writing

“Pith”, the title of my new short story in Wilderness House Literary Review, is one of my favorite words, dense and layered with meaning. As a noun, it refers to spongy plant tissue or a body’s soft interior; it can also mean the essential part. As a verb, it means to kill. It’s a word in constant dance with its context – move this way, and it could be a refuge; shift slightly, and it’s peril. By either interpretation, it’s impactful.

I hoped to weave these multiple meanings into the story, a simple one of Dara, a young woman attempting to connect with her elderly father, newly vulnerable at this moment in their relationship.

I also wanted to create a personality test for the reader, and purposely left the time period vague. Set this story in late 2018, for example, and the tone reassures. Place it in January 2020 and inspire dread. I leave it up to you whether to support or kill.

Thank you to fiction editor Ian Halim at Wilderness House for selecting my work, and to the women of SWIG and Andrew Wagner for thoughtful critiques.

Read Pith in Wilderness House Literary Review >

Photo courtesy Margaret Jaszowska via Unsplash

Thank you to the team at Levee Magazine for publishing my newest short fiction, Embolus.

A bit of process notes on this one: Embolus went through multiple revisions over the years and received mixed feedback, both from my writing workshops and editors at literary journals. It certainly mystified me as I worked on it. I knew I wanted a mood piece that spoke to something the main character considers unspeakable, something she knows but prefers as mystery. Something intimate and also foreign.

I’ll say little more, just that the timing of Embolus’ publication in Levee’s fifth issue, in the throes of the novel coronavirus, and the rash of high-profile diagnoses this week, seems a little too timely. Can we ever really acknowledge our vulnerabilities?

Photo courtesy Tyler B Dvorak via Flickr Creative Commons

In 2019, my New Year’s Resolution was to work on a writing prompt every day, using A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves as my guide. Whether I had five minutes or five hours, the goal was simply to make it a daily practice. I wrote longhand each day, sometimes in plain notebooks, other times in fancier leather-bound journals. I alternated between drugstore ballpoint pens and bold purple inks. I made it the whole year.

In 2020, my resolution has been to work through those prompt exercises like a miner, extracting useful nuggets, in an attempt to produce a polished short story each month. Nearly five months in, I’ve been keeping at it, although “polished” may be a relative term.

A bit of validation, though: I’m pleased to announce the first of my prompt stories has found a home. Check out my newest published fiction, Serotiny, in issue 6.1 of The Maine Review. (Interestingly, although perhaps not surprisingly, nearly nothing from the original prompt exercise made it into the final draft.)

Thanks to editor Rosanna Gargiulo for her thoughtful edits, as well as the incredible readers of SWIG and Andrew Wagner for their invaluable feedback.

As always, thanks for reading!

Photo courtesy Matthew Macy via Flickr Creative Commons