CREATIVE NON-FICTION
"A Stranger Here"
River Teeth vol. 18.2 (2017)
EXCERPT: "During the night, I will picture them with the wagon heading down some back road. The wheels winching up dirt and bruising tracks into the soil. The cruel heat beating down on them. I will picture them as vagabonds living in the Dust Bowl, traveling for food, pitching up the blue tarp whenever the storms get rough. I will picture them moving across the country. Moving across decades. Escaping the boy’s estranged father, his drunken violence, and making their way to Florida. To Tallahassee. Right next door to me."
"Put Your Ear to the Streets"
Medium - 6/2/20
EXCERPT: "It doesn’t take long to learn the synchronization of the stoplights on Liberty. At first glance they may seem uneven, arrhythmic like an old drunk’s heartbeat, but there’s a pattern to it all, a pulse, and if you pay attention you just might be able to get to where you’re going a few minutes quicker."
EXCERPT: "The temperature’s warm for October, the fluorescents swapped with a big bright sun. At the courtyard, just outside the cafeteria, a few picnic tables scatter themselves about, their benches and chairs bearing the weights of fathers and daughters and sons and wives as they reunite with one another. Cigarettes are smoked down to the knuckles and eyes are studied in silent hopes of recognition: the visitors longing to find the old, healthier versions of their loved ones, back before their eyes reddened, clouded, and closed, or worse yet, changed altogether."
"Our Deepest Sympathies"
Redivider vol. 18.2 (2021)
SHORT FICTION
"Pinner & Otis"
The McNeese Review vol. 57 (2020)
EXCERPT: "For the next ten minutes Pinner and Otis let the streets do the talking: the singsong of passerby, the bass of ephemeral vehicles, a basketball bouncing invisibly around the corner, sirens in the distance, coming and going, coming and going. The blunt morphs to a roach and time slows and muscles slack and the city’s got a nice, little haze to it now—muted orange like young dusk."
"The Man From Lowville"
Water-Stone Review vol. 21 (2019)
EXCERPT: "I looked east toward the trestle, at the tracks that cut through the Adirondacks like a steel vein. No trains had ridden them since the war began. The bend to Holland Patent was still unfinished, no men around to complete it. No one to put in the subgrade or the sleepers. No one to throw down the ballasts or bolt together the new fishplates. Throughout those months, I’d been hearing reports that if the war didn’t end soon, there’d be a company of women arriving from North Creek to complete the southside line."
"Adirondack Express"
New Limestone Review vol. March '18
Nominated
for Pushcart Prize
EXCERPT: "Alongside the shore stood a bullmoose. It was young, his antlers only knobs of brown velvet, its small dewlap swaying some in the wind. Danny carefully pulled out his camera and began taking pictures while Liz placed her arm around his waist, smiling. Hunter watched—the moose reaching its long neck down into the current, the muscles on its back warped and strong. He was thinking about his mother. How out of all the years she had spent at the cabin, out of all the decades she’d visited the Adirondacks, she had not once seen a moose. At the beginning of every vacation she would say, “This is the year, I can feel it.” And so as magnificent as the animal was, bending down and quenching its great thirst, Hunter couldn’t help but feel he was cheating her, his mother, taking away something that wasn’t his to begin with."
"Borne"
New South Journal vol. 10.2 (2019)
EXCERPT: "For some reason Belle was driving that night, the night things ended between us. We were joyriding Mullan Rd. along the Clark Fork. It was after 2am and the college bars had closed but we weren’t quite ready to turn in yet, so we got into my beat-up Tacoma and headed north. I remember she was telling me a story, something she and her friends had done while working at a llama ranch in Burlington, Wyoming. But it was like she wasn’t even talking to me, just opening her mouth to fill in some empty space that had shown up the week before. She’d been acting strange—eyes getting that far off look, drinking above her fill, that kind of stuff—but I didn’t pay it much attention."