I inherently believe that anyone with a lit degree whose ultimate endgame is not to be a published novelist is a liar and I’m mostly not one of those.
I used to be singular in my quest to break out of the 9 to 5 hustle and be a career novelist, writing and pitching full manuscripts each summer when I was a teacher. Obviously, none of them went anywhere, and 3 out of 5 of them should never again see the light of day and won’t be spoken of any further.
Subsequently, I’ve written and pitched 3 additional manuscripts that also didn’t go anywhere but that I’d still love to find a home for. I’ve also been stalled on a fourth for a couple of years now (tale as old as time: it’s all but written in my head…but just needs to get down on paper).
A couple of years ago, frustrated by my lack of forward mobility on the be-the-next-great-American-novelist front, I turned to short stories, a medium I always sort of discounted (there are misguided reasons for this, but for brevity’s sake, we’ll gloss over that…maybe I’ll touch on that later), and have not only enjoyed this medium but managed to get a few of them published.
What Karen Did - The Wilderness House Literary Review
In hindsight, this tale might be a little heavy-handed, but I also wouldn’t change a thing. Written before the name Karen got its current connotation, “What Karen Did” is a mediation on sexism, media outrage, and radical complacency, chronicling the “misdeeds” of “disgraced” high school teacher Karen Walker.
*Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of school shooting violence.
I always end up coming back to the theme of “people are inherently fucked,” which could easily sum up this piece, which started with the errant thought of, “What if you found a dead body, but it was just a real weirdo playing dead?” It takes place in a fictionalized version of the apartment complex I currently call home and isn’t not inspired by some of the characters I’ve encountered here.
1-D - Drunk Monkeys
Many people find twins inherently creepy. I am a twin, so while I don’t fully observe that tradition, I do think there is something inherently creepy about identical twins…and children in general. If you combine inherent twin creepiness with a subtle each-the-rich commentary, you’ll get “A Twin Thing.”
*Another version of this had the character of Jared quietly singing Wonderwall instead of quietly rapping Cardi B, which I changed because it just didn’t seem realistic for a pre-teen in the 2010s. Thematically, I wished I had kept it.
A Twin Thing - Bookends Review
This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It’s based—sadly—on the discourse surrounding a student who went missing during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations during my tenure at the University of Scranton. The question I wanted to explore with this piece was, “What if being a ghost was super boring?”
Ghost World Problems - Litro Magazine
Wildfires terrify me. So do realtors and anyone involved in property management.