What I’m working on

All through grad school, I thought of myself primarily as a writer of short stories, even though I’ve never been able write a draft of anything in that 20–25 page sweet spot. Under 10 pages or over 50? Easy enough; I do well with concision and sprawl. My poet friends were always saying that I could sit at their lunch table—even though if you told me to write a poem, I wouldn’t know where to start—and the half-finished novel draft that was my thesis project had been such a difficult undertaking that I figured “the short story” (whatever shape that may take) might be my lane.

So it was a surprise to me as much as anyone that I started writing a novel in February 2024. My brother’s dog passed away and I’d been doing some thinking for a class that didn’t happen that would use texts like Ice by Anna Kavan, Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, Event Factory by Renee Gladman, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, Blackouts by Justin Torres, and writings by care workers as lenses for thinking about creating spaces on page that resist or evade knowing AND for imagining the kinds of spaces we’d want in the future but don’t currently have. An image came to me during that planning that felt insistent in its demand that I write toward it, so I went for it (and 100 pages later, I got there 😅). I’ve been writing either longhand or on a 1960s Olympia typewriter inherited from my grandmother.

As of October 2025, I’m just over 78,000 words into the manuscript. You can read a little bit about it here. I’m also two long-ish stories from being done with a collection I’ve been chipping away at since grad school; some of what’s below is included in that.

“The next day: the man carries his buckets to the sand, strips down, and walks into the sea. He does not sing. When he steps onto shore to dry, the sea feels for the first time the shape of the absence of his calves and heels, of his nine toes, and longs for how his body fits.”

Animated illustration of a man in a suit holding a beer bottle, sitting in a dimly lit bar or lounge.

“Solomon’s Knot”
Catapult magazine

“You make of him a mouthful, yet you can taste his unease, taste his cold feet.”

“Begin by asking the audience to silence, but not turn off their phones. Advise that this production features targeted seating, and it is therefore important that members be positioned in the seat number listed on their tickets. The show may or may not include the potential for gunfire (simulated or otherwise), home invasions, theft, embarrassment, shame, and, in some cases, death. Sloppy transitions encouraged.”

Black and white magazine cover featuring a smiling young girl with curly hair and bright eyes, titled "FOGLIFTER"

“In ‘Call Your Girlfriend,’ I felt l like I’d come upon a small, queer secret — something naked and evident but somehow unseen by so many, something that I could access and share with those who were different like me.”

“Scrounge”
Storm Cellar magazine

Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

“The dog survives.”

An abstract illustration in pastel blues and pinks and lavender, of two overlapping figures sitting with arms stretched toward each other, over a plant with big leaves.

“Lost Things”
A Velvet Giant

“In the new apartment, you hear things in the walls. They skritch when you’re cooking and scuff during the night. The cat stares under the radiator, eyes the gap between the cabinets and the floor. Should we text the super, your husband says. It’s not mice, you say, but the old friends with whom you’ve lost touch.”

“That Which Bites”
Arkana Mag

Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

“Over a weekend in July, my husband, Carlos, was eating a piece of bread and bit down on a rock. He spat it out and was horrified to discover that the rock was a piece of his molar that’d snapped off, painless.”

Colorful image of a supernova explosion in space with bright purple, red, and green gases expanding outward, surrounded by stars in a dark sky.

“Salt”
X-R-A-Y Magazine

“When you step on a snail in the dark, the shape and timbre of that sound taps something deep within you, and you imagine paying someone to take a needle and ink and carve colored lines into you, marking your own skin with a rendering of a snail as a sort of penance for all you’ve crushed.”

“Untitled”
TSR Online

Winner of a six-word story contest judged by Amy Hempel

“Took the medicine…”

“Belly”
Mortar Mag

“I adore my lover's stomach, how there is enough of him that he ripples like a lake-top, how the scars of his appendectomy bisect him from side to side.”