Posted in: Writing
I am over the moon to be included in the Fall 2021 issue of South Carolina Review! “Handbook for Demolition Cats” is one of my most gleefully absurd pieces and was a sheer joy to write, and I’m so grateful to the team at SCR for selecting it. “Handbook for Demolition Cats” is a companion piece to “What the River Takes,” published in Litro. Copies of South Carolina Review Volume 54.1 can be purchased on their website or at Barnes & Noble.
I am absolutely over the moon to share that I am now represented by Nicki Richesin at Wendy Sherman Associates! Nicki is a dream agent, and I am so grateful for her passion and diligence and enthusiasm for my work. My novel, BRANMOOR, is a neo-Victorian coming-of-age story about family and loss and the changing way children consider their parents, and I so hope to be able to share Helene’s journey (and Nicholas and Valera’s antics) with you.
In the meantime, I am (gleefully) hard at work on a new project: a novel-in-stories about cats, architectural restoration, and abandonment. If you would like to read one of the stories from this project, head over to Litro for “What the River Takes.”
This fall, I had the honor of attending my first-ever writing residency, at the Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms, on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee, and it was an experience for which I am immeasurably grateful. I wrote a ridiculous and over-the-top piece of pseudo-poetry about the end of the world, and painted and collaged, and read high fantasy, and wrote short fiction; I got to spend whole days thinking through characters and plot-holes and sentences and structures, and no matter what time it was or where I was (my favorite spot: the barn loft after dark), could grab my notebook and start writing again. It was glorious. I wandered a state park and a community garden bursting with love, hiked and swam in a quarry (like something out of Michael Fournier’s Swing State!!) and drove twisting, winding mountain roads, and saw so much natural beauty I had no idea existed here. It was eye opening. I spent every possible second I could outside, and earned dozens upon dozens of mosquito bites. I visited historic cemeteries (a tiny company graveyard, half up a mountain and half-full of the graves of children; a national cemetery for veterans, with the names of their wives written on their tombs’ back-sides) and the Museum of Appalachia, where most of the thousands of items on display came with hand-written explanations. I learned so many small pieces of people’s individual stories; I was honored so many people shared their lives and hearts with me. I helped cut off a piece of netting that had been wrapped tightly around a duck’s foot, and helped an awe-inspiring neighbor find her missing dog. Speaking of doggos: Inara and Zoe, the resident farm-floofs are the absolute goodest girls and the best to snuggle and stargaze with, and I know I left a piece of my heart with them and the fireflies (and mosquitoes) on that rugged, wonderful hollow hill. Thank you, SAFTA, for this incredible experience; I am so deeply humbled and grateful!
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is an absolutely wonderful organization that offers a reading series, workshops, lectures, published works, and so much more. If you’re looking for a writing community or for a writing residency or book publisher, be sure to check out their offerings!
Best of the Net 2019 Anthology (Cover image: "Surrendered to the Air" by Rhonda Lott)
I’m so honored and excited and humbled to share that my short story “The Urg” was announced as a winner of Best of the Net 2019. It is a dream come true to see my name written alongside the likes of Camille T. Dungy, Kristen Arnett, and Roxane Gay, and I am so incredibly grateful to Megan Giddings and Sundress Publications for selecting my work, as well as the entire team at Porter House Review for nominating my story. “The Urg” was originally published by Porter House Review, as the winner of their inaugural Editor’s Prize for Fiction.
Check out the Best of the Net 2019 anthology here, or read “The Urg” here.
Please forgive the extremely late announcement, but I am so thrilled to share with you that my short story “The Urg” won the inaugural Porter House Review Prize for Fiction in March 2019! I completed this story while working with Willy Vlautin and Jack Driscoll at Pacific University, and am so, so grateful for their advice, feedback, and support. I am also incredibly grateful to the team at Porter House Review, and so proud of an accomplishment that four years ago I believed impossible.
Read the “The Urg” here, but please be warned, it involves disordered eating, which may upset some readers.
