My work comes from the strange liminal friction when memory collides with imagination, when what I remember meets what I can barely grasp—like a chord formed from notes that shouldn't harmonize but somehow do. The methods I use—whether they involve genre-mixing, technology, long silences, or messy conversations—they answer to no one's tribunal. Only to what the work demands.

I refuse to believe that my pedigree, provenance, or how I produce determines what it's worth. What matters: the weight behind it, the way it moves through the world after it leaves my hands. Not whether I followed someone else's recipe for legitimate labor or technique.

Inspiration belongs to me. What and when I choose to produce and share is my choice. I express things because I'm human—not because my creative work or process should pass inspection at someone's militarized border crossing.

How and why I work is my own country, with its own topography. My creative rhythm follows no external conductor—no beat but its own.

I won't routinely explain or justify the invisible scaffolding behind a sentence that rings true to my ear—though I may choose to share process when doing so serves to democratize rather than authenticate. I won't diagram how a story carved its channel through me or transcribe the melody that guided its composition. The work either has its own atmosphere or it doesn't. Nobody needs the map coordinates of my arrival unless I decide to share them.

Art and literature have always had their guards at the gate. And I've noticed something: some of the people who already have passes—access to editors, time to write, workshop credentials, the whole institutional apparatus—they're often the most hostile to new, different, or unmirrored voices. Quality? That's their stated purpose but the real concern is control. These gatekeeping dynamics extend beyond the symbolic to the material—who publishes, who profits, who distributes—forming concrete barriers as formidable as any aesthetic judgment.

I'm not writing for admission to anything. Not for anyone's stamp of approval. I write because shaping formlessness into form is how I stay sane, how I think, how I locate some fundamental honesty in a spectral capitalist post-truth world of simulacra and simulation—a world where writing becomes one of the few acts that can pierce through layers of representation to approach something genuine, however provisional. The page remains the only place I've found where contradictions can coexist without tearing each other apart, where truth and reality converse fluently, where silence gets its own vocabulary, and where reader and writer co-create meaning through engagement.

I refuse to swallow whole any system that flattens complexity into conformity, that confuses institutional access with actual artistic vision. I'll walk away from any venue or gatekeeper who demands my artistic obedience as an entrance fee. I recognize the complex realities that make such refusal easier for some than others, yet still assert this as an aspiration even when circumstances demand compromise. That's not productive dialogue—it's a power play for domination.

Feedback and constructive criticism have their place. But my creative autonomy is non-negotiable. I'll use whatever means I deem necessary to say what needs saying. If the result breathes and pulses with its own life, that's my only evidence. The only proof that matters.

Whether my work has value is yours to decide. I've already answered that question for myself by sharing it with you. I recognize that creative freedom comes with responsibilities—to truthfully represent, to consider impact, to acknowledge what and whom my work engages with and borrows from. I seek connection without supplication, circulation without surrendering to systems I critique. But know that I won't genuflect to bias or hypocrisy in exchange for institutional blessing.

Passion will guide me, not protocol. Curiosity, not conformity. Defiance, not deference. Conscience, not calculation. 

I won't read rejection as failure. 

I won't barter away curiosity for approval. 

Gatekeeping isn't truth-telling, no matter how it dresses itself up. 

What I make is an offering, nothing more.

And I'll keep coming back to the work itself—to that first note that makes the second note possible, to the silence that gives shape to the sound.