and love and family dysfunction from the one person we don’t get to see first had. 

What experience in your life has had the biggest impact on your writing?

I discovered my love of writing my senior year in high school with a composition teacher who encouraged us to write about anything of interest to us.  It was liberating. Once I got to college, I had professors whose classes were formatted like creative writing workshops. We’d read each other’s work and ask questions, provide feedback, and keep writing.  I also took a job as a writing tutor at the school’s writing lab. I loved workshopping other students’ stuff, but that also helped me realize I had a gift for writing. Language, description, story, and metaphor all came easily to me, whereas some people who may be gifted in sports or math, or political science struggled with it. So I think my love of writing and the sense of freedom that comes with it, coupled with encouragement from teachers, professors, and peers, highlighted a path for me that includes writing.

Are you planning another collection of short stories or a full novel? If so, when can readers expect it to be available?

I have a couple of novels that I’m working on. One is a science fiction story taking place in the distant future on a planet colonized by humans. It centers on a family trying to build a life away from the confines of society in the wilderness of the planet. Another is a historical fiction taking place in the first century. The premise is that Jesus has a twin brother separated at birth and raised in Roman privilege. It will culminate in the two of them meeting. The sci-fi is much further along, but I’m much more taken by the plot and characters of the historical fiction piece. When will they be out?  We’ll have to see. I’m hoping by 2025.

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