#doha writer

On our shelves were a handful of worn, black and white picture books of the old country. Czechoslovakia. Prague. This was where my people were from, and not in some distant past—my mother had escaped communism when she was pregnant with me, taking my eight-year-old brother with her. I grew up outside of Chicago, in a house with a sunken living room, riding a banana seat bicycle down streets that…

There’s something unsettling about discovering that the stories you’ve been avoiding are the ones you’re meant to tell. For decades, horror lived in me like a secret language I refused to speak fluently. I could appreciate its literature—Dracula, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works. I could lose myself in Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic voice, Christopher Lee’s Gothic grandeur. But writing it?…