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Brian: Growing up I drew a lot, and at the age of about eleven started taking pictures and making short films and animations on Super-8. During college in Minneapolis, I played in bands and hung out with the local underground music scene, documenting shows. Around 1985, a shot I took of Sonic Youth was published in Cream Magazine, and I guess that's when I found a niche. It was a natural extension of the skills I'd been playing around with all those years, plus it payed.

Brian: There's an editorial shot I did in the mid-nineties that people seem to gravitate towards. It's a telephoto black and white close-up of my girlfriend's legs. She's wearing a Betty Boop skirt and combat boots, grasping the leash of a toy dog sitting at her feet. The aromatherapy tycoon Horst bought a print to hang in one of his mansions.

Brian: Definitely later. I'd always devoured fiction and loved making up stories, so I fancied becoming a filmmaker, which was what I studied in college. It became apparent that making movies was a remarkably convoluted process, involving too many people and too much money. It's extremely rare for a filmmaker to be allowed to pursue their singular vision. So I focused on the photography, still chasing scenarios in my head, which is pretty pointless if they're not documented. Then I had a little lesson in mortality after a bad fall down the staircase of a warehouse, New Year's night, 2001. I was pretty broken. While convalescing, Rutger Hauer's soliloquy at the end of Blade Runner kept running through my head. So I started writing.

Brian: Ready-Made Dreams was written first, during the buildup and invasion of the second Bush's second Iraqi War. Godless was intended as the opening of an epic rock'n roll novel with a Sci Fi edge. And Bullseye Inc. reflects trends that seem to be happening with expanding corporate branding, homogenizing culture, taken to an extreme. They were all written independently, so the inspirations were varied, but by mixing characters from different narratives, it created an interesting time-line with back-stories to lean on.

Brian: For now, Ready-Made Dreams is the end. But one of the novella's implied themes deals with alternative realities, so you never know. Godless is the opener.

Brian: I think it would be fun to explore the underground band that Hondo, Barris, and Zelda belong to in Godless. It's always been a bit of an obsession to tell the ultimate rock'n roll story. Harlan Ellison's Spider Kiss and Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street are outstanding works on the subject, but dated, and I haven't seen anything of that caliber on the contemporary music industry yet.

Brian: Right now I see them as a series of vignettes. Originally it was to be one great sweeping novel, but written as shorts they seem to acquire a life of their own, going off in unexpected directions.

Brian: There were a lot of great experiences, but I'd have to say Marilyn Manson. I toured with him twice, and he was so giving with his time and so damned interesting, it's pretty reflective in the images.

Brian: That and filmmaking. I don't have any academic background in literature, as anyone who's helped me edit can attest, so it's got to come from somewhere. Actually, I've never taken a photography class either.

Brian: What a friend calls my 'opus,' Still Waters Run Deep is a novel about the misadventures of a gang of River Rats on the upper Mississippi in the seventies. I grew up on the Mississippi. I was a River Rat. Moving to the Twin Cities, making new friends, we'd trade war stories from our childhoods. The reaction to mine was pretty universal: dude, you should write a book- all we did was hang around at the mall.

Brian: Just finished an erotic horror short: Auto Lurkers. Dubious market potential, but it was fun to write. I've been tinkering with Skyway, an intended literary piece, for a few years. It's written in the second person point-of-view, a difficult format. There are a couple concepts for photo publications in the works as well.

Brian: I'm considering working on a piece that I started about five years ago. It starts as a satire on the commercial photography industry and slowly turns into this hallucinatory horror trip – kind of a reflection on some of the experiences in the industry.

Brian: Over the past thirty years I've seen sports rise from a celebrated pastime to a kind of fanatical devotion, on par with nationalism and religion. All three seem to thrive in politically conservative climates, so I made an extreme extrapolation for the story.

Brian: I usually have music on when writing, but there was a time I worked exclusively at the Library. The silence and the academic surroundings actually helped me focus. While finishing Still Waters Run Deep, I had the radio tuned to a seventies retro station, which is probably one of the reasons the book contains an extensive playlist of seventies hits. Working on Godless, I was into The Bronx, and band author Charlie Huston referred to in one of our correspondences as 'real skull fuckers'. I couldn't agree more.

Brian: Rock'n roll. Always.