Step into life in the sleepy suburb of Westminster, where unexpected tragedy strikes the Hawthorne family. Siblings Lacey and Cain struggle to cope with the whiplash of their Father’s absence and hurried remarriage. Their overbearing stepmother, years of experiencing neglect, and two additional children jockeying for space make a small home feel that much smaller. A rough and tumble story about coming of age for two young adults whose relationship is complicated by inverted responsibility and rapidly blurring boundaries. Bullies, hormones, first kisses and first times all come together in this exciting romp through a not so normal set of circumstances between brother and sister.
This work is heavily influenced by trauma, reader discretion is advised.1
- EDITORS NOTE: There are some things worth writing about, even if they disgust, revolt, or otherwise burden. It is the duty of art to scare us, to make us feel things we fear, to widen our experiences and broaden our horizons. It is something I have long believed to be true and one major reason for my interest in works that truly unsettle the expectations people hold fast. After all, why do our principles exist if not to be tested? What would they be without adequate challenges?
Fountainhead started as a short story concept I wrote on my notes app. A crappy, 500 word piece in the second person. I didn’t use punctuation or capital letters because they are disabled by default. Eventually, I realized that the series of dated entries read like a web novel and I was already in the process of writing another book, so I shelved it. As work slowed on that book, mostly due to my own authorial nascence, I returned to the notes app drafts, snippets, and character outlines that had slowly built up. I started writing Fountainhead as a novel.
It inspired a genuine fear; my first thought, having the outline and drafts mostly completed, was to bury it. I knew that people would be upset by the content and the themes. I knew what the reactions would be (and are), because I have a brain, I have common sense. I knew exactly what would make this work so controversial. I could never publish this, it would never see the light of day, I thought.
Well, here we are. I want to get ahead of the curve and say that Fountainhead is not problematic. It is disgusting, saddening, and immoral; but it does not contribute to or support the issues it discusses.
In an era of AI slop and continually degrading literacy, it felt contrary to my beliefs in art to keep it just a draft. In fact, so many people I respect and love encouraged me to publish that I wrote and wrote until the work had eclipsed my conceived abilities. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that this much of me would spill out over paper, bleed into pages, and subsequently be consumed by an audience.
For those reasons I chose to put this up, however long it lasts. Perhaps a payment processor will disagree with the efficacy of my legal jargon. Maybe people will be mad enough that the work must be banished to AO3, or some other cesspit for dead and dying literature. This isn’t to say I don’t love AO3, I certainly do, but we must recognize the literary retirement home that it is.
In any case, I wrote it. I poured my soul out on paper, dredged the worst feelings I could out from ink, and created something that has brought more than a few close friends to tears. I think that is worth the cost, the judgement, the ‘really? you wrote about that?’ I will inevitably receive from friend and foe alike.
Yes, I did write about that. I wrote about a great many other things too, which I hope people might extract and debate. The worst outcome of attention to my writing, in my mind, would be for conversation surrounding Fountainhead to start and stop at that.
I grew up choking on expectation. Society, family, friends, lovers, enemies. We all do, and we all cope, or find ourselves strangled by the overwhelming weight of it all. I am not afraid to say I drowned. Life left me more than a few times, and like a phoenix I rose to try again; only to choke, to die, and be reborn without so much as a brief respite.
That is what Fountainhead is: a chronicle of suffering between the parts of a greater whole. All this to say, I have seen hell. I have walked the road paved with good intentions (shout-out Madonna), and every step I took, of my own volition, meant at least four steps back to find redemption. A little cryptic, sure. A little overly symbolic, absolutely. I simply want to express that I have sinned, I have desired, I have thrown up and crashed out.
Even if I haven’t made the exact same mistakes as Cain and Lacey, I have lived a life that understands their very emotions, and to me, that is enough. The bits and pieces that make up the entirety of Fountainhead are scraps of things I spent years unpacking and repacking, in and out of therapists’ offices, up and down the streets of my city, far and beyond the darkest corners of repressed memories.
The work is a reflection of me, of parts of myself I must bare under the sun, lest they wither and die without introspective light. That is the most appalling choice. Letting things I fear to look at within myself rot in some long forgotten nook of unaddressed psyche. It is certainly worse than embarrassment, shame, or judgement.
While you are reading, or if you have already read, I only ask you keep in touch with how the work makes you feel. Or don’t. To me, great literature should pull you inside its world. It should force up emotions, bid you to confront them, and all the while hurry on the spectacle so that you continually offer yourself to the arena. Don’t be a spectator. Reach into the pages and tear out the beating heart of meaning, slather yourself in the blood of understanding, and relish the freedom to interrogate your worst impulses alongside two people who simply refuse to curb their own. ↩︎