Writing

When I write, I seek to go beyond my own, small life—to expand my world and my thinking. Whether it’s an essay about my painful legacy with curling irons; a short story on food, motherhood, and death; an article concerning the appropriation of body positive discourse to sell plastic surgery; or a collaborative piece across word and image that grapples with the insidious psychology of Lost Cause rhetoric, I write for many of the same reasons once claimed by Anaïs Nin, who said: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection...[,] to transcend our life, to reach beyond it, [and] to teach ourselves to speak with others.” Writing is connection—a hand reaching out to grasp another hand, across pages, across oceans, across time.

Fiction & Essays

When I write creatively, I put things together. I strive to synthesize some of the messy things that form the human: loss, love, death, delight, jollity, and fear. Like the synthesis of an exquisite dish made from disparate ingredients, a well-crafted story or essay should become more than the sum of its parts. I believe such writing should be of this world yet also otherworldly: a combination that defies easy explanation and that contains both insight and awe.

Articles

When I write critically, I take things apart. I read closely to discover the how, which inevitably leads me to the why: how did this poet use enjambment; how did that novelist employ interior monologue; how is a certain literary or feminist or antiracist discourse being commodified through popular media—and why did the writers of these texts (or the makers of affiliated images) make these choices?

Collaborations

I often choose to write collaboratively because I believe it’s impossible to think very well when one thinks wholly alone. To think together might mean picking up a book, watching a documentary, or following someone else’s recipe. Through engaging a novel, a poem, a film, or a recipe, at least two people make meaning together: the author and the audience. In this way, all language and all images are collaborations. In order to prick empathy, at least two humans must work together towards mutual understanding.