Recently in from the estimable editor, C.M. Muller: Proud to announce that my story, “Hog Butcher for the World, is slated to appear in an early, 2026 installment of Chthonic Matter Quarterly.

“Hog Butcher for the World” is really a byproduct of a story produced for David Surface’s June, 2025 installment of Strange Little Stories, with one of the participatory directives being that the story had to be true. Non-fiction’s never been my strong suit, as I tend to, by nature, digress into distortions in order to tell a tale.

Still.

Our discussion brought me back to those lingering contemplations about the intersections of truth and fiction (and if there really is, ultimately, a difference). Of course, liminally speaking, there are differences; but I’m often unconscious of how much I weave in and out of those boundaries.

A few years ago during an interview with Ezra Klein about her book, Demon Copperhead (2023), Barbara Kingsolver—owing not only to the down-beat content of the opioid epidemic, but to the characters themselves, people she didn’t think the “outer world” cared for—shared her self-doubt when attempting to approach the novel. “I spent a couple of years walking around and around this story, trying to figure out how to break into that house because I really felt sure nobody wants to read it.”

I spend significant time dwelling on how to break into several of my own houses. I’m not squeamish about accessing (and possibly vandalizing) those personal properties; but, from time to time, I’m reticent to revisit those interior corridors for the fact that, in part, those echoes will not resonate. “Hog Butcher for the World” is an exercise in navigating the channels forking between fiction and non-fiction, and it’s an honor to have it placed in one of C.M. Muller’s shadowy “houses.”