NONFICTION
This Is What We’re Doing Now As I stand there, my thumb depressing the “cool” button so as not to burn her tender skin, I say, “Cathy, if you told me when we met that one day I’d be blow drying your boobs in the back of an RV in Texas, I never would’ve believed you.”
Published online: Cutleaf Journal Vol. 5 Issue 13, July, 2025
Shut Up and Listen: A Recent MFA Grad’s Thesis Journey In my journals from twenty years ago I have found entries of what I can only see now as early drafts of my thesis. Bitter passages about my alcoholic father and his inappropriate confessions, laments about my mentally ill mother and how I felt her a ghost, an early account of a cherished family relic and what it symbolized. My thesis had been in the making for a very long time.
Published online: Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog August 15, 2018
Listen to “Shut Up and Listen” here:
Dirty Talk Before he leaves, I give him a hug goodbye. It takes him by surprise, and me too. I’ve never done that before. I don’t know why I do it now. Maybe to remind myself that we’re real people. That the three hundred dollars I made off him tonight carries its own price. That what we’re doing here has consequences bigger than ourselves. Then I think, no, don’t make too much out of this. You’re just a girl making a living, and he’s just a dirty old man who ought to learn some manners.
Published in The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace. Editor(s): Peter Scheckner, M. C. Boyes. 2008
FICTION
Too Good To Be Forgotten: The morning is warm and humid and Kim can already feel a fine sheen of sweat on her upper lip. She wipes it away with the collar of her shirt and wonders what you’re supposed to do if a boy tries to kiss you while your lip is sweating. She’d like to ask Amy but knows Amy would just laugh. Kim once asked her what you should do when a boy asks to kiss you, and she had laughed then. “Grow up, Kim! They’re not gonna ask!”
Published online in Peatsmoke Fall 2022
Listen to “Too Good To Be Forgotten” here:
Jack Nobody: My mother had only been dead four days when Jack showed up at the Pink Palms Diner for the first time, filling the space in the corner she had left behind. It was like when my cat died last year and another one had shown up in the backyard, skinny and tick-ridden, meowing like crazy as I dumped the last shovelful of dirt into the grave I had dug. Jack was like that. Not from the dead, exactly, but close to it.
Published online in Black Fork Review, Issue 4, April 2021
A Girl Seen: When she met James at a party last year and mentioned she was a stripper, James said, “Big deal,” not even giving her the chance to tell him about how she had found the ad for Dancers: No Experience Necessary! in the local indie paper at the coffee shop where she had been working since dropping out of Ohio State. About how, at twenty-five, with no boyfriend and no cute boys even looking her way, she was starting to feel invisible. Sure, the leering and the awkward would sometimes try to flirt, but she didn’t like the unhip, lonely image of herself reflected in their gaze.
Published online in Peatsmoke Spring 2021
Fifty Million Cents: Joey is nine years old when his mother goes nuts and his sister goes bad and he has to live with his grandmother who gets mad if he eats cheese in the living room. His grandmother gets mad about a lot of things these days. This morning is no different.
Published online in The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 2020
Walter’s Wreck: He has strange dreams now too. Last night he dreamed of a woman who fell in love with the county fair’s prize-winning gourd. It was a big, obscene, yellow thing with warty bumps and a long brown stem. The woman called it Smokey, and sat stroking it on her lap while she rocked in her grandmother’s rocking chair. The chair had a pink cushion. Next thing, the woman found her husband in the kitchen with a knife by the gourd, saying, “Damn, honey, this melon’s gone bad.” Smokey was cut to pieces.
Published in The Bellevue Literary Review Vol.17 No. 1 Spring 2017
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