Current Projects
Full Length Projects
Completed and Available for Publication
INTERIOR
In INTERIOR, the narrator traverses and explores fluctuating landscapes, searching for something that resembles harmony and solace within her mind, as one who lives with a complicated list of mental disorders. This work offers a unique perspective, which challenges the typical structure of a memoir narrative by blending free-form poetic prose, photography, and art to include the reader on a journey home. By playing with the space of the page, evolving personal pronouns throughout the narrator’s journey, and using poetry as storytelling, the reader is given space to accompany the mental illness/mental health journey of the narrator. Through this manuscript, the narrator builds on some lessons, while having to learn others again and again. Her interactions within the mental-medical community leave her constantly trying to fix her fissures until ultimately, she recognizes and confronts the stigmas, and challenges the very definition of what is considered “sane.” INTERIOR is an exploration and an intimate examination of what home looks like within a neurodivergent mind. With intersections of expectations, cities and buildings, people, and the untended wilds of nature, the search for safety leads the reader into their own discoveries and conclusions, asking, where is your home? How do you find it?
This manuscript is complete and available for publication.
Note: This manuscript was longlisted for the Dzanc Books 2021 Nonfiction Prize. Additionally, several of the pieces from this manuscript have been published and can be read or the issues within which they were published can be purchased here.
Pretend I Always Looked Like This
This hybrid poetry-photography-art collection is a curation of items that span the deep arc of a body as it experiences the [often] gutting nature of connection, and the fruitful space of learning the cyclical natures of the self. As the narrator grows through the space of the work, so do the pieces becoming more and more reflective on ideas of identity and holding a tender space for all the elements of who you were, are, and will become. This work performs as poetry, while being imbued with the tactile textures of 35mm film photography and acrylic paint; this combination, the hybridization of poetics, film, and art, invites the reader deeper into the catacombs of a life.
This manuscript is complete and available for publication.
In Progress
Everything Moves
My speculative, eco-fiction project, Everything Moves, pools around a literal flood that engulfs a small college campus in the mountains of western North Carolina. Through the course of the flood, the reader is buoyed alongside the life trajectory of the narrative's three main characters: a woman who works in the college's writing center, a graduate biology student studying an endangered mussel population, and the river itself. This work seeks to dredge the background of the landscape into the foreground of the narrative, allowing the river and its inhabitants to tell an intimate story of ecological change. The characters and reader must reconcile what we are taught is possible through science with the lengths to which reality can bend when processing grief. Everything Moves blends the filling textures of prose with the soft edges of poetics, creating a body of literature that performs as a photo-capture of the bedload of transformation. When the physical realm, the psychological, and ultimately reality itself are bent, the reader must choose between staying safely on the shore or trusting the current and diving in.
This project is in progress.
log
log is a series of poetic prose essays and long-form poems that serve as meditations the narrator has on her long (and occasional short) trail runs. The act of running performs as a portal through which she explores the landscapes both internal and external, and what it all means in the vast experience of staying alive.
This project is in progress.
The Food Store Diaries
The Food Store Diaries is a collection of story-essays which focus on the combination of our messy internal spaces and the hard and solid place of the grocery store. Each piece investigates questions of identity, planes of existence, gender and sex, and neurodivergence. The steady setting of a supermarket brimming with options often provides ample space for contemplation and, sometimes, revelation.
This project is in progress, but you can read one of the stories within this work on On The Run Fiction.
The Living Room, The Dying Room
The Living Room, The Dying Room, blends prose-fiction, poetry, and snippets of 35mm photography to showcase the slow degradation of a body, a mind, and a household. As the main character grows up, she also grows into a quickly fractured mental state that is forever tied to the golden elk who haunted her childhood. This narrative chases the idea of one's sense of self across the topography of mysticism and harsh realities, ethereal connection and tremendous violence, until finally coming home to roost in an unexpected space.
This project is in progress, however, you can read a chapter from this work in Issue 1 of Landing Zone Magazine.
I Always Say I Love You Before I Go
I am currently working on a project that blends two lives, that of a father and a daughter, to tell the story of family and friendship through a unique lens. It covers the complexities of parenting, growing up through divorced households, the experience of going from parent to friend, shared traumas, and growing old while also growing closer. This work blurs the lines of genre by using interviews and narrative story-scape to give the reader a comprehensive look at two people while they navigate the world together.
This project is in progress.
Chapbook Projects
The House of M:M
The House of M:M efforts to capture the full breadth of a relationship; the tumultuous but breath-taking beginning, the process of discovery, the narrator's challenges navigating living with her mental illness and sharing that and her needs with her partner, the cyclical working through of issues, and ultimately what goes into the decision to stay with another. The pages of this work are burnt because when writing about the coming together of two humans there is a flame from ember component that we cannot ignore, even when it sometimes sears our flesh. The journey the texts takes the reader on was inspired by conversations between lovers and the evolution of a relationship that survives. The things said / left out / texted / answered / fulfilled / worn away / held dear burnt into what we know of our history.
This chapbook manuscript is complete and available for publication.
How To Lose Your Voice
How To Lose Your Voice showcases the slow degradation of staying quiet. A love affair starts off, as they all do, with promise, only to quickly deteriorate into a polluted abyss. The lasting effects, that enveloping yourself in someone else can have, are as drinkable as water. But as the reader works their way through, they begin to wonder if that water was poisoned all along. This chapbook examines what love tries to look like and how we warp ourselves for another who does not fit. Until ultimately one has to choose to speak up or disappear into the little deaths of silence.
This chapbook manuscript is complete and available for publication.
This chapbook was a finalist for the 2023 Flume Press Chapbook Contest.
If you are a publisher and are interested in any of these projects, please contact me.