I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.
Steve EricksonI began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Steve EricksonI believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
Steve EricksonIn my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.
Steve Erickson