Prose Publications
March 2023
HerStry 2023 Eunice Williams Prize Winner
Hospital Gown
This nonfiction piece is a five-part journey into the abyss that silence creates. The narrator wakes up one morning pissing blood and is rushed to the hospital. There she is told that she has low-grade cervical cancer. Through the remaining parts, she tries to navigate truth, loneliness, and what it means for yourself when you don't speak up. Anyone who knows me knows that I am very comfortable talking about my mental landscape, but the physical is something I struggle with being open about. This piece is my best effort to own the ways I didn’t take care of myself emotionally back then and to come to terms with all the things I stayed silent about. I am deeply honored that this piece was chosen as the 2023 Eunice Williams Prize First Place winner.
December 2022
Inverted Syntax: Fissured Tongue Volume 4
(Digital Issue)
the landscape of waffle house
“the landscape of waffle house” is a three-part piece that performs as poetry while retaining the narrative space of a memoir-esque essay. The narrator relives for the reader (or herself) three memories, three competing moments, at the iconic, southern, fast-food restaurant, Waffle House. This piece plays with the idea of safety and the violence we enact upon ourselves by simply being. The images embedded in, and in some cases mashed into, the text serve as the placemat from which the reader ingests the words.
*This piece was nominated in 2023 by Inverted Syntax for Best of the Net.
July 2022
On The Run Fiction
The Food Store Diaries: Hunger
“The Food Diaries: Hunger” performs as the memory of a fracture. In this piece, the two main characters, a young man and woman, share a moment while picking out semi-prepared food in a grocery store. While they both are there at the counter together, the two could not be further apart, a fissure that builds through the text chronicling both desire and defeat. Through this short piece, the main female character is hungering, but not for just the simplicity of skin, but something deeper, to fit into something/someone, to belong while retaining the independence which makes her feel important. With her final words, the piece just ends, dropping off into the oblivion of so many quiet, unseen lives.
June 2022
decomp journal - The in-house Journal for the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia
Issue 5 E-zine: (en)visionary futures
(Digital Issue)
ECHO
In this piece, the primary thread of the essay is that of the female narrator processing in real time the invasive experience of receiving an echocardiogram from a male technician. Her mental spiraling and shame ebbs and flows, as the fascination with the procedure is in direct contrast with her desire to have the whole thing end. While it is easy to assume this piece is about one thing, the braided pieces invite the reader into the deeper question of the trajectory of one’s life and how we approach living within the self. The word "echo" throughout this piece is more than just test being performed, more than a delay of sound, more than a command; it is also a call inside for the narrator (and out to the reader) to investigate the embodiment of fear mashed up with a kind of hope, which is in a way, a love note to survival.
*Please note that decomp was unable to match the intended formatting of this piece on their website. If you are curious about the original and intended formatting, please reach out to me to discuss.
April 2022
Landing Zone Magazine: 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest
1st Place Winner
Chapter from The Living Room, The Dying Room
This excerpt from my in-progress novel, The Living Room, The Dying Room, blends prose-fiction, poetry, and snippets of my photography to showcase the slow degradation of a body, a mind, and a household that is centered around a young girl and a golden elk. This chapter meshes, and in some cases mashes, imagery and words together creating little deaths within the main character that slowly bubble to the surface of her being. It chases across the topography of mysticism and harsh realities, ethereal connection and tremendous violence, until coming home to roost in an unexpected space.