When I first met convicted art-forger Freddy Plinko in Los Angeles in the summer of 1960, I was a twenty-four-year-old journalist on my first assignment to America, and he recently a septuagenarian...

The Fraud

So this is the end. After two decades, I’ve stopped writing Lightborne. This is a celebration, but it’s also a eulogy: for the work, for the hope, for the task I just had to complete, which began as all eulogies do, with death.

Eulogy for An Unpublished Novel

No trains ran to Silver City, Idaho, on the rugged edge of what was, in 1882, agreed to be the United States of America. When our stagecoach broke an axle crossing the mountains, the driver saddled two spare horses, one for Oscar, one for me...

Sebastian Melmoth in Silver City

If I believed in God, I would use Him 
The way He has been used against me.
Those who have condemned me, I would condemn
From my high pulpit, and rain hellfire down
On what I deem hypocrisy.

'GOD HATES ___' (A sonnet)

They asked me "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And I answered,
     (a wolf)
but I said nothing. Wolves do not speak.

Untitled

Do not tell me to heal. I want no poems
that call the wild geese home, or command me,
behold the winter sunset, or, consider
the fox frozen in river-ice. I want no poems
that tell me how to mend, or how to mourn
all the world’s little losses...

Pearl Mussel

The bell had rung,
and the corridor was strewn with girls,
backs against their lockers, sobbing
into their hands.
I walked through them like a ghost
who had been dead for centuries,
bewildered at their collective grief.

"Kurt Cobain"

Last year, I took a shot. I applied for the Irish Writers Centre’s international Novel Fair. If you haven’t heard of it, I suggest you click that link right now. Picture two days of intense speed-dating with a selection of literary agents and...

The Big Pitch: 4 Questions Literary Agents Want You to Answer

One day, we disappeared: some of us
in a flash of light, some in a puff of smoke.
Some faded-out, as in a cheap mirror-trick.
Some glimmered as we slipped from view,
fairy-lights in our hair and fingertips...

How We Became Gods By Disappearing

I sometimes wonder whether, growing up, anyone ever uncovered my “dirty little secret.” I was not always good at hiding it: I misread social cues. I struggled to focus on conversations. I made few friends. I mimicked behavior... 

No Words for What I'm Feeling: Writing Emotions

Dread is an instrument. Its sound varies depending on how you play it. We’ve all heard it before, in the background of movies and TV series: there’s the high-pitched note that stretches on and on, the irregularly thudding heartbeat...

Three Virtuosos of Dread

Excerpt from forthcoming novel, Lightborne, about queer Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. In 2022, Lightborne won a spot in the Irish Writers Centre's Novel Fair and will be published by Atlantic Books in 2024.

Hesse Phillips

Selected work