Steven Christopher McKnight
Bio
Disillusioned twenty-something, future ghost of a drowned hobo, cryptid prowling abandoned operahouses, theatre scholar, prosewright, playwright, aiming to never work again.
Venmo me @MickTheKnight
Stories (94)
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About Binding Prometheus. Top Story - January 2026.
I want to start actively advocating on behalf of my own work, and the most valuable part of my canon is, without a doubt, Binding Prometheus, the play I have been working on since 2019 and only finished in 2023 as part of my MA. The play itself is an amalgamation of a million different inspirations. On one end, it evokes the Ancient Greek myth-play, deriving its own title from the earliest extant work of Western drama we have, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. On the other end, it borrows significantly from the sci-fi bulwarks from over the years, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. The play could be an episode of Black Mirror, I fear. I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen one episode of Black Mirror.
By Steven Christopher McKnight8 days ago in Futurism
My Own Big Toe, Object Study
Object Study 1 I shudder to think of the fetishists watching in the bushes who see this and find themselves spellbound: a toe is a toe, and a big toe is simply the biggest of the toes on a given foot. At the topside, a thick toenail flattened after years of stubbing and dropping books and tools on it. It’s mangled, just a little bit, by a lifetime of ill-timed and ill-fated clippings. The right end of it juts out a little farther than the left, which is thicker, a little ingrown, bleeds whenever the nail-clippers come down on it without mercy and without finesse. Beyond that, a tuft of hair—Hobbit-hair, as mother called it growing up. It’s lighter than I imagined it to be, lighter, the shade of my beard after a summer in the brunt of sunlight, the shade of half-dried sand on the precipice between dry land and less dry sea, the shade of the hair on my grandmother’s head before it turned white with age and then to ash.
By Steven Christopher McKnight8 days ago in Writers
If 167 Million People Read This Article, Vocal Will Make Me a Millionaire
Allow me to explain: I like money. I like writing. I like making money from writing. My dream in life is to make so much money from one very meaningful work of fiction or theatre that I never have to work again, that royalties allow me to rent a modest apartment, and I can pursue my dreams of taking walks and making soups and collecting the things my little goblin-brain loves to collect. Unfortunately, I have realized that in today’s economy, it takes significantly more than one singular week-long burst of genius to get to this point, and as such, it is a marathon and not a sprint. Sad. I actually have to work to attain my dream.
By Steven Christopher McKnight14 days ago in Writers
The Black Mark of AI
Now that I’ve returned to this site to seek out riches and attention for my own nefarious purposes, and as I comment on other people’s work in hopes that my selfishly-intentioned kindness will feed back into me in due time, I keep seeing the AI-generated content label everywhere. I appreciate the warning, and I skip any story that may have it. I suppose that’s why it’s there, so that people whose tastes oppose AI integration into art and media can gently invest their time and attention elsewhere. But I think this is indicative of a greater blight, something which breeds animosity between myself and the robots which lazy content spewers outsource the emotional and physical labor of writing to.
By Steven Christopher McKnight24 days ago in Confessions
The Poetry Dimension. Top Story - December 2025.
I have been telling stories since I first learned to speak. I’ve been writing since I first had the motor control to grip a pencil in my little ravioli fist. One of my two Bachelors degrees is in Creative Writing, for goodness sake! I like to imagine, dear friends and enemies, that I have made somewhat of a life for myself out of the written word. But if this is the case, dear reader, then why does poetry confuse and upset me so damn much?
By Steven Christopher McKnight26 days ago in Confessions
How Did It Come To This?
The bones of Saint Nicholas sit sopping wet somewhere in a chapel in Italy. You have no idea how this happened, and frankly, you don’t think any amount of money would be enough to get you to drink Saint Nick’s Bone Juice. You also have no idea how this happened, but as you sit in a primary school classroom in Oparany, someplace in Southern Bohemia, you hear the cacophonous tolling of a choir of handbells. You stare out the classroom door into the hallway just in time to watch a parade of preteen boys, faces caked in black makeup, horns sprouting from their scalps, meander past the classroom to the rooms where the younger students learn. Honzik peers into your classroom, calls out your name, comes sprinting up. He marks your forehead with the same black paint that’s on his face, says something to the tune of, “You’re one of us, now” in his thick Czech accent, and rejoins his hellspawn comrades as they terrorize the shitlings of their school.
By Steven Christopher McKnight26 days ago in Humans
Froggyland: A Wonder of the World
“Have you ever heard of Froggyland?” I have asked this question a million times in the past month, to friends, to students, to colleagues, to Tinder matches, to whosoever will listen to the ramblings of a madman (me). Have you, dear reader, ever heard of Froggyland? I thought not. It’s not a place you read about in the history textbooks. No wars were fought over it, no huddled masses ever sought refuge there. No kings were crowned in Froggyland, and therefore none were overthrown in bloody or bloodless revolution. Froggyland is Froggyland, simple as that.
By Steven Christopher McKnight2 months ago in Wander
The Pickharness Principle
There exists a 14th-century play by a long-dead and long-anonymous individual known only by his (or her, but it was the 14th century, so-) highly aggrandizing epithet, The Wakefield Master. They are called that because they are considered to have authored four plays in the Wakefield Cycle, a series of biblical stories brought to theatre in Medieval England. Obviously these plays are written quite masterfully, otherwise the Wakefield Master would be considered the Wakefield Schlub. In whichever case, I would like to talk about one in particular, The Killing of Abel, which I, when I was at the tender age of 19, read for the first time so as to write what my professor called a “grotesquely long” research paper that annoyed her to no end. Most notably, the Wakefield Master’s Killing of Abel stood out to me because it is the first and only time I have ever encountered my favorite word in the wild.
By Steven Christopher McKnight2 months ago in Humans
