Essays
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Home is a Word Unspoken
Our grocery store. Our bank. Our beloved local coffee shop and pizza parlor. I didn’t know where I was until I saw the magnolia tree, rigid and charred.
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Pigs Rooting for Truffles
The state was good. Parents were not necessarily good. Sometimes, in order to serve the state, you had to turn your parents in.
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Deficiency
I’ve never had a cavity, but I brush too hard. A decade ago, a dentist told me I was scrubbing away my own flesh.
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On Tove Jansson’s Eccentrics and Oddballs
I saw my fears and yearnings magnified and reflected back to me in Jansson’s stories.
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A Bloody Brilliant Sentence: Erotic Linguistics in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
…I had not yet read horror written by another woman with such a rich, arresting evocation of female sexuality.
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Parallel Practice: How to Break a Sentence
Which color might capture the word “would,” for example? And which stitch?
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Losers Keepers
It’s hard to go on reading when you don’t remember what happened twenty pages ago, so I haven’t read many novels recently.
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On Snorting Human Remains
One of my friends, Enzo, had just died, and he’d probably felt a similar way, invincible and lost.
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Nothing New Under the Sun: The Russian Formalists’ Guide to Prose Craft
With a fixation on abstract novelty, our students call to us from a crowded space of so many like tales and so much pressure to spit out some shiny new thing.
