Caleb Ross is sometimes mistaken for a person from a television show called The Tribe. And though he accepts the adulation of his occasionally confused fans with a grin, his true identity is one that is far more interesting and, if there is justice in the world, one they shall soon know: that of a talented young writer from the Kansas City area, specializing in a prose style that walks a surreal line between the subtle and the explicit; while evoking moments of calligraphic insight in his shorter work, he is equally capable of the broader style that befits a novel, crafting for his readers surreal trips into the ether as he follows his characters into the oily dark of the subconscious; we accompany them on doomed, Sisyphean pilgrimages through forever-dark truck stops, museums of human oddity and towns overflowing with the dead. He is gifted, in that his characters exhibit grotesqueries that somehow seem encoded with the same flaws of the world they inhabit, as if they are not constructs, but victims: the fruits of a tree growing upside down.

His turn into a writer of formidable talents has all the characteristics of a religious awakening, in that an interested professor turned the nagging symptoms of a writer into a full-blown infection. He's attended workshops and received scholarships on the strength of his work, and has been published in Flint Hills Review, Dogmatika, The Green Muse, and Vestal Review. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Caleb in a workshop environment, and recently, he was good enough to answer a few questions.