My writing
Fiction:
"How Strange It Is," Toho Journal: Resilience (Vol. 3, No. 1)
Excerpt: The sun glares from the northwest, polishes the Thames to an alabaster lustre. Tour boats and barges thread the water, send waves of static lapping against the banks. On the north side, County Hall’s windows blink Morse code. The air smells wet.
All along the riverwalk people sip Pimm’s Cups among roving families of cyclists. A teenager in a white sundress tugs on the leash of an errant poodle. A toddler shrieks from his pram.
It is too hot for a London summer.
Personal Essay:
"Deze schrijver is het levende bewijs dat fictie je helpt de wereld te begrijpen," ILFU.com
"How Reading Fiction Can Shape Our Real Lives" was translated into Dutch and published on the International Literature Festival Utrecht's (ILFU's) online platform.
ILFU Director and Chief Editor for ILFU.com, Michaël Stoker, described the essay by saying, "[it] both beautifully illustrates the impact fiction had on your life, as collects some interesting scientific insights on the question why fiction matters."
Personal Essay:
"How Reading Fiction Can Shape Our Real Lives," Greater Good Magazine
Excerpt: I started college in the fall of 2003, when I was seventeen years old. I’d spent the last year dissecting news articles with my AP Government class on the U.S.’s escalating tensions with Iraq. War had moved beyond theory and into inevitability—yet I didn’t know how to express my horror and had even less of an idea of what to do with it. Then, six months after the first time the U.S. invaded Fallujah, I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Creative Nonfiction:
"A Timeline," Toho Journal: Duality (Vol. 2, No. 1)
Excerpt: I used to be in love with my sadness.
At thirteen, against the muffled chorus of my parents’ bitterness, my older sister’s white-hot rage, I steeped myself in her. Devouring Anne Rice novels from my bedroom floor, my cheek pressed to the coarse gray carpet, I watched Dead Poets Society on an endless loop and drew lines on my thigh with a rusted boxcutter.
Creative Nonfiction:
"A Conversation with a White-Presenting Cis Man," Conversations With Men
Excerpt: “I treat everyone the same,” he said—repeated. Twice. The problem, of course, was only a white-presenting, cis-man could claim this as the moral argument.
I wanted to explain the privilege inherent in such a position. That by being afforded a life in which an opportunity like economic mobility appears to you as a choice, you hold a position of advantage—that it assumes that the same is fair.
Creative Nonfiction:
"Potentiality," RiPPLE
Excerpt: I had the potentiality for corruption, half an hour ago, if he’d moved in closer on the vinyl couch, pressed his leg up against mine and let our knees rub—the warmth of his thigh lingering.
Half an hour ago, if he’d come up behind me on the dance floor, sighed his breath onto my shoulder and through my hair, into my ear, leaving the air there damp as though he’d kissed it.
Half an hour ago, if he had taken my hand and held it tight and warm in his, let our palms sweat, let his long fingers wrap like a glove, like a second skin, around my own.
Fiction:
"The Orange Line," South Philly Fiction
Excerpt: She sits on the subway with headphones dwarfing her ears and Ethan stares at her, digging her the way he did that first stolen sip of beer from when he was eleven. She is sweet to the lips, he can tell, and he wants her in that desperate way that makes his skin feel hot.
She’s crossing her legs, legs wrapped in wool tights and scuffed leather boots that stretch from Fishtown all the way to Pattison Ave. They transfix him immediately—invitingly—and so he glosses over her smudged eyeliner and near-translucent skin. Her hair black like ink against the white paper of her flesh. She’s not the type he usually goes for, preferring instead the women who drink too much and dance too close—the luscious loose-lipped ones who promise even looser morality. But he’s got that itch back beneath his skin.