LATEST NEWS
All the latest River Kai interviews, appearances, and more.
River Kai was recently featured on Anna P.'s Indie Support Sunday Blog! Here's an excerpt from the interview:​
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Who or what inspired you to write?
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Growing up, my animator dad taught me how to draw. I admired his incredible, seemingly endless list of skills, inspiring me to draw with him often, and to listen to his thoughts on any and all creative media. I also loved creating imaginary stories with my younger sibling, Ashlynn, in our free time, allowing us to laugh and express ourselves through fictional characters with our toys. This set me up for a deep love of manga, video games, movies, and TV shows, learning from their storytelling methods until I began crafting my own stories in my head to give me an escape as I struggled with insomnia and chronic illness from a young age.
When Lyme disease threatened to take my life as a teenager, writing saved my life. I was bedridden and a shell of myself, so I made writing the next page of Chronic Nightmare Syndrome—my first discontinued webcomic that inspired Soul Survivors—my new purpose. I didn’t realize it at the time, but writing this horror story was a cathartic release, allowing me to express what it felt like to live under constant, inescapable attack from within my own body. I lived to create the next page and the next, guiding me to my second webcomic, What-Sexual??, which brought me to the realization of a secret I had been harboring from myself: I’m a transgender man.
This combination of self-expression and self-acceptance gave me the strength to pull through, granting me a second chance at life. I’m now determined to write stories to hopefully help others like me feel less alone.
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Read the full interview on Indie Support Sunday
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Business as UNusual Podcast Feature - Supporting Others Through Stories of Survival and Love ft. River Kai
River Kai was recently featured on Bicurean's Business as UNusual's Podcast! Listen to the full episode here:​
Business as UNusual Podcast Feature - Authors for Palestine
River Kai was recently featured on Bicurean's Business as UNusual's Podcast! Listen to the full episode here:​
CanvasRebel Interview - Meet River Kai Pilger
River Kai was recently featured on CanvasRebel! Here's a snippet of the interview:
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"River Kai, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
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Readers often ask if I’ve written myself into my novels or comics. I like to tell them that while I wouldn’t want to torture myself like that, every story I’ve written is a deeply personal part of my own healing. I love to experience each of my characters’ journeys with them, resolving huge fictional problems with real-world connections that feel insurmountable in real life. My debut novel, My Shy Alpha: Book 1 of the Steamy Shifter Romance Series, holds a deeper meaning for me – which I know may sound silly just from hearing the title. But that’s exactly why I wrote it. I wanted to select a genre with an endless selection of toxic tropes and gender roles for me to unpack, especially as a transgender man who has already undergone a major unlearning process around these very issues.
In doing so, I came up with a story that made me uncomfortable in the best way. Not because it follows these tropes or gender roles, but because it breaks them, it defies expectations, and the characters heal from very real issues despite being surrounded by fantastical, beastly scenarios (literally)."
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Get in Touch
River Kai Art
PO Box 1414
Wilsonville, OR 97070
United States
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