current projects
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 in the list of publications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are a publisher and are interested in any of these projects, please contact me.