I am not cool.

I look weird in t-shirts.

I make self-deprecating jokes when I should be projecting the auteur.

But I’m a storyteller: I spend a lot of time in my head, and it shows. Stories don’t burst forth fully-formed, it takes time to meditate on them, work out what it all means. But when you get to the heart of it, it’s like the molten core of a volcano that grows and grows under pressure until it streams forth with a power that can seize and change the landscape.

I gravitate towards gritty, scrappy towns with swampy atmospheres. Home for me has been Pittsburgh, the Ohio/West Virginia border, Baltimore, Eastern North Carolina. My comfort zone is inhabiting complicated places with complicated histories, places that exert a pressure on the people living in them.

What I write: drama with a twist of the uncanny. Think of those times when you lift your head and think – did I just hear something? A voice? But the silence stretches and you convince yourself it was in your head.

There’s a humor that comes with this, too - a subtle and dry kind of thing, where the funny bits are inappropriate to (but funny because of) the gravity: the ghost with his mittens in Kristin Lavransdatter, the shabby Gentleman in The Brothers Karamazov, the gurney stuck on an ambulance from Manchester by the Sea, the stray dog in Tar.

This contrast lets you go deeper into the drama than you could otherwise; it lets you get weirder and, maybe counterintuitively, more realistic too. My real life is full of these contrasts - I’ve laughed in an ICU more than once. I laughed at the deathbed of my mother, and the scene where my father passed away.

Are you interested in laughing along with me?