CREATIVE WRITING

During the pandemic, I turned to writing creative nonfiction. Here is some of my work.

“Where Ashes Bloom” | Baltimore Review Summer 2023
Won 1st Place in the Flash Nonfiction contest

“I moved west when I was barely an adult and no longer whole. I left behind a limb in an east-coast surgical ward, saying goodbye to a body part and to my own completeness. Amputation forces a farewell.

As I entered southwest Idaho, the evening air hung thick with alfalfa’s scent. Other fields grew mustard and mint—more peppery bitterness. Outside the fields and away from the river, trees and meadows were scarce. Sagebrush and prickly creosote whispered in place of flashing maple and crisp birch. This arid land hardly held the promise of home.

I adjusted to life without my left leg. Sometimes I pictured its remains—flesh incinerated to coarse sand and gray ash, tiny chunks of desiccated bone, the refuse of a heat stronger than desert sun on pale skin…” LINK HERE TO READ MORE

From “Plummeting”
in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher's Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration

“… Perhaps I am especially compelled to this dark remorse because I have been here before. There was a first time when I unthinkingly killed, and then grieved, migratory birds. I was young and foolish, a New Englander visiting a new lover in Louisiana’s steamy richness. The morning air was thick with wet when my lover and I paddled his green canoe onto a Spanish moss-draped lake outside of town. Painted turtles plopped from drifting logs, and alligator-eyes blinked heavy alongside bald-cypress knees. The muskrat-like bodies of nutria crisscrossed the canoe’s path, their coral-colored teeth chewing grasses, reeds, everything that swayed. Dark-headed cottonmouths parted the duckweed carpeting the water. That whole place was slippery.

We left the tree-studded swamp and paddled into denser thickets. We leaned forward in our seats, reaching our necks toward our knees to duck under crooked boughs. Soon we dropped our paddles in the belly of the canoe and grasped the branches of surrounding buttonbush, pulling the boat deeper into the brambles. Wedged in a tangled grove, we joked that if it weren’t for the alligators we could make love here, hidden to all but the tree frogs. Only then did we look up and see: we were making trouble…”

 “Song for the Bobolink” | The Revelator | July 2021

”Our small family knew bobolinks from a bird refuge four hours away. Each spring my partner and I made the trip to Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge with our daughter in hopes of seeing the 90-plus species of migratory birds we typically spotted over the course of a binoculared weekend. As we headed West we anticipated the winnowing, sky-dance displays of Wilson’s snipe, the oranges of Bullock’s oriole flashing high in the cottonwoods, and the bright spots of sunshine that dart through riparian thickets — the yellow warbler…” LINK HERE TO READ MORE