I spent my childhood weekends on my Dutch great-grandfather’s farm. By the time I got there it was more of a petting zoo and a vegetable garden, but that’s not what mattered to me. 

My grandpa and I would run around the woods, play in the stream, and eat wild raspberries off the vine. It shaped who I am, and one day, it was gone. The man who owned the land was shot in a bar fight, and we lost it to the bank. It’s not something a kid could understand.

That sudden, irrevocable loss left an impression I carry into my writing: life can change in an instant, and some things are beyond our control.

My first novel is about a boy named Leroy who must make an impossible decision when an otherworldly force comes to take all he has. It mirrors that same sense of sudden, incomprehensible upheaval I felt back then. Though, filtered through a more imaginative lens. 

My work doesn’t whitewash, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything it's not. All it does is ask readers to confront the messy, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying truths of being alive.