Publications
“The Girl in the Shadow of the Urn” in STORY, Summer 2023
Lainie had just moved in from Chicago. She had earrings, poked in by a friend back in the city, running all the way up one of her ears. “I’ll do yours too,” Lainie said one afternoon. “All you need is an ice cube and a needle. And a match, to sterilize the needle. And an earring. I could give you some of mine. I have loads. And a potato.”
“In the Way of a Life Backwards” in Boulevard/Natural Bridge, June 2023
They stood circling the cross on the ground, all of them dressed in their blue robes and sensible shoes, linking their arms together. One looked up, then the rest of them did, seeming to anticipate something. All at once, a cacophony of bells filled the stone square.
“Rooms” in Peauxdunque Review, Issue Eight, January 2023
But those pictures—ill-arranged, mass-produced—collected by a trapped teenage girl, still glued to the wall where her bed used to be? Yeah. That got me.
“Radical Empathy via Free Indirect Style: Luis Alberto Urrea’s ‘Mountains Without Number’” in CRAFT Literary, May, 2022
One of the noble aims of fiction is the fostering of empathy across difference, including difference of beliefs. Most difficult for me is finding empathy for those with unpalatable beliefs. Softening my gaze puts my own moral code into question...
“Stone Soup” in Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family, (Proceeds to fight food insecurity in New England) Beacon, May 24, 2022
After the closing bell, I sat in a conference room drinking rum and Moxie, pigging out on cake I didn’t need, laughing with my colleagues, several of whom looked at me with jealousy.
“Sanctuary: Rethinking Trouble in Fiction,” AWP Writer’s Chronicle, April 2022
Throwing trouble at a character might assume a kind of privilege: for a character who doesn’t generally see it, trouble breaks status quo and becomes the occasion for story. But for a character who is always watchful or guarded, letting down that guard might be a more unusual—and transformative—narrative moment.
“Babel,” Slippery Elm Journal, Summer 2021
Among them were twelve citizens who refused to carry bricks. Not our tower, they said. Not our leader, they said.
Multimedia collaboration with me (voice and word collage), Ed Andrews (video collage), and James Barr (sound collage)
“The Beloved You: Direct Address in Sigred Nunez’s The Friend,” TriQuarterly, Winter/Spring 2021
Like prayer, it is directed at something powerful and mysterious—but it is also for the person praying. It is private and almost involuntary. This narrator is addressing her “you” not by choice, not for “you” to hear or understand, but because that is what comes out of her in the passion of her grief. It is devotional. It is automatic. It’s what love does.
“The Anatolian Girl,” North by Northeast 2: New Short Fiction by Maine Writers, Spring 2021
“The Anatolian girl is in love,” says the man in gray. “She cannot marry her beloved. She is promised to another. But she weaves her love letter here, into the design.”
“Night Watch,” Story #8, July 2020
Invisibility has its advantages, Jules supposed, if you let yourself sink into it. You can sit and watch the courtship of others, thrill to it vicariously, and no one will even know you are there.
“Black, Black, Red, Black,” A Public Space No. 28, December 2019
She says she wants to descend those steps, into the cold rush like her favorite writer, pockets full of rocks. Since we were kids she talks like this, strolls along edges and fake-laughs. I don’t slap her. Not anymore.
The Artstars: Stories, Indiana University Press / Blue Light Books, October 2019
Enticing, heart wrenching, and darkly funny, the interconnected stories in The Artstars are set in creative communities—an art school, an illegal loft studio, a guerrilla street performance troupe—where teamwork and professional jealousy mix, and the artists grapple with economic realities and evolving expectations.
"Light Streaming from a Horse's Ass," Fifth Wednesday Journal #22, Spring 2018
You pet his cold neck, look into his enormous chestnut-glass eye, then work your way toward his tail. Strange. The tail is gone--only a hole where it used to be, a hole into a dark void.
"Strays," Among Animals 2: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, Ashland Creek Press, 2016
They made wild little babies with dripping eyes and bellies bloated with worms. Many were not even cute. Some dropped hefty, inbred litters, with markings so alike they looked like a single being, a furry amoeba throbbing around the water bowl.
The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, Ploughshares Solos #34, Fall 2014
And the doctor—or nurse, I didn’t ask—who must have been a dozen years younger than me, tied off her last suture and looked up at me with the concern one reserves for crackpots.
"The Pacific Madrona" in Crab Orchard Review Vol 19 No 2, West Coast & Beyond issue, Summer/Fall 2014
He kept a pick in his back pocket, the kind with the clenched plastic fist. Hair was everyone’s business but mine.
"Their Town" in Fugue, Issue 46, Spring 2014
The laugh was unstoppable, and awful, and endless. . . It spread through the graves onstage, body by body, over the footlights, and—worst of all—to the rows of audience, until it reached the last tier of Little Theater seats.
"The Anatolian Girl" in The Bridport Prize Anthology, 2014
There is a minaret outside our hotel window. It startles me out of my dream each dawn. The loudspeaker crackles. The muezzin wails. My heart flips. I don’t go back to sleep, I never go back to sleep.
"The Flipside of Mercy" in The Normal School, Issue 9, Fall 2012
To be held. To be held like a treasure. Mother-arms: muscled, bones not yet brittle, fat still bewailed in moments of vanity. Skin not yet turned to rice paper, mind not yet stuck in a bitter circle. Lou missed this. She missed it, then wondered if she was imagining or remembering it. Can you miss the nonexistent? The never-was?
"Pink" in Witness Vol. XXV No. 3, Fall 2012
The kitten looked scared. Helen had never noticed that before. Mortally terrified, like the fall from the tree was many stories, would be his last. It wasn’t funny at all. Friday’s coming. The kitten knew better than to count on that.
"Periscope" in Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2011
Tonight, her head was full of bees. Inside the steel tank, her feet were cramped and curled. Her legs were sandstone. She could feel her hands clutch each other, heavy on her belly, where the nurse had left them. The cool compress on her forehead had slipped. If she looked down her nose, she saw only the rubber cowl, tight around her sweaty neck, puffing the machine’s meter, relief in metronome.
"A Picture Made of Sound" in Body & Soul: Narratives of Healing from Ars Medica, 2011
The violinist stopped. I heard a man ask him why he played in the columbarium. Wasn't it obvious?
"The Lemon Method" in r.kv.r.y quarterly, Spring 2011
The lemon sits on the table for weeks, while the fife plays on. He doesn’t know we are in here, that we hear him all day, that his song penetrates our jumpy bodies like ash: particles of asphalt, computers, bones.
"Three Views of My Mother" in JMWW, Fall 2007
An explosion onto the dishes and placemats, yellow and red vomit, volcanic, acrid, sprays onto my shirt, pools under my chair. The smell overwhelms. I can't help it, I erupt too. Onto the beige vinyl floor, its barfy pattern I have crawled on and memorized.
"War" in FRiGG 17, Summer 2007
Sara applies Vaseline to my cheeks and eyelids. She will make a portrait of my face, like a death mask.
"Read the Goddamn Poem" in One on One: The Best Women's Monologues for the 21st Century, 2007
And Marla, she just wiped her cheese glob chin off and told me I was full of it: we are all bearded ladies at one time or another, she said, and we're not paying the freak show people to be different, we're paying them to be the same, like the wavy-ass mirror in the funhouse, where you get to see what you would look like if things had gone very, very differently.
"Three Lessons in Firesurfing" in Hobart #6, Summer 2006
O'Malley, we call him Boss. It fits him. He's a big ruddy guy with big arms and a big truck. I think he has a big brain too, but I'm not sure yet. Mostly I just see him collecting money for beer. Today is our first crit of the year. My first year. My first chance to hear him for real.