In early 2026, as part of my cognitive rehabilitation from Long Covid, I began writing short stories by hand in a little leather notebook. In the beginning, admittedly, some of these stories were not great, but as I kept at it I was able to develop many of them into something worthwhile, perhaps even good. As an essayist, I work primarily with the built environment -- for ten years now, most of my career has been based around a scathing yet somewhat architecturally open-minded perspective on suburbia. When I started writing fiction, I began narrowing my attention even further and settled on works that interrogate the inherent violence and entitlement present within the nuclear family.
For me, the most creatively productive perspective on this violence (which has certainly been infinitely explored elsewhere) comes from within the sibling bond. This was something I was already interested in after having finished a comprehensive series of essays about Siegmund and Sieglinde, the incestuous twins from Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre. Through that work, I became acquainted with the writing of the feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, who, across the span of two books on the subject, developed a theory of 'fratriarchy', the idea that the reproduction of patriarchal society takes place via not only vertical (i.e. Oedipal) relations within the family, but lateral ones as well. These are formed primarily through the emergent bonds between siblings as they are established by what Mitchell calls the law of the mother, who both prohibits violence and incest between her children and genders them along the axis of who can and cannot bear a child of their own. I find these ideas endlessly generative and have been building stories on their foundation ever since. (Curiously I have four siblings of my own but have never felt the need to write about them.)
Fiction, for me, serves the same purpose as criticism, which is to draw attention to underlying political structures that must be fundamentally identified and altered before the world can really move in a progressive direction. Thus, most of the stories are violent. Many of them are sexual in nature. Brothers pinion, stalk, and fantasize about their sisters; sisters resent, envy, and want to destroy their brothers. In all of the stories, the struggle for power within the close confines of the sibling bond distorts both parties' feelings, motives, and desires. The scope and length of each varies considerably.
Some stories deal primarily with children and childhood, with impulses and urges rooted in not-yet-understood feelings and sensations. Two year old Julia wants to cut the baby out of mommy's tummy and crawl inside. Similarly, six year old Harry uncovers, in the cool, damp shade of the sandbox, the tenuous connection between pleasure and force.
Others are classic suburban romances with all the cultural criticism inherent therein. In one, a teenage girl latches onto seducing her brother as a way of destroying her and her affluent family's entire way of life. In another, a predilection for increasingly extreme online pornography leads a young man to have violent and intrusive thoughts about his younger sister. Meanwhile, in the world of adults, two twins are forcibly driven apart after one mysteriously develops a serious mental illness that relegates the other to the position of caregiver. A young woman in an unhappy marriage reminisces about her first ever stirrings of sensuality, which were awakened in her as a ten year old by her much older half-brother.