SELECTED WRITING
“In Praise of Slow Writing (and Reading)” (short essay) in Women Writers, Women’s Books Blog
In my household, we have pet snails. Around six common garden snails call our terrarium home, each the size of a dime, the first of which my nine-year-old daughter found in her fairy garden. Just this morning I snail-watched. A snail crept across a rock with liturgical slowness, antlers stretched to the heavens, taking no notice of the glistening trail it left behind. I value the slow life, too. In fact, as a writer, I’ve embraced the value of slow writing, not just as the result of a busy life, but as part of my process.
"Kudzu" (short story) in Carve Magazine
She could barely make him out. He—she was certain the figure was a he—was a fleck, a disturbance on the horizon, and—this was another certainty—he was coming her way. She was right, which didn’t surprise her in the least, although her accuracy didn’t ease her irritation. When he came into focus, he was a jumble of limbs advancing down the pale country road: a man on a boy’s bike.
"Why Stories Matter to Me" (short essay) in Lighthouse Writers Workshop Top Secret Blog
About a year ago, when my daughter was nearing four, we were out on a walk. She was balance-beaming on a high concrete lip that stretched alongside a schoolyard fence, and I was doing a syncopated little dance beside her, to keep my muscles agile in case I needed to lunge in any direction to catch her. Distracted by my over vigilance, I was taken aback when she stopped, wheeled at me, and said, with the kind of ferocity small children possess, “Who made this world?!”
"A Gathering Up" (short essay) in Lighthouse Writers Workshop Top Secret Blog
I never met my maternal grandfather. When he died of a stroke before I was born, my grandmother found in his wallet a poem clipped from a magazine. The poem was “Remember Then” by Daniel Whitehead Hicky. Under the circumstances, the first stanza was prescient: "If you should come upon my skeleton / Blanching in marsh or sand / In some far year no calendar now shows, / Pity it not, but touch it with your hand / As you would touch a bird’s wing or a rose."