Fiction
ON THE WAY TO THE DRUGSTORE, my mother tells me what her father did to her when she was a girl.
CHLOE RECEIVED THE FIRST LETTER IN DECEMBER. She worked at the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, and spent that afternoon helping a middle-aged couple put their golden retrievers into two of the museum’s many replicas of the clothes the couple in Grant Wood’s painting wore.
A FEW HOURS AFTER BREE TAKES THE PREGNANCY TEST, the dog outside her apartment starts howling.
THERE WAS A LITTLE MEMORIAL ON THE SIDE OF HIGHWAY 67, right past the S&W Manufacturing Plant, with a knee-high white wooden cross in the ground.
IT’S LATE JULY and Venice smells of brackish water, rotting food, and dog shit.
“A Chain of Tiny Disasters,” Narrative (Stories of the Week, 2013-2014)
IT HAPPENED IN THE MORNING BEFORE SCHOOL. Delia found brown stains on the crotch of her underwear, a murky color, nothing like the bright red she always pictured her period would be.
“Watch Out for Lions,” Midwestern Gothic, Summer 2014
Winner of So to Speak’s 2013 Fiction Contest
I HEARD ABOUT THE COUNTDOWN one month before Bree Hadley’s birthday.
SHE TALKS TO ME, Cathy told me three months after Mom died.
“Joys and Concerns at Parkview Church,” New Delta Review, Winter 2010
Creative Nonfiction
MRS. DALLOWAY SAID she would buy the whiteboard markers herself.
“List: If Famous Novelists Were Adjuncts…” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, January 2017
WE WERE SITTING NEXT TO EACH OTHER at a Washington, D.C. bar, drinking Jack and Cokes. I was a 20-year-old intern from Iowa. He was 30 years my senior, my biggest celebrity crush.
“A Stained Glass House,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2014