In 2022, I completed an MA in English Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. When I started working on my degree, I just wanted to become a better writer. When I finished, I realized that what Martin Shaw writes at the beginning of Courting the Wild Twin is true:

Bad storytellers make spells. Great storytellers break them.

Story has always been how I most productively process life. I collect metaphors like other people collect stamps or seashells. The more I have, the better equipped I feel to engage this complicated reality we all share. Fiction doesn’t enchant the world for me so much as it reveals what’s already enchanted within it. When I’m sleepwalking through my days, a good story will wake me up. Science does the same thing: It opens my eyes. It rewires frayed or dead connections in my mental architecture; it expands my sense of reality. Together, these two realms are my shortcut to the transcendent. 

How do I characterize “the transcendent”? Listen, why do you think I’m so obsessed with collecting metaphors? But all right, if it’ll make you feel better—I consider myself a Christian universalist with a deep well of hope for our evolving world, and a profound respect for the mystic strains of other world religions. I don’t think God’s picky about how God speaks. The real question is: Who’s listening?