Current Projects

The Body Cannot Be Whole Alone

Grace and Edward Carey are Des Moines residents and members of the Greatest Generation—they meet and marry on the eve of World War II, have three children when Edward returns home, and are prosperous owners of a small business started with the help of the GI Bill. They are beautiful and seem to glow with an energy that magnetizes those around them. But a darkness surrounds them too, the echoes of war violence, of rural poverty and loneliness, of family members who cannot integrate into—in Jonathan Franzen’s words—the “bright modernity” of postwar life. 

In progress

If You Wanted to Live: Stories

A finance wife grows eyes over the surface of her body and has a spiritual conversion. A crumbling family hides a dark secret in the basement. Two men battle for self-respect on a vintage mini-golf course. A daughter is snake-bitten, her father causes a gruesome accident, her mother falls in love with the woman next door. A university student ferries bribes for the Chicago political machine and uncovers a murder. If You Wanted To Live is a story collection populated by those who’ve grown up in the flyover—Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa—a land of subtle beauty and endless sprawl. Those who have stayed reckon with loneliness, the forces of time, and an economy that tries to strip their humanity. Those who’ve decamped to larger cities are haunted by pasts they cannot outrun, no matter how much education or wealth they accrue. 

Completed, and currently on submission to contests and small presses; seeking representation