I’m an emerging writer who gravitates towards the historical, the weird, and the fantastic. Writing fantastic literature enables me to express ideas that cannot be expressed through straightforward realism. This does not mean, however, that fantasy and realism do not coexist in my work. In the best fantasies, a synthesis between these two modes takes place.

I find the best fantasy stories are profoundly mimetic in the sense that they mimic life, even if they break the rules of realism to describe dragon societies or impossible realms. The best fantasies reflect some aspect of ourselves back at us.

For example, my upcoming urban fantasy story, “The Goddess in Him” (NewMyths.com, Sept. 2020), is about a Scythian temporal refugee who lives in the Plateau neighbourhood of Montreal and is having difficulty adjusting to twenty-first century life.

Montreal is a city with layers of history. The Kanyen’kehà:ka, the French and English settlers, and other waves of immigrants have each left their traces on her urban fabric. I’m hoping “The Goddess in Him” will be the first of several set in Montreal.

My favourite authors are Guy Gavriel Kay, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Ondaatje, and Charles de Lint. My in-progress novel is an archaeological thriller with a Jorge Luis Borges-inspired twist, while my short fiction has appeared before in Bards and Sages Quarterly and the 600 Second Saga podcast. I recently taught a creative writing class in speculative fiction at the Thomas More Institute.

Ever since graduating from McGill University with my MA in English literature, I’ve been producing literature rather than theorizing about it. Fantasy can be just as much a refusal of the terms dictated by the modern world and a search for new ideas as any experimental modernist form.