Growing up in the rural South, I fell in love with the stories of William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter. However, I was disappointed to see the Southern Gothic genre destroyed on the stage either by soap opera melodrama or a perverse misunderstanding that “Gothic” simply meant “Horror.”

My work is inspired by the Southern Gothic style as portrayed in classic fiction - a style that heightens reality, gives epic importance to everyday situations, and embraces the macabre as a necessary, and instructive, part of life – yet transforms this literary style into an active and dramatic narrative for the stage.

“There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.” -Flannery O’Connor