Nicholas Trandahl

Edgar Allan Poe__ writings showed me perfectly that there can be such fragile beauty and purity located in darkness and sorrow.

I primarily use poetry as a purge, a self-medication device when I__ in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I__ lost in the darkness of mental illness, I spill forth a deluge of words and prose that are oftentimes grim, dark and depressive. And when my poems are spilled forth into one of my poetry journals, I feel a weight has been indeed been lifted from me, and my mind can rest just a bit easier.

It__ my opinion that only in times of utter depression or lofty peace is it appropriate to be creative.

I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.

I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It__ my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.

I__ a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.

Give me a bottle of hard cider, a bowl of Peterson Irish Oak in my Neerup pipe, and please, above all, give my Henry David Thoreau__ Wild Apples. Do that and you will see a man contented.

As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom.

In my own book-signings, I find humility. It__ always humbling when people go out of their way to come visit with me and by some of my books.