Kai D. Waddell is a wallflower survivor of the late 70's Chicago queer punk scene. With fond memories of starting shite on the piss-slippery dance floor at O'Banion's (when the fuse box blew during Warm Leatherette). That was the apogee of her artistic endeavors, though we didn't know it at the time. The 80's brought age and illness. Through many lost years and lost friends, feeble incantations and re-incarnations, gaps and air flaps, flotsam and jetsam and then a disappearance. Michigan sails blowing, and just countless regrets. That firm commitment to reaching rock bottom, never more attainable or absolute. And to think it all began when Will and I jumped a freight train in Wabash. It was not the Wabash Cannonball. But it landed us in Chicago's Bucktown that last day of the Blizzard of '77. In four years, it was all shut down. A couple more snow storms and our dog went senile and wandered off. We didn't find him until the snow melted. He'd been asleep for months there in the gutter off Clybourn Avenue.
Now forty years on, well into retirement, we're still here. I should just keep to myself and stop pissing off the anti-intelligentsia. But instead, we confabulate and rise from the ashes of Bengay, a despairing, aspiring storyteller, a few years into it, and posting my first completed short novels. Attempted genres: charmed, fringe characters thrown into cozy, contemporary queer slow-burn romances. Thanks to everyone for being here.