My formative experiences were spending many weeks alone in the woods as a young child and, after dropping out of school at 13, hitchhiking alone around the eastern United States. The former imbued me with a permanent sense of wonder and an unshaken belief in magic. The latter showed me how freedom and fear may live side by side, revealed the generosity and depravity of my fellow humans, and animated my inborn desire to embrace the common good, to nurture justice and community in the world. These are the gifts that sustain me as a writer.

Fiction

The Kindness

It took me many years to know what had been important, what I should have done. She didn’t care whether I’d got to the West Coast I finally understood, way too late. She’d just wanted to know I’d survived. Instead, I’d let her worry, how much or little I couldn’t say. Read The Kindness in Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Human Remains

What strange inheritance did Uncle Kessem leave behind for Roger? Find out in The Saturday Evening Post.

Excavations

I’d been here a few weeks in relative peace but now the park was being dug up all around me, and I was having trouble finding out why. At first I thought they were going to excavate and replant the flower beds and shrubberies. I panicked then about being displaced from my comfortable abode in the heart of the ancient rhododendron, which was larger than my last apartment and rent free. Read Excavations in Idle Ink.

Idyll

When Shoshana won that first election her breastbone and then her clavicle sopped up the violence, the stomping, whistling, clapping caldron she found herself immersed in; she felt the whisper of too many balloons released from the ceiling net brush strands of hair across her ear as they fell to confuse her ankles, but all she heard was the sultry gravel of her grandmother’s voice, that lifelong touchstone for whatever was right in the world. Read more in Canary - A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis.