BANNED BOOK is a genre-blending, literary art collection that encompasses twenty-one years of creative endeavors, including short stories, poetry, snapshots, and acrylic paintings.
BANNED BOOK seems crucial and relevant today, as much as it did when the project began in 2001. The pieces in the book ask large, often deceptively simple questions. At the core of the book, the thesis that answers do not matter, only the questions matter – curiosity about the mystery of existence is much more important than any declarative statement masquerading as a universal truth.
Some of the bleakest moments of 21st Century Modern American History are retold within the pages of BANNED BOOK: The 9/11 Disaster, the George Floyd murder, the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Trump Presidency – and calculated with equal parts romance and indecency, concreteness and abstraction, absurdity and realism.
The projected audience of BANNED BOOK could be anyone who feels like they have no heroes, no voice, no past to remember and no future to look forward to. The audience of BANNED BOOK would be a generation without anybody to echo what they are feeling about the world or seeing in it. BANNED BOOK urges a passive culture to reimagine hope by depicting a world without it, to get involved in thinking about injecting meaning into an existence that seems to have none.
BANNED BOOK provokes the reader to ask questions that have no answers. BANNED BOOK attempts to define the difference between objective and subjective truth, reinforcing the idea that knowing the truth is, in fact, knowing that the truth does not exist.
'Stalking Chore' was published in Adelaide Literary Magazine in 2019. 'Reduction in the Intensity of Light' was featured in the Dab Art exhibition ART IN THE TIME OF CORONA, VOL. 2, 2021-2022.