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.
Bliss, Struggles, and Epiphanies: My Two Years in Writing
A two-year reflection on learning to write fiction, from early enthusiasm through struggle and overwhelm to persistence and forward momentum.
Struggles of Mental Health: A Look into Hope and Madness
A reflection on mental illness, family caregiving, and the systemic gaps that shape the lives of those living with bipolar disorder.
A New Writer’s Review of Your First Page by Selgin
A craft-focused review of Your First Page by Peter Selgin, examining how first pages reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a story.
New Writer’s Review of Anatomy of Story by Truby
A craft-focused review of Anatomy of Story by John Truby, examining character development, four-corner opposition, and story structure.
How Do You Know When You’re Making Forward Progress
A reflection on measuring real progress in writing, where collaboration, conviction, and adaptability matter more than speed.
Fear, Flight, Hope – The Creation of a Short Story
A behind-the-scenes reflection on writing, revising, and reshaping a short story under creative and structural constraints.
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.
