Essays
Essays is the home for my nonfiction writing.
These pieces grow out of lived experience and sustained 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.
My Wicked Good List of Universal Truths About Writing Fiction
Writing fiction comes with its own set of truths—ignore the wisdom of these truths at your own peril. This is my ongoing record of the lessons I return to when the work gets hard.
An Excellent Sample of My Authorial Voice
A craft-focused reflection on authorial voice, comparing critique feedback, literary influences, and an AI-generated rewrite to examine how my writing is developing.
Do You Know About the Prechter Bipolar Research Program?
A personal and research-informed look at the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Program and why greater awareness of bipolar disorder research offers real hope.
How To Use Authorial Voice To Find New Reads
A practical exploration of authorial voice, showing how understanding an author’s voice, or writing style, can help readers find new books and writers deepen their craft.
Hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing: Perspective on Pursuing Life Goals
Hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing tested my limits in ways I didn’t expect. Battling wind, cold, and uncertainty, I found myself confronting the same questions that surface when pursuing any meaningful goal: when to turn back, when to persist, and how growth often comes not from reaching the summit, but from continuing when the outcome is unclear.
Recent Presidential Pardons: Blanket Immunity’s Devastating Injustice
A reflection on blanket immunity and presidential pardons, examining how unchecked power harms people beyong the victims and weakens public trust.
Quiet pieces shaped by lived experience. Moments of pause, noticing, and meaning.
Writing from inside the work—endurance, doubt, revision, and the long middle where stories resist and slowly take shape.
