Ethan Wilder
“We’ve outsourced so much of our emotional lives to systems that were never designed to care—dating apps, customer service protocols, algorithmic feeds that think they know what we want. I write about the spaces between the code, where real connection happens despite the forms we’re forced to fill out. Every bureaucratic nightmare I create is really a love letter to the parts of us that refuse to be processed, filed, or understood by committee. The heart doesn’t fit on any form I’ve ever seen—and that’s exactly what makes it worth writing about.”
Ethan Wilder writes speculative fiction for readers who’ve ever been told their heartbreak doesn’t qualify for the correct emotional tax bracket. His stories navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of human connection, where love requires proper documentation, intimacy must clear compliance protocols, and your soulmate might be trapped in an endless phone tree.
Drawing from a world where algorithms decide our dating prospects and customer service bots handle our deepest confessions, Ethan crafts absurdist love stories that feel uncomfortably familiar. His debut collection, Your Application to Be Understood Has Been Denied, explores what happens when romance collides with regulatory frameworks—where falling in love becomes a clerical error and heartbreak may be subject to administrative review.
These aren’t tales of love conquering bureaucracy; they’re stories of love through bureaucracy, finding the warm, flawed, inescapably human moments hidden within the machinery of modern indifference. Ethan’s work speaks to anyone who’s ever been rerouted mid-sentence, misunderstood by design, or forced to quantify their feelings on a satisfaction survey.
When he’s not designing dystopian filing systems or engineering emotionally devastating phone trees, Ethan can be found drinking too much coffee while contemplating the existential horror of automated responses, or wondering if his own feelings would pass a compliance audit. He writes from deep inside the machine, searching for the glitches that reveal our humanity.
English