Michael Wells Jr.

Growing up in Concourse Village, I could always hear the faint clack of passing Amtrak trains, the sound of leaving, of somewhere else.

Before I got to see that "somewhere else" in real life, I learned about the world through Henson — Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and The Muppets. Sesame had monsters and people on the same block, learning from each other. Fraggle Rock showed me how ecosystems work, and The Muppets gave me insight into a version of New York that exists in the minds of those that aren't from it. Shows like Ren & Stimpy taught me to love the absurd, and Ghostwriter, a ghost who helped a crew of kids from a similar hood crack neighborhood mysteries through reading, quietly taught me words were a kind of power and adventure is what you make it.

A moment in sixth grade broke something inside of me, forever altering my perspective. I'd just been in a fight with a bully. While we waited in the principal's office, he handed me a peace offering: a VHS of Ghost in the Shell. I watched it alone, a latch-key kid in the living room. A woman steps off a rooftop, free-falls, disappears into optic camouflage, and is gone. She was powerful, in command, deadly, and not quite human, a consciousness poured into a machine. It was the first time the hero looked nothing like the heroes I'd been handed, and the first time I asked questions I've never stopped asking: what makes us human? What constitutes a hero?

People think the South Bronx limits imagination and perspective. It doesn't. For me, it meant my resources were limited, but that scarcity stretched my imagination — even as life started to ground me in reality.

After high school, I failed out of my first year of undergrad and went to work as a paraprofessional (an assistant educator) at a district 75 school, in a classroom full of kids from my own neighborhood. It broke my heart that they couldn't picture themselves anywhere outside of where they already were. But they watched a lot of TV, the way I had. That's when writing stopped being a wish and became a calling: I wanted to write them, and me, into the worlds we'd been told we don't belong.

A film degree was earned much later within CUNY (Brooklyn College). After undergrad, I stumbled into the music industry, then agency-level production and post work. Fatigued and unsatisfied in the commercial space, I committed fully to writing just in time for the pandemic. The more I write, the more I realize being called monster or marginalized all depends on who's telling the story.

That's why I write genre. Drama can state a thing; genre can name it, make it strange enough to hold, and leave it with you long after the credits. The question under all of it is simple: do we survive if we don't face things head-on? I write because it's a biological imperative, if I don't get it out, I'll obsess until there's nothing left of me.