SAS Speaker Spotlight: AJ Romriell

Meet SAS26 speaker AJ Romriell, whose memoir Wolf Act was published by University of Wisconsin Press earlier this year. We had the pleasure of interviewing AJ to get to know him more before his SAS debut in 2026. Read below!

Norah Clifford: What was it like working with University of Wisconsin Press? Their LIVING OUT: GAY AND LESBIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES is quite a prestigious line of work. Fun Fact: All of the founding editors are part of the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame!

AJ Romriell: I truly can’t say enough wonderful things about University of Wisconsin Press, and all those who were/are a part of it. After the unpublished manuscript earned first prize in the 2021 Utah Original Writing Competition, I sent the book to various agents. At that point, I either heard nothing back or was told it was too hard to sell an essay collection as your debut. It was then that I had an early reader advise me to send the book to UW Press’s Living Out Series who would consider the book whether agented or not, and it only

took three days for the Editor-in-Chief (Nathan MacBrien at the time) to respond to my query. He was thrilled by my work. He wanted to move forward with it. And while the journey took some twists and turns over the following years, every person that I worked with was just as passionate, just as excited, just as supportive and impassioned to produce something of which we could all be proud. It’s true what they say about working with small/independent/university presses: they care so deeply about the books they publish, as well as the authors they work with.

When it comes to being a part of the Living Out Series specifically, I am still entranced at the idea that I get to be a part of it. I hadn’t realized all of the founding editors were in the Hall of Fame; that’s amazing! I remember, when the first physical book first arrived on my doorstep, I flipped open the pages and found a list the series prints in the back of each one of their books—a compilation of incredible, magical, beautiful queer authors who had been published in it before. I read through every title, every name, and I was overwhelmed to find my place amongst them. I think, in various ways, I’ve felt disconnected from the LGBTQ+ community at different parts of my life, so to see my own name in this series—well, I couldn’t feel more proud, or more grateful, to call myself queer.

NC: You use the structure of a play/screenplay for the overarching structure of Wolf Act and play around with different formatting and structure for the individual essays. Can you speak to how you feel these forms support and enhance the content of the stories and the overall narrative?

AR: I’ve always been drawn to whitespace, poetics, and forms that mirror the emotional architecture of what I’m writing. With Wolf Act, I wanted a structure that could hold both performance and revelation—the way our own identities can feel staged, rehearsed, or rewritten over time. The play format allowed me to explore how queerness, religion, and illness each demanded a kind of performance from me, both public and private. The stage directions, acts, and shifting voices gave me a way to move between personas, to show the artifice of self while also reaching for what’s genuine underneath.

Within the individual essays, I played with format—braided structures, Hermit Crab Essays, fragmentation, collages—because I wanted form to follow the fractures of memory and body. I knew there was an inherent risk in doing so: that tying together a narrative through essays of different forms could feel confusing or disorienting. But that’s the thing about illness and trauma and even love—these things rarely (if ever) move in straight lines. They loop and echo, stagger and contradict. Whether it was a Hermit Crab essay about discarding enforced labels and definitions that borrowed the form of a dictionary, or a fragmented essay about the ghosting habits of modern dating, by letting structures come naturally, I could more honestly reflect the instability and beauty of those experiences.

NC: During your writing process, did you set out with the play structure, or did that emerge as you brought the separate essays together? Similarly, were you following a particular narrative arc as you wrote or did the pieces begin out of chronological order and you placed them together as you moved through the work?

AR: The play/musical structure was definitely something that emerged as I brought the pieces together. I had been writing the different essays for years, mostly for classes in my undergraduate and graduate degrees. Early on, I found that I processed the experiences of my life through writing about them. Whether those experiences regarded past relationships, my exodus from the Mormon religion, or my neurodivergence, I came to understand them—and therefore, myself—through the art of the essay.

It was only when I brought them all together that I began to see patterns in my work, almost as if my subconscious had been laying breadcrumbs for me to follow all along. There were two main motifs I found originally. First, I had a startling amount of experiences that included wolves—from my first crush being on the boy who played the Wolf in our high school production of Into the Woods to desperation to meet a wolf in real life. The second motif was theater. It had played a much larger part of my life than I had realized before placing all those essays together. I came to understand that yes, I loved musicals and plays while growing up, but I had also lived my life on a metaphorical stage: lying and pretending, masking and costuming, never letting anyone see the real person behind the curtain. Ironically, using the art of a play became the only way I knew I could tell the story in an honest and complete way.

NC: You mention that your first publication was in poetry, and speak about some of the poetry classes and workshops you attended. How can poetry and creative nonfiction overlap/interact and how does your experience with poetry complement writing personal essays?

AR: I am so glad you asked about this. For me, poetry and creative nonfiction have always shared the same bloodstream. They’re concerned with whitespace and musicality and emotional truths. Studying poetry showed how to attend to silence and image, how to find music in grief, and this same lyric instinct still drives my essays: a need to make meaning out of fragmentation, to use rhythm and metaphor as ways of reaching toward what can’t always be said outright. In Wolf Act, as well as my work now, I’m often writing into experiences that resist easy articulation—illness, queerness, faith, shame—and poetry has always helped me find the language for that. Poetry showed me that truth isn’t always linear, that sometimes the most honest thing we can do on the page is to let the form itself fracture. 

NC: The first “Wolf Boy Interlude” ends with the admittance/realization that as a reader you wanted “these stories to be about me, tales that could teach me how to be brave.” And we see our narrator embracing his inner wolf and bravery throughout the memoir. As the author, what do you hope your stories can teach? How is sharing your tales an extension and expansion of the bravery we see developing throughout the book?

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net 

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