My Thoughts on Paté
Agni, short story
Agni, short story
What is consciousness? Is it in your head or is it something your head encounters? Is it in the world itself, can you touch it? Or does it touch you?
Ten Conversations about 'My Struggle'
The Gettysburg Review, essay
Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2020
The Gettysburg Review, essay
Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2020
I fish a flat sliver of ice out of my water glass and rub it against the inside of my wrist. David asks how a person can get carpel tunnel from reading a book, and I take the final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel My Struggle out of my backpack to show him, again, how thick it is.
Red Currants and 'Gooseberries'
Tin House, essay
Tin House, essay
I saw the berries dangling behind a thin screen of leaves and branches, glowing in a reaching bit of sunshine. And when I saw them, I felt some enormous thing—a feeling, you could call it for the sake of convenience, though it seemed much more than that—quickly rise in me and then, just as quickly, evaporate.
Knitting 101
New World Writing, lyric essay
New World Writing, lyric essay
As one of the nicotine-infused salesladies who work at my local yarn shop once told me (disgusted by another customer’s fear of improvisation), “Knitting is all about taking chances!”
I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson
Brevity, lyric essay
Brevity, lyric essay
I wish I could write like Russell Edson because then I could show my husband standing in the kitchen like a tree that lost its leaves all at once. Or like a rock in the living room that doesn’t notice the lichen.
Toast
Michegan Quarterly Review, short story
Distinguished Story, Best American Short Stories 2014
Michegan Quarterly Review, short story
Distinguished Story, Best American Short Stories 2014
One of the strangest memories I own is of wandering around an old-fashioned carnival, complete with the smells of popcorn, cotton candy, and oily, meat-scented smoke.
