Essays
Essays is the home for my nonfiction writing.
These pieces grow out of experience and attention to the forces that shape private lives: family, care, responsibility, identity, power, and belief. Some essays stay close to the personal. Others step back to examine patterns, systems, or tensions that resist easy resolution.
What connects them is not argument or conclusion, but a commitment to looking carefully and allowing complexity to remain intact.
How Stories Depict Mental Illness
These are the books recommended as shelf-mates for my novel about a family and mental illness. Few actually were. But reading them together—Poe to Plath to Olive Kitteridge—revealed how literature and mental illness have shaped each other for two centuries
Getting Past the Writing Plateau Nobody Talks About
Nobody talks about hitting a plateau in writing. Four years in, I could feel it in my bones. I wasn’t where I needed to be, and no amount of clases or critique groups helped.
I Know This Much Is True, Mine Is Too
A critique partner suggested a book about a brother trying to save his mentally ill twin as a comp title. I read it afraid my story had already been told.
Outside Looking In: Crazy by Pete Earley
Pete Earley’s Crazy and my novel Hope and Madness cover the same broken ground — mental illness, law enforcement, and the impossible cost of fighting for someone you love. One maps the system from the outside. The other lives inside it. Both are necessary. Neither offers easy answers.
Please Don’t Feed the Bears
The bear got in through an unlocked door. And the question of who actually understands a situation like bipolar.
Going Dark: Bringing The Death Ledger to Life
Two months. A genre I’d never written. A submission deadline for a screen adaptation opportunity. This is how The Death Ledger came to be — and why it needed a different name on the cover.
Personal essays on meaning, idendity, and care
Process, practice, and making stories
Exploring ideas, systems, and hard questions
Books, authors, and ideas in conversation