Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephen Graham King. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Stephen Graham, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

Honestly, no. I have been creating in various ways my whole life. I was in the choir as a child. I was in drama club in high school and for a while wanted to pursue it as a career. When that didn’t pan out, I left university and waited tables to pay the rent. But one of the other things that happened to me in high school was getting to be in a small, invite only, creative writing class. It was a mix of students who might not have ever gotten together otherwise. There were cheerleaders, a football player, a Mormon girl, some of us Drama kids. And we learned the forms and shared them and critiqued each other. And that lit a slow burn fire in me that came back. I came back to writing at some point, I was feeling the need for a new creative outlet. So I sat down and wrote my first novel. Which was terrible and I’ll never show it to anyone. But I learned the form and got better with each draft and attempt. It took several years of work, with often long breaks, before I wrote some short stories that sold, and then a novel that sold. And then I rewrote two that I had completed previously and sold those. And I’m here now, having just released my sixth novel, working on my seventh, and with a collection of essays with my publisher as well.
And it’s more than that. I drew as a child, I went through a painting phase in the early Aughts and now I’m a photographer, which is a whole different set of muscles. But they spring from the same place. All of the activities feed the others and make me better at them. Even something as simple as arranging objects in my home in a way that pleases me feeds that deep creative impulse

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a writer and a street photographer working mostly in black&white, and I feel those two disciplines feed my soul in different ways. My writing is science fiction, which is a genre I’ve loved since I was a child, being three years old and watching first run Star Trek. But when I grew up and came out, I found a way to showcase the type of story I loved, but with queer people in the leads, in the forefront of the narrative. And in the future, which is something that queer people often didn’t see. Especially having grown up in the Seventies and then through the time of AIDS. I thought it was incredibly important to portray a future where queer people exist and thrive, where we are a part of the fabric of life, where our right ti exist isn’t questioned. I wanted to portray us as heroes. And from early on, my mantra was “queer is never the problem”. And I’ve been incredibly lucky to get to do that.
My photography stretches a very different set of muscles. Where writing is a long process of working out every detail, being a street photographer is immediate. You either capture the shot or you don’t. You have to recognize the story in that moment you’re trying to capture and get it before it’s gone. And I think shooting in black&white strips away the preconceptions we have of colour and the associations that go with it. We just see shape and light and shadow. Motion. Most of us live our lives in colour, so stripping that away makes us perceive the world around us in a different way.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The work itself. I tell aspiring writers this all the time, and even those who are further along. You have to find a way to fall in love with the act of writing. The creation of the characters and world, the construction of the narrative, combining the words to make sentences to make chapters to make stories. You have to find a way to love the process itself. Writing is a solitary thing, You do it alone, in your room, or in a cafe or wherever works for you. But there’s nothing there with you but the tools, the idea, and your skills. And it takes a long time. You might work on a book for a year or often more. Finding the path to publish it takes time. When you find a publisher, the production period can be two years. It takes time and it’s hard. So you have to love it. It’s the only thing that will keep you going.
And it’s the same thing with photography. I love the act of walking around and trying to see the moments around me that I might have missed if I didn’t have the camera in my hand. I love the feel of my camera and what it can do, looking at the world through it. I love going through the shots when I get home and seeing what I’ve managed to capture. Just the act of taking pictures makes me happy.
Cultivating that love for the way you express your creativity will help you through the moments when it’s hard and the world tells you it doesn’t value what you do. But it matters less because YOU value it and love the act and the process.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Back in the year 2000, I was diagnosed with metastatic synovial sarcoma which, at the time, had a mortality rate of something like 90-95%. It started in my knee and spread to my lungs. I had the whole shebang, radiation, chemotherapy, and six major surgeries in ten years. My left leg has been rebuilt, and I’m missing a half a lung. But, by some fortuitous set of circumstances, I survived. So I like to say that everything since then has been dessert. I came into my own as a writer, I took up painting, then abandoned it and took up photography.
But one of the things I did to cope with that period in my life was to write. I kept a journal for a while, chronicling the appointments and milestones, but then it became something else. It became something more like a memoir, a way to understand how I felt, what was happening to me, who I was becoming. And I turned that into a memoir called Just Breathe: My Journey Through Cancer and Back.
And writing that book made my writing better, going through that experience and writing my way through it made my fiction stronger, honed my skills, and freed up my fiction as well. When I went back to a couple of novels I had written before getting ill, my new revisions were stronger, deeper, more real, even though I was writing about fantastical, far future worlds. Going through that illness and surviving made me a better writer and a more committed and thoughtful artist in every way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://stephengrahamking.com/s
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephengrahamking/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephenwritesbooks
• Other: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/stephenwrites.bsky.social
  Mastodon: https://wandering.shop/@stephengrahamking
  Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/streetpicsteve/

Image Credits

Stephen Graham King