JABBERWOCKY: Do you see yourself or some of the people you know in your characters?

ERIC TAO: I think it’s a lot of myself, ’cause I feel like I write a lot to convey my emotions and feelings, so it goes from my brain onto the paper very easily.

JW: Some of your pieces reference works of classical music. What role does music play (no pun intended) in your writing?

ET: To be honest, I'm more of a composer than an author. I really enjoy writing music, so there's a lot of references to music. I feel like there’s a lot of similarities between writing, say, a poem, and writing, say, a tone poem. So, when I’m listening to a piece of music, oftentimes there’s some mode of connection…so, the first thing that I did for the pieces that I sent [to Jabberwocky] was that I wrote the titles, so that would happen when I listened to the piece of music, and then I would come up with the story later.

JW: Do you like getting political with your writing, and why or why not?

ET: I feel like a lot of the role of writing is to create ambiguity in political situations, so one person could interpret it one way, and one person could interpret it the other way. For example, there's a story of one author, Milan Kundera, and I think it was [an anti-abortion] person came up to him and said "You can't write this," but it turns out he was actually on the same side. So I think it should embrace political issues, but at the same time it can’t be just propaganda, because that’s the opposite of the role of literature--you want it to be mind-expanding instead of constricting.

JW: What does the word “metamorphosis” mean to you?

ET: Obviously change, and irreversible change; so, at one point, it’s a creation, there’s also the destruction of a past self. So you have this big interplay between two opposites, and that’s really what creative work is, in a sense, to create and destroy--both at the same time.

Read Eric's poetry and short fiction below!