All of my fiction features left-of-mainstream protagonists who have grown disenchanted with American cultural values and who seek at the margins for a world more aligned with their ideals. Through fiction, I chronicle the beauties, pitfalls, and redemptions in continuing to choose such a life. Studies in Zen, shamanism, and healing also deeply inform my work--but I'm not interested in the "spiritual bypass." I also see writing as being born out of relationship with particular landscapes, both environmental and cultural. Fiction can be an acupuncture needle, and a kind of geography.
I am currently working towards a PhD in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My current creative and scholarly work, as well as my teaching, are informed by New Materialism—how our relationship to materiality and “objects” is really about relationship to narrative, and vice versa. Or, as Jane Bennett says, it’s a question of to what we do and do not ascribe “agency.” How we define relationship to materiality and narrative, and how we use language to mediate that relationship, is a cultural question; an ecological question; a spiritual question; an economic question. What is alive for us; what do we value; and how much of that is culturally prescribed? How is post-colonial, American late capitalism suppressing a more biophilic and sacred understanding in which we are stewards, in conversation with the world?
In 2010, I received the Keene Prize for Literature for the short story "It's the song of the nomads, baby; or, Pioneer," about a young pregnant woman who goes off-grid in Taos, New Mexico. The story was also a finalist for Colorado Review's Nelligan Prize.
"Selling Eden," a long-form short story about a 75-year-old environmental activist widower in the Berkeley Hills, was a finalist in Narrative Magazine's 2016 Fall Story Contest.
In 2005/6 I was the recipient of the first annual Writer's Travel Scholarship from the former www.equivocality.net. The award, given by a private patron (an early developer of WordPress who believes writing and travel are interconnected), was a free round-trip plane ticket anywhere in the world. I traveled to East Africa and worked for six months with HIV/AIDS nonprofits, both as volunteer service and as research for a novel I then wrote but did not publicly release.