Writing
"North of Normal" - novel excerpt
This is not the beginning, but it’s the first thing you remember when you start to remember: you’re in the middle of a pond the color of mud, sitting across from him in a wooden boat that slices through the water in rhythmic swishes, his white work truck a dot on the shore. You ask to row, and he laughs when you don’t have the strength to lift the oars out of the water. You are dizzy from the sips of vodka that still burn in your throat. You are seven.
from "Small comforts"
A week after the accident, I made plans to meet the attorney my mother had hired at the storage lot where my father’s work truck had been towed. She wanted to take pictures for a potential lawsuit, and I wanted to see if there was anything worth salvaging: house painter’s tools of the trade like a sprayer, brushes, roller skins, perhaps some gallons of intact paint, maybe some work receipts or paperwork he’d kept in the truck. Remnants of what his life looked like that day.
“Be prepared for what you might see,” she warned me. She wore heels and tip-toed serpentine through the lot, damp and muddy from the previous day's fall rain.
“Yes,” I said. Words to live by.
publications
"Small Comforts," The Swannanoa Review - 2025 Best of the Net Nominee
"Normal People," Sycamore Review - Wabash Prize for Fiction Finalist
"Posing," Ascent
"Baby," Other Voices
"Normal People," Euphemism
"Restorations," Rambunctious Review, First Prize
"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte," Rambunctious Review, First Prize
"The Girl on the Bubble," Warren Wilson Review
"The Things You Remember," 2024 Central Oregon Writers Guild anthology
"A Place Called Normal," 2023 Central Oregon Writers Guild anthology
"The Measure of All Things," Willow Review
"Posing," (alternate v.), Willow Review, First Place
"Mourning," Willow Review