Selected Personal Essays
"Money, Deadlines, and Water"
An essay about finding possibilities for a story – an engine made of trouble – at a boat launch in the Adirondacks for Agni Online.
"Eye of the Beholder"
An essay about reckoning with a degenerative eye disease and how it impacts my appreciation for art – on The Paris Review blog. The essay received Special Mention in the 2021 Pushcart Prize XLV anthology.
"The Writing Daughter"
An essay about being a writer with parents who did not anticipate that kind of daughter – in the new journal, Speak.
"Eye Trouble"
An essay about my own visual problems and the difficulty for anyone of making unique experience clear to others.
"Drowning the Children"
A personal essay about writing despite interruptions in Issue 001 of New Haven Review.
"Fever"
An essay about junior high school during the McCarthy era
Selected Short Stories
“The Vandercook”
A PEN/O Henry Prize-winning story
“Brooklyn Circle”
A modified excerpt from the novel Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
"The Odds It Would Be You"
A Pushcart Prize-winning story
"Innovative Methods"
New Haven Noir, edited by Amy Bloom
Read more about this anthology here
Selected Essays on Writing and Literature
"Henry Green's Wartime Novels," March 2018
"Women Taking Charge," August 2016
"Not Telling," March 2014
"Tillie Olsen and the Writing of Fiction," February 2013
“Silence and Storytelling,” February 2009