Creative Portfolio
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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 purchased from my complete list of publications.
everything moves
My hybrid fiction novel, everything moves, pools around a literal flood that engulfs a small college campus in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The unnamed main character the reader encounters in the beginning provides a space for the reader to smoothly slip into her skin, providing an easy entrance into the body of this work. Before long, the reader will find that which made this story comforting quickly washes out into the belly of a constricting undercurrent. This work blends the soft edges of poetics with the filling textures of prose, creating a body of literature that performs as if it is a photograph-capture of a river. This work seeks to dredge the background of the landscape into the foreground of the narrative, allowing the water and land to be participants in telling the story of ecological, metamorphic change.
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.
