What really matters to me is that my work is unmistakably me.

I think absurdity is a way to retreat from the realities of the world while also shining a light on them. It’s also just fun.

I’d sit by any campfire I could find and I wouldn’t tell anyone my name.

I would be the sentient molecules of spilled beer that has calcified into the concrete floor of Baltimore punk venue Ottobar, nameless and older than time.

I think there is something like a creative force inside us. It manifests in various ways. It can be suppressed but like a water gusher, it cannot be held down.

I’ve always known [I was weird]. It’s only recently I’ve realized that’s pretty cool.

Life is a leathery orange sphere that flies out of bounds and clunks you on the head.

Ah, winter. How my goth heart loves thee. It’s a time for doom metal and ceremony. Candlelit nights and snow-muffled reflections on the year’s gifts and tolls alike. Nature tightens her death grip, freezing lakes and frosting noses. She wraps us in darkness and dares us to dream.

One summer I collected cicada exoskeletons in an empty coffee can, then went around the neighborhood attaching them to people’s screen doors in pleasing geometric patterns.

I do hope readers are left with just a bit more audacity to lean into the weird in their own lives.

We all lose control, at some point or another, of the shape and momentum of our lives.

I think it’s in our nature as people, or maybe as writers, to be self-critical. You have to be able to be self-critical to get better, but I think you also have to be a bit delusional.

My closet is intentionally organized according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and all the objects contained within it are ruled by entropy. Nonetheless, an uninformed observer viewing my closet may overlook the science and call me a slob.

Many believe that weeds exist because of the cracks in the pavement, when in reality we are the ones who cause them. Here's how you slowly crack the system: take care of your roots, train your resilience, grow inconspicuously, be with many.

While basking in Igorrr's melodic screaming, I thought about music as a method of storytelling and realized there are parallels between what I love the most about this band and what we enjoy finding in our submissions at Weird Lit.

God had no focus groups and created scorpions.

We want the type of writing that channels social anxieties, human philosophical concerns, and big-picture questions.

I go walking and muttering to myself through the trees.

Like a beaver building a dam, I return to the page. It’s just part of my nature.

It’s a beautiful thing to create something new, and the process is sometimes as important, if not more important, than the final product.

Reality is whatever it is, it doesn’t care to satisfy us or to even be intelligible, it doesn’t owe us anything.

We’ve got a few suggestions for how to harness your weird friends or family as beta readers to help you kick off your revision process.

I sometimes google people by chance on the day they die.

Avant-garde is less importantly a title we give to ideas, art, or movements, and more an opening in the way we should be looking at these things ourselves, without the anchors of our current societal hangups and our constant need for cultural relativity.