Selected Essays and Short Stories of Recent Vintage

 

We Sit In A Circle (essay)
The Sewanee Review (Summer 2022)

Facetiously but seriously, Marcia made us raise our right hands. Facetiously but seriously, we intoned as one: I shall make no changes. I shall not revise.

 

 

Sabbatical Dog (short story)
Another Chicago Magazine (April 14, 2022)

If the diagnosis had come one week earlier she would never have taken on the responsibility of a dog. She’d have thought cancer was plenty. But the shelter called before the clinic did.

 

Of Sound Mind and Memory: On Wills and Language and Lawyers and Love (essay)
The Missouri Review (Fall 2021)

Before I became a writer of novels I was a writer of wills at the oldest law firm in Rhode Island. The firm was founded by two attorneys in 1818, but by the time I was hired as an estate planning paralegal, 160 years had passed and there were now fifty-some lawyers, almost all male, a like number of staff, almost all female, and a roster of prominent clients, almost all inanimate.

How We Met and What Happened Next (essay)
The Sun Magazine (December 2021)

We had one of those summers: boiled lobsters and corn, swimming naked at Moonstone. At night the parks went mad with fireflies. This is how long ago it was: there were fireflies.

 

 

The Crane Husband (essay)
Entropy (September 20, 2020)

Last week two sandhill cranes and their colt came by…They toured the area, poking at the bergamot, considering the shed, meandering over to the decimated hostas the way tourists do when encountering ruins.

 

What It’s Like Living on the Green Border: On Dreamers and Deportations (essay)
BLARB: Blog/Los Angeles Review of Books (September 12, 2017)

That pile of shoes — thousands of shoes, taken from prisoners arriving at Majdanek Concentration Camp — in the Holocaust Museum in D.C.  That single shoe — ordinary red sneaker — beneath the crumpled front grille of the Challenger in Charlottesville after it hits Marcus Martin and kills Heather Heyer.