Writing Projects and Published Work

Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, issue, (11) Winter 2023

You never expected much. You come from humble people—giants after all. But your wife changed you. She was immersed in a world you had ignored. She watched sunsets, collected wildflowers, waded in streams to feel the cool water on her bare feet. You began to consider a bigger life.

Isn’t the point of life to become something greater than yourself? To make a mark that overcomes mortality? If you are not talented, not wealthy; if you do not discover a cure, or rise to great power; if you are of average means and faculties, how do you give meaning to a life? Isn’t this the purpose of loving another? To love is to be held in an eternal embrace. You feel for your wife as you have never felt for another . . . 

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 West Branch, No. 98, Winter 2022 

Four months after the baby died, Ruby’s parents returned to the world they abandoned years previous. They found a house in Minneapolis, parked the van out front, and went to work converting the basement into a darkroom. A week after the construction was complete, her mother left. She told them that she needed to be with women. Years later, Ruby understood that her mother was speaking of a particular woman, but then she imagined a world of only women, a land of mothers and daughters, sisters and grandmothers. She was left in the world of men with her younger brother, Niko, and her photographer father, Lynn. Someone needed to stay behind to take care of things. It seemed appropriate that she should be the woman left to this duty. She had just turned eight . . . 

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 American Short Fiction Online, July, 2018

When the Boeing 727 takes off from Mitchell Airport, the bolts that hold the landing gear door in place are already unwinding. Eight miles away, Tucker Knoebel is making his way home early to the suburb of Oak Creek to be with his wife, Della. He loves entering the subdivision from the city when the streets turn from straight gray creases to lilting curves meant to mimic the flow of hills and rivers. Tucker sometimes feels like he is in his childhood train set among the metal models of the post office, the butcher shop, the station. Even the people are like his brightly painted figures—everyone posed with a prop: boy and ball, girl and jump rope, woman and garden shovel, man and lawnmower. It’s almost as though he can just move a pair of children and a pool to his own backyard.

Even if Della hadn’t gotten sick, they may not have had the children they’d spoken of through their courtship in such detail that Tucker had imagined attending tee-ball games and ballet recitals. 

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 (novel excerpt) 45th Parallel, July, 2018 

"Start with: ‘In the beginning . . ."

“In the beginning the earth had just one enormous continent.” Dad chewed his words uncertainly—unfamiliar food that he did not want to swallow but was too polite to spit out, his stomach turning nervously at the thought of digestion. His fingers entwined to make a basket of his hands too tight to let light through the cracks.

At four and a half years-old Mariah’s sister Fee tried to repeat the gesture, overlapping rather than interlocking so that one hand held the other.

“One island,” Mariah said. She was seven and always looking for ways to be helpful.

“And one sea,” Dad confirmed.

The three of them were crowded into Fee’s lower bunk . . . 

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 (micro-fiction) Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 80, Oct. 2016

“Do Jesus and Santa Claus come from the same place?' our sons ask us. It is confusing because our family displays these icons together at this time of year: jovial, fat man in red pajamas beside nearly naked infant cradled in ceramic hay. “If Joseph isn’t Jesus’ dad, then maybe Santa is,” the boys say.

Our family doesn’t have a train set to put up at the holidays; instead we place the manger beside the tree and our sons play with the figures as though they are G.I. Joes. It may be sacrilegious—the way our sons engage the three wise men in wrestling matches or turn Mary into a C.I.A. agent . . .

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Lindenwood Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 2, 2012

For years there was a man who sat on the cracked sidewalk outside the wall that surrounded St. Joseph’s Academy for Gifted and Talented Young Men. He sat legs stretched out, back to the ivy-covered stone wall, beating a rhythm with a tin can on the sidewalk to the opening and closing of the wooden gate. He came to the spot as though attending the school from that position, arriving before the first bell, staying until the last of the staff had pushed their way out of the yard. He was there for so long that regular instructors and permanent staff came to know him. Although he did not beg, people dropped money into his can, brought him food and an occasional cup of coffee. 

One day, the head of the music department, Dr. Abe Ada, bent closer, a little closer still, recognized the man beneath the scraggly beard and uncombed hair, and brought him inside . . . 

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Lindenwood Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 2, 2012

For years there was a man who sat on the cracked sidewalk outside the wall that surrounded St. Joseph’s Academy for Gifted and Talented Young Men. He sat legs stretched out, back to the ivy-covered stone wall, beating a rhythm with a tin can on the sidewalk to the opening and closing of the wooden gate. He came to the spot as though attending the school from that position, arriving before the first bell, staying until the last of the staff had pushed their way out of the yard. He was there for so long that regular instructors and permanent staff came to know him. Although he did not beg, people dropped money into his can, brought him food and an occasional cup of coffee. 

One day, the head of the music department, Dr. Abe Ada, bent closer, a little closer still, recognized the man beneath the scraggly beard and uncombed hair, and brought him inside . . . 

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 Cerise Press, Issue 8, fall/winter 2011-2012 

On the first day of the rains the Australians walked to the ocean, surfboards in hand, and threatened to go in. The drifter walked down too, with the Brazilian guys because they wanted to get a look at the girls soaking wet in their bikinis. They were already pretty messed up then, so he knew that he was imagining it, but he could hear the sea howling. The waves were chaotic. They weren’t washing towards the shore or back out to sea, but diving at one another, a swarm, swallowing each other, cannibalistic. There was no horizon. The beaches were closed and blue jellyfish were being spat out onto the shore looking like trash after a party. The rain was getting heavy, flogging the ground, flogging them. They could barely see. They all headed back to the hostel and haven’t been out since . . .

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 The Florida Review, Issue 36.1, summer 2011 

Zelda was one of a parade of occupants who passed through the rental triplexes on Pillar Street between the Kosher deli and the public library. There were only a handful of tenants who stayed any length of time to, what could be considered, make a life for themselves. Most occupied the three room apartments as though they were holding pens, train stations; barely noticed while waiting to move on. They were moderate brick structures with worn hardwood floors and walk-out porches off of the second story stairwells; owned by a mismatched flock of landlords who had purchased the properties as investment or inherited them from nostalgic parents. These people lived elsewhere—across town, in the suburbs, in grander or warmer places. They were easily convinced to sell when city developers decided that the area should go commercial. The tenants heard rumors of sale, eviction and razing. Most did not call their landlords or city councilmen, or canvas the neighborhood with petitions to save the historic structures where they ate, slept, and kept their possessions. For the most part they didn’t care. They labeled these places “home,” but meant something different.

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Cleaver Magazine

In fairy tales the woods is often a manifestation of the unknown that is contrasted with the safety of the village, or home, where the protagonists feel in control of the setting and situation. Protagonists in these fairy tales leave the comforts of home for the unknown element of the woods for different reasons—at times in flight, and at other times in quest: Little Red Riding Hood goes into the woods in order to attend to her sick grandmother; Hansel and Gretel are led into the woods and abandoned by their parents; Snow White hides in the woods to escape her evil stepmother; Jack travels up the beanstalk (his version of the woods) to seek wealth and adventure. The woods represent the world over which the people of the village and the protagonists have no control. Here the characters are literally and figuratively out of their elements. The story then becomes about a struggle to gain control over the unknown . . .

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Glimmer  Train Press

To craft a good narrative, I must allow myself to be consumed completely by the emotions of this space; engulfed by the smells, sights, sounds and sensations; to understand the scenes as the characters understand them. But I must also remain objective: I am a guide . . . 

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