I work in nonfiction because nothing is more curious or exhilarating than real life.
“Somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom…”
- Luis Buñuel
The Desire We Were Becoming || Kenyon Review Winter issue, 2024
In the multifaceted, flirtatious character of Conchita, we held a spyglass to our own imagined futures, on a dare to unlock the secrets of life among and against men. In this sense, we were terrorists too...more
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Miracle Dog || Mocking Owl Roost: Unexpected Delights issue, 2023
Our family debates whether Annie is smart or driven by instinct. Who cares? She's an expert at getting what she wants...more
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My Father Dreamed of Sailing Home to Greece || Dorothy Parker's Ashes, 2023
The day after my wedding my father and I sat in the backyard of my Brooklyn apartment, drinking beer and talking for hours, relaxed in a way I hadn’t often felt with him. It was July. He chain-smoked on a lawn chair while I sweltered on the wrought iron staircase that led to the terrace above. He sounded happy about the family I had found, a life created so differently from his. Then he told me he never should have had children... more
First Job || Cordella Press, 2023
I didn’t admit it to myself, but this job was starting to upset me. I had no qualms about taking the subway at night to hang out at the Mudd Club or Danceteria. Yet, the agitated scrum of the production office, my general ignorance of the film industry, plus spending hours alone inside a dark booth underneath Fifth Avenue, with the implicit knowledge that the fine art of bullshitting teachers would be of no use here—all of this made me feel fairly nauseous with apprehension... more
A Fig to Remember || SweetLit, 2022
Every August, when the tidal chorus of crickets swells to high volume, and summer drapes a silky, humid sheet for one final, explosive round, I succumb: to a fickle, flinty fruit that I crave with such passion, it withers other mouthy pleasures. more
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Book Review: Permafrost by Eva Baltasar || Rain Taxi, 2021​
Eva Baltasar’s well-paced, debut novel opens with a glimmering scene of existential crisis: the narrator is standing on the roof of a building, contemplating suicide. “If surviving is what it’s all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely.” more
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Twenty years ago, a cancer reprieve for my husband on one of the country’s most terrible days || The Washington Post, 2021
Was it over? I felt joy, of course, but had lived so firmly in the grip of denial that relief barely registered. more
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Even a Hollow Object Will Displace Water and Air || Speculative Nonfiction, 2021​
I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space. more
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Urn || River Teeth Journal: Beautiful Things, 2021​
“What kind of urn do you have in mind?”
“No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.” more
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Henry Street || Flatbush Review, 2020
Every year, a blue jay returned to nest there. I learned its song, and believed it was the same bird coming back year after year like an old friend, to teach of loyalty and joyful recurrence, the opposite of dread. more.
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The Route of My Escape || Blood Tree Literature, 2020​
Crossing the Talamanca Range for the first time, heading to Puerto Limón on a rickety train while devouring a mango, I watch vertical peaks melt into the Caribbean. Farther on, banana plantations settle the sultry valley once owned by United Fruit, like a page out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Oh, this is why I came.” more
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A Legacy of Falling || Brevity, 2019​
In the last few months of her life, when she could no longer get out of bed without falling, my mother told her nighttime caretaker that she had contemplated throwing herself from the subway platform into an oncoming train. more
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Cardinal || Haibun Today, 2019
For a time, he flew into our side door. Made a habit of hurling himself, red chest and wingspan smashed to two dimensions by the windowpane. more
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Kerria || River Teeth Journal: Beautiful Things, 2017​
“Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years. more
WRITING
READING
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is both a page turner and a novel of philosophies. The narrator is freelancing for an anonymous entity paying her to infliltrate an eco terrorist group in southwestern France. (All novels these days are one way or another dealing with the confounding impact of climate emergency on people.) I admire how unpredictable she is, bringing the reader close with commentary that betrays other characters.
“People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieus of the same, those things fall away.
What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them?
Not politics. There are no politics inside of people.
The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt.
This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.”
And yet she softens to the writings of the group's leader, who is obsessed with how H. Sapiens outcompeted other branches of humans. "Neanderthals had hunted in teams, had lived collaboratively, but were introverts by temperament and kept their clans small. They did not hoard supplies, or engage in a growth-at-any-cost midget. Their brooding, Bruno speculated, may have aided their resistance to such a mindset, of greed and accumulation. And Thal’s freedom from ambition for ambition’s sake may have led him to the most refined and least practical of human drives: to art for art’s sake.” Alas, the loss of our better natures.
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Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar -- what do I have in common with an Iranian American poet in recovery? Nothing and everything?
"The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don’t cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not doing."
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"“Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves.” Jonathan Keats in Noema Mag "A Clock in the Forest"
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​Her First American by Lore Segal. A revelation, published in 1985 close to 30 years after the author's relationship with the real man. Here Ilka and Carter are walking on Ave C when they run into two young proselytizers flagging down cars.
“What do you call yourselves?
The Christ Has Beens. Sundays,” says the girl. Carter asks her a out the tents of the denomination.
“We believe Christ has already come and gone the second time.
That’s the saddest thing I ever heard, said Carter. Can I buy you a sandwich?
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From The Bee Sting, Paul Murray
This is about the best dialogue/scene I’ve read in some time; Cass, Imelda’s daughter, is packing to move to Dublin to go to Trinity, and the mom friends are talking about the phase they’re in:
“That’s your forties Your kids hating you that is just the tip of the iceberg
I’m not forty yet Imelda says startled and then Is it that bad?
It’s worse Geraldine says Everything turns to shit
Your looks go Maisie says Your body turns into cellulite You start getting aches and pains everywhere You keep thinking you have cancer
Your parents get old Roisin says Then they get sick Then they die
Your marriage goes up in smoke Maisie says He meets someone younger or starts banging the secretary
Or he disappears into his shed or his golf club or some mad hobby Roisin says gloomily Martin got into online Scrabble He’d rather play Scrabble with some randomer in Arizona than make love to his own wife I mean I’m sorry
Josephine Toomey’s Colm tried to get her to go swinging Geraldine says
Like dancing? says Imelda Swing dancing?
Ah our poor innocent Imelda says Geraldine with a laugh What was God thinking giving you a body like that and all
You think the forties are bad Una says I’ve said it before Wait till the Change hits you You wake up and don’t know whose body you’re even in
All the more reason we shouldn’t grudge the girls their freedom Roisin says It’s all just beginning We should be happy for them We had our turn Didn’t we?
And they all say Yes yes because what kind of mother would envy her daughter’s new life.”
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