Nicholas Trandahl

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

“Edgar Allan Poe’s 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’m in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I’m 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.”

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

“It’s my opinion that only in times of utter depression or lofty peace is it appropriate to be creative.”

“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.”

“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.”