About

A Bit of Context

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01 Geoffrey McKay
Geoffrey McKay outdoors in autumn, holding a trumpet

Geoffrey McKay

Dr. Geoffrey McKay (They/He) is originally from Richland, WA. Geoffrey trained as a trumpet performer at Central Washington University, earning both a BM and MM before completing a Post-Master’s Performance Certificate at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA and a DMA at the University of North Carolina Greensboro—alongside a PBC in musicology. Along the way, Geoffrey performed with regional orchestras across the Pacific Northwest, won the Spokane Symphony Orchestra young artist competition, and appeared with the Piedmont Wind Symphony, Orquesta Mayor, and as a collaborative guest at the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Geoffrey’s D.M.A. recitals explored the themes, characters, and narrative of The Twilight Indigo as multimedia performances—an early sign of where the work was headed. His research centers on the social and sonic coding of the trumpet in popular film, and extends into punk, metal, and popular music and their relationship to political discourse and social movements.

Now entering their third year in the role, Geoffrey teaches popular music history at Spokane Community College and applied trumpet at the University of Idaho.

Geoffrey began writing The Twilight Indigo in 2020 while living in Atlanta, GA.

02 The Twilight Indigo

A Novel · In Draft

Grace McGregor pulls a waterlogged journal from the edge of a poisoned lake in Downtown—what remains of the Southern Municipality after the United States fractured into warring, hyper-politicized factions. Its author shows up minutes later—bleeding through his bathrobe, already half-gone—and tells her he’s been working on a proof of radical love. Then he disappears back into whatever is left of the future.

Grace is a doctoral student, a drunk, and a punk living under Governor Andrew Klick Jr., an ultra-conservative tyrant whose regime surveils, enforces, and slowly erases anything that refuses to be monetized. Her circle—the Twilight Indigo Collective—are theorists, burnouts, and true believers navigating blurred morality and radical resistance in equal measure, guided in part by Prophy, the Absurd Prophet, who cosmically philosophizes through indigo threads from the moon.

The Twilight Indigo is surreal, formally experimental, and deeply concerned with what love means when being radical is the only way to survive. Whether the Collective succeeds is a question the novel refuses to answer cleanly. It insists on the question instead.

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