The punk scene is my main tribe. It was an important refuge for me in my youth, so much more than any of the other realms I inhabited back then, and it’s still a major part of my life now.

It’s also the main topic of my writing. Almost all of my characters, especially my main characters, are wild working class punks who have lived tumultuous lives of hardship and chaos.

In writing about that world I try as much as possible to read about it. There are many excellent documentary books on the subject: Please Kill Me about the early days of punk, The Story of Crass is an excellent band biography. Violence Girl is also another excellent book, about singer Alice Bag.

Fiction is another matter. I personally haven’t found as many bright spots when it comes to fictional representations of punks and the punk scene, and alt underground scenes in general. Sometimes a book or graphic novel about punks will start out with a promising opening, and then the main character will start mugging businessmen at night, or they’ll be at a club and pull out a gun and start waving it around, or some other act of over-the-top anti social behavior. Basically the writers decided to do an “outlaw” version of punk, relying on mainstream tropes about people on the “edges of society”, making the story implausible and ridiculous, and almost impossible for me to keep reading for all of my eye rolling.

It’s not all bleak. There are a few bright spots in the world of punk literature, such as Stephanie Kuehnert who wrote I Want to Be Your Joey Ramone, among other books, and the epic Love and Rockets graphic novel series by thee Hernandez Brothers.

I found Dani Dassler on a Facebook forum for writers when she was pitching her punk novel. I was, of course, interested, but that’s about it. Given my genre I was duty bound to check out her work. After all, we were theoretically writing about the same topic. But because of my past experiences with a lot of punk fiction and “punk” fiction, I approached her work with a perfunctory sense of duty to check it out.

Cover art by HE Creative for
Dani Dassler’spunk novel PR

PR starts off with a terse and rebellious Andrea Leeson being sent to a counselor’s office at her high school after having outrun a security guard at school. While wearing Doc Marten boots even! She eventually gets around to being picked up after school by her leather-clad biker boyfriend Dereck after finding out her punishment is to run for the track team.

Many times I don’t have to get too far into a book before I figure out where it’s going, or what it’s going to be like. This is quite often not the fault of the writer, as I have read so many books I can oftentimes spot the hooks and plots and upcoming timelines early on. With many books that does not detract from my enjoyment of reading it, unless the plot is very obvious. (Or the writing is just bad.) With punk fiction I go in with a pretty jaundiced attitude, waiting for the punk characters to devolve into the CHIPs version of punk rockers when they eventually do such things as pointlessly vandalizing a store, mugging an old man, or just waving guns around, plot twists and turns that follow ridiculous tropes and the GOP version of what punks are and represent.

The scumbag outlaw trope never appeared as I kept reading PR. I soon realized that this was not another mainstream type of novel, and I kept reading.

And I was not just simply impressed, I was stunned.

There’s a lot of raw emotion in PR. With Andrea, with her boyfriend Dereck, and with her best friend Roxanne. Andrea’s place in her life and her culture are emphasized when she meets other students on the track team, people who are just regular students or the “civilians” as I sometime call them. The entire angle of Andrea’s life are emphasized in the culture clashes in the story. Even though I’m using the term “culture clash”, Dassler does not fall into yet another trope by making it all about conflict. Andrea eventually feeds off her new way of life, her track and running life, as much as her new friends find out about her side of the tracks and her rock and roll culture.

PR goes beyond that as well, with Andrea’s complex relationship with her mother, and the entanglements with her family and her extended family, revealing a lot about where she comes from and why she is the way she is. Many of the characters in my work have perfunctory or non-existent relations with their family, but in PR Andrea faces her problematic family relations head on, and in a gut wrenching way.

There are also other trials and tribulations in this story, things that make me think about my chaotic past in such a way that it brought up for me all too strong memories and powerful emotions. I won’t say what those story elements are however, because I do not want to give away too much of the story before you get a chance to read it.

Dani Dassler modeling a shirt from
her online shop Punk Jocker

(Read her book if you want to find
out what Endolphins are!)

In writing my novels I strive as much as possible to make it like real life. And real life is quite bizarre. I was a product of the alt scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been to wild clubs, insane parties, drug-soaked raves, leather and denim biker parties swimming in drugs and alcohol, and have known crazy, insane, and wickedly talented people who would be famous if they weren’t such desperate train wrecks, as well as people who lived in the fast lane, pursuing the live-fast-die-young lifestyle. That’s where I was at. And too many of my friends did not make it out of that era. Too many of them went out in a blaze of glory, experiencing the kinds of high-octane facets of a wild life that most people will never know. I was one of the lucky ones who got out of that scene alive.

Basically if someone made a movie about my young life John Waters or David Lynch would have to direct it. It’s one of the reasons why I write. I have lived too much life, and I simply cannot keep it all to myself. But even with the intense subject matters of my work I strive to make my stories believable and plausible. I want people to read my stories and know they could have actually taken place in the real world.

I found a truly kindred spirit in this writing world when I found Dani Dassler. I contacted her and started sharing my writing with her. We started messaging each other and talking about shows and writing and the scenes we were involved in. Eventually we started sharing our writing with each other, even projects that were works in progress. We started bouncing ideas off of each other, as well as trading music and talking about books and writers and promotion strategies for our writing.

Recently Dassler has uped her promotions game. She got HE Creative to make a new cover for PR. She released a sequel to PR, Coming up Gray. I beta read and edited one of her manuscripts, and she’s invested more time in social media promotion, as well as setting sales and outreach goals for herself.

We’re good friends now. We message each other often. We’ve met up and went to a Rancid show, one of her favorite bands. And she has helped me out by beta reading my works in progress, giving me valuable and insightful feedback on my new works. And her friendship and writing have started to have an effect on me. Diving into Dassler’s material has had a marked influence on my own writing, something I discovered as I was editing my most recent works in progress.

(My most recent book, A Long Slow Aftermath, has a significant scene that was inspired by a story in PR!)

The alt cultures that arose in the Eighties, especially punk, are centered in artistic expression: fashion, music, and art. Many people in this movement not only dedicate themselves to its art and music, they immerse themselves in it by making it part of their lives. It is true that many of these cultures are steeped heavily in aesthetics, particularly Metal and Goth cultures, but some movements take it much farther, especially Punk and Hip-Hop cultures.

My novel Crash Shadow takes
on the uncomfortable subject
of drug abuse in the punk scene.

Punk turned its rebellion up to 11, whether it’s singing about drugs and bacchanalian chaos, railing against police brutality, taking fascists head on, or taking a bare-knuckled approach towards imperialism and the pernicious bedrock concepts in Western culture. It also shows itself in its raw rebellious state when a lesbian band becomes one of the bedrocks of an unapologetic Queercore movement, and when a Jewish band co-opts fascists symbols in their looks and artwork, or when a black skinhead band covers a white supremacist song.

For a culture that is so heavily invested in art, fashion, and above all music, the realm of literature in punk is one of its most glaring voids. As I said earlier, non-fiction is not a problem. There are many excellent documentary books about punk life and culture, but when it comes to fiction there’s an all too noticeable lack of good representational material. It’s one I’ve tried to fill, and it is a huge task. The number of stories, overviews, personal accounts, trials, tribulations, and struggles are rich in the punk and alternative scenes. I’ve published seven books so far, and I’ve only scratched the surface of the constellation of stories that should be and need to be told. And I am writing even more material, while I look and search for other like minded individuals like Stephanie Kuehnert and CE Hoffman, and the Hernandez Brothers. This is a scene that definitely needs more scribes, the one artistic tangent that it is sorely lacking.

Finding Dani Dassler was like striking gold. She tells the kind of stories that are not just rich, complex, and entertaining, but also gives us the kind of voice we all need to hear.