SELECTED STORIES
"My Thoughts on Pâté" in Agni
excerpt ▼
My Thoughts on Pâté
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? Our brains are matter, of course, like rocks, or stars, or like that stick of butter melting in the sun on my kitchen counter. Our brains are things. Soft and greyish. Bumpy. They say electrical impulses carry our thoughts and these impulses jump from synapse to synapse. Sometimes deep paths are worn over long trails of synapses, and these constitute habitual thought, like rote memories or those odd connections that haunt you on a regular basis. For example, say there’s a certain stop sign at a certain street corner with a certain sticker on it with the name of a certain band that, for no reason you can think of, reminds you each and every time of your mother’s garden.
I bought a wheel of brie the other day and started thinking about these things. Brie isn’t even pâté, but it is French, and I suppose that must have tripped the process. I actually love pâté, but I haven’t eaten it for many, many years. I have ideas about why this might be. I even know the answer. I mean, I bet I know what Freud would say, if I ever had the opportunity—just speaking hypothetically—to discuss it with him. He would say that pâté reminds me of the goose, and the goose reminds me of Alain, and Alain reminds me of what he did to me—which by some people’s definitions might be called rape, although on this point I, myself, have never been a hundred percent certain. But really, they’re much, much more than that, my thoughts on pâté. For instance, pâté makes me think about the benefits of cruelty. And also about the love of sons for their mothers, and of daughters for their fathers. And it makes me think about the loneliness that’s wedged, like cotton, like some kind of dense packing material, between us all.
continue reading online at Agni
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? Our brains are matter, of course, like rocks, or stars, or like that stick of butter melting in the sun on my kitchen counter. Our brains are things. Soft and greyish. Bumpy. They say electrical impulses carry our thoughts and these impulses jump from synapse to synapse. Sometimes deep paths are worn over long trails of synapses, and these constitute habitual thought, like rote memories or those odd connections that haunt you on a regular basis. For example, say there’s a certain stop sign at a certain street corner with a certain sticker on it with the name of a certain band that, for no reason you can think of, reminds you each and every time of your mother’s garden.
I bought a wheel of brie the other day and started thinking about these things. Brie isn’t even pâté, but it is French, and I suppose that must have tripped the process. I actually love pâté, but I haven’t eaten it for many, many years. I have ideas about why this might be. I even know the answer. I mean, I bet I know what Freud would say, if I ever had the opportunity—just speaking hypothetically—to discuss it with him. He would say that pâté reminds me of the goose, and the goose reminds me of Alain, and Alain reminds me of what he did to me—which by some people’s definitions might be called rape, although on this point I, myself, have never been a hundred percent certain. But really, they’re much, much more than that, my thoughts on pâté. For instance, pâté makes me think about the benefits of cruelty. And also about the love of sons for their mothers, and of daughters for their fathers. And it makes me think about the loneliness that’s wedged, like cotton, like some kind of dense packing material, between us all.
continue reading online at Agni
"Toast" in Michigan Quarterly Review
Distinguished Story, Best American Short Stories 2014
excerpt ▼
Toast
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; there were games of chance, amusement rides, and dozens of bicolor tents housing such spectacles as the Strong Man, the Fat Lady, and the Bearded Girl. I must have been ten or eleven years old at the time, and on one side of me was my sister, holding my right hand, on the other was Darin, holding my left. Darin was the little boy who belonged to the woman who was supposed to be babysitting us—my sister and me—but who really, more often than not, left all three of us in front of the TV while she took naps and ran errands. The unspoken understanding was that my sister and I were, in fact, in charge of Darin whenever his mother wasn’t around. Her name was Dot, and she and Darin and Darin’s skinny, disgruntled father shared a tiny house with lots of wood paneling inside. It was a dark little place, and there was a wooden table in the kitchen, and ruffled, flower-print curtains hanging from the windows, and an itchy green couch in the living room. That’s about all I remember, except for the toast. Dot had a real talent for making toast, which is a matter of timing—which is always a gift, no matter the context. There was always an extra-long loaf of Wonder Bread on top of the fridge, and inside the fridge, a tub of salty, canary-colored margarine. And with these two ingredients, Dot made the best toast I’ve ever eaten. I was so grateful for that toast, I loved it so much. Darin, the dark house, Dot and her brooding depressions—the toast was worth it. Perhaps the toast was the reason why my sister and I never ratted on Dot—never complained to our mother that we weren’t really getting babysat, but were actually doing quite a bit of babysitting ourselves.
continue reading online at Michigan Quarterly Review
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; there were games of chance, amusement rides, and dozens of bicolor tents housing such spectacles as the Strong Man, the Fat Lady, and the Bearded Girl. I must have been ten or eleven years old at the time, and on one side of me was my sister, holding my right hand, on the other was Darin, holding my left. Darin was the little boy who belonged to the woman who was supposed to be babysitting us—my sister and me—but who really, more often than not, left all three of us in front of the TV while she took naps and ran errands. The unspoken understanding was that my sister and I were, in fact, in charge of Darin whenever his mother wasn’t around. Her name was Dot, and she and Darin and Darin’s skinny, disgruntled father shared a tiny house with lots of wood paneling inside. It was a dark little place, and there was a wooden table in the kitchen, and ruffled, flower-print curtains hanging from the windows, and an itchy green couch in the living room. That’s about all I remember, except for the toast. Dot had a real talent for making toast, which is a matter of timing—which is always a gift, no matter the context. There was always an extra-long loaf of Wonder Bread on top of the fridge, and inside the fridge, a tub of salty, canary-colored margarine. And with these two ingredients, Dot made the best toast I’ve ever eaten. I was so grateful for that toast, I loved it so much. Darin, the dark house, Dot and her brooding depressions—the toast was worth it. Perhaps the toast was the reason why my sister and I never ratted on Dot—never complained to our mother that we weren’t really getting babysat, but were actually doing quite a bit of babysitting ourselves.
continue reading online at Michigan Quarterly Review
"Why Dim Sum Makes Me Feel Tender" in The Seneca Review
The Strange Child is a full-length chamber opera based on a fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann (Das Fremde Kind), with music composed by Julia Werntz. The libretto explores the theme of childhood imagination and its often painful conflicts with the adult world. It takes place in a bucolic village, where the lives of siblings Christlieb and Felix are upended by the arrival of two strangers: a cruel tutor named Master Inkblot, and a mysterious sprite who lives in the woods. Weird and magical happenings culminate in a violent struggle in which imagination itself is at stake.
Julia Werntz's music employs microtones (tones divided at intervals much smaller than the standard half steps). Microtonal music may sound unfamiliar, but it rewards careful listening with an expanded emotional spectrum of musical expression. In this opera, Julia uses microtones to translate speech into song with great subtlety and ingenuity.
Firmly rooted in Hoffmann's fairy tale, Adrian's libretto elaborates on that text with such inventions as a singing stork who spouts philosophical aphorisms, a chorus of excitable birch trees, and a plot that turns explicitly on the kinds of cut-throat capitalist practices that Hoffmann's original story hints at more obliquely.
The Strange Child premiered at The Alloy Studios, Pittsburgh, PA, June 17 and 18, 2022. It was produced with the generous support of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, and the Heinz Endowments. The opera was commissioned by Kamratōn, a music group that "exists to challenge the boundaries of music performance, expand the contemporary chamber music repertoire, and celebrate the role of women as leaders in the arts." Its premiere was directed by Shana Simmons, with musical direction by Daniel Curtis, and singers and musicians from Kamratōn and Quince ensembles.
Chinese translation in 作家 (Writer Magazine)
excerpt ▼
Why Dim Sum Makes Me Feel Tender
In college I knew a boy who walked funny, and a wrestler with golden ringlets, and a Greek boy who danced like an angel, and I knew a boy whose mother killed herself with a heavy-duty electrical extension cord. I knew other boys in college, too, but for some reason these are the four I still occasionally remember with affection despite the fact that, in reality, I never actually got to know any of them all that well. To tell the truth, I don’t even remember most of their names.
The wrestler is the one I liked the best. He used to be able to put his enormous, wide-shouldered body into an empty green beer bottle. It was a magic trick of his. I don’t know how he managed it, but he’d set the audience — a bunch of drunken frat boys, their drunken girlfriends, and other partygoers, like myself, on one side of the room, himself on the other, and an empty bottle of Rolling Rock in the middle. Drunk as he might be (and I believe he sometimes achieved great heights of drunkenness), this boy always managed to maintain a reserve of mystery, even a quality of dignity, which is why I liked him so much and why he was able to fit inside a beer bottle. Of course, he didn’t really put himself inside the bottle. It was a kind of miming operation, or an optical illusion, or just the power of suggestion, but in any case, we all gasped whenever he slowly lowered one incredibly meaty leg (with its comparatively dainty foot, usually clad, as I remember it, in a white tennis shoe) into the bottle. And as he maneuvered his other incredibly meaty leg (at the end of which dangled another comparatively dainty foot in another white tennis shoe) into the bottle we laughed disbelievingly, perhaps even a little uneasily. And somewhere in the backs of our minds, as he wiggled his slim hips and slightly waspish waist past the neck of the bottle, and then struggled more and more desperately to pull in the rest of himself — his enormous chest and even more enormous shoulders, his beautifully sculpted arms decorated with a few plump and well-placed veins, and finally, his head, which was a silly and captivating thing with its sparkling blue eyes and great masses of shiny blond ringlets — we were all struck, I’m certain, by the poignant yet essentially pointless beauty of humanity.
continue reading online at Seneca Review
In college I knew a boy who walked funny, and a wrestler with golden ringlets, and a Greek boy who danced like an angel, and I knew a boy whose mother killed herself with a heavy-duty electrical extension cord. I knew other boys in college, too, but for some reason these are the four I still occasionally remember with affection despite the fact that, in reality, I never actually got to know any of them all that well. To tell the truth, I don’t even remember most of their names.
The wrestler is the one I liked the best. He used to be able to put his enormous, wide-shouldered body into an empty green beer bottle. It was a magic trick of his. I don’t know how he managed it, but he’d set the audience — a bunch of drunken frat boys, their drunken girlfriends, and other partygoers, like myself, on one side of the room, himself on the other, and an empty bottle of Rolling Rock in the middle. Drunk as he might be (and I believe he sometimes achieved great heights of drunkenness), this boy always managed to maintain a reserve of mystery, even a quality of dignity, which is why I liked him so much and why he was able to fit inside a beer bottle. Of course, he didn’t really put himself inside the bottle. It was a kind of miming operation, or an optical illusion, or just the power of suggestion, but in any case, we all gasped whenever he slowly lowered one incredibly meaty leg (with its comparatively dainty foot, usually clad, as I remember it, in a white tennis shoe) into the bottle. And as he maneuvered his other incredibly meaty leg (at the end of which dangled another comparatively dainty foot in another white tennis shoe) into the bottle we laughed disbelievingly, perhaps even a little uneasily. And somewhere in the backs of our minds, as he wiggled his slim hips and slightly waspish waist past the neck of the bottle, and then struggled more and more desperately to pull in the rest of himself — his enormous chest and even more enormous shoulders, his beautifully sculpted arms decorated with a few plump and well-placed veins, and finally, his head, which was a silly and captivating thing with its sparkling blue eyes and great masses of shiny blond ringlets — we were all struck, I’m certain, by the poignant yet essentially pointless beauty of humanity.
continue reading online at Seneca Review
SELECTED ESSAYS
"Ten Conversations about My Struggle" in The Gettysburg Review
Excerpted on LitHub | Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2020
excerpt ▼
Ten Conversations about My Struggle
Thursday, July 12th
At the little sushi restaurant near my husband’s new office, 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.
"Mostly it happened at the beginning. When all the weight was in my right hand."
"Wow. Dedicated."
The waitress comes over to take our orders. David gets the eel bento box. I get the spicy tuna roll with flying fish roe.
"Actually, it goes pretty fast. His tone, diction, the whole energy of it—it’s very natural feeling. You’d like that aspect of things. You’d like his descriptions, I think."
"‘Like what?"
I pick up the brute (according to my kitchen scale it weighs three pounds) and start leafing, but—it’s weird—crammed as I know it is with incredible descriptions of the most ordinary, everyday activities—from making a cup of coffee, to holding an infant’s tiny bottom, to mowing a lawn—I can’t seem to find anything really terrific to read out loud.
continue reading longer excerpt online at LitHub | full essay available in v.32:no.1 of The Gettysburg Review
Thursday, July 12th
At the little sushi restaurant near my husband’s new office, 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.
"Mostly it happened at the beginning. When all the weight was in my right hand."
"Wow. Dedicated."
The waitress comes over to take our orders. David gets the eel bento box. I get the spicy tuna roll with flying fish roe.
"Actually, it goes pretty fast. His tone, diction, the whole energy of it—it’s very natural feeling. You’d like that aspect of things. You’d like his descriptions, I think."
"‘Like what?"
I pick up the brute (according to my kitchen scale it weighs three pounds) and start leafing, but—it’s weird—crammed as I know it is with incredible descriptions of the most ordinary, everyday activities—from making a cup of coffee, to holding an infant’s tiny bottom, to mowing a lawn—I can’t seem to find anything really terrific to read out loud.
continue reading longer excerpt online at LitHub | full essay available in v.32:no.1 of The Gettysburg Review
"Red Currants and 'Gooseberries'" in Tin House
excerpt ▼
"Red Currants and 'Gooseberries'"
1.
Once, about eight or nine years ago, I caught a glimpse of some wild red currants growing by the side of the road. The road traced the spine of a rolling, lightly wooded hill in West Virginia; my husband and I were on our way home from a wedding, and he was driving—forty, maybe fifty miles an hour—while I half dozed in the passenger seat. But my eyes must have been at least partially open, because 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.
Twisting in my seat, I watched as the road unraveled behind us, but of course the berries were gone. And although I was strangely sad about this, I didn’t say anything to my husband, because I understood that there was no easy cure for the emptiness I felt; I knew that even if we turned back and found that same spot, those same berries—even if I picked handfuls of the tiny, ruby-red spheres and studied them for the rest of our twelve-hour trip home—whatever it was that had risen in me, then so painfully disappeared, could never be retrieved by such prosaic means.
continue reading online at Tin House
1.
Once, about eight or nine years ago, I caught a glimpse of some wild red currants growing by the side of the road. The road traced the spine of a rolling, lightly wooded hill in West Virginia; my husband and I were on our way home from a wedding, and he was driving—forty, maybe fifty miles an hour—while I half dozed in the passenger seat. But my eyes must have been at least partially open, because 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.
Twisting in my seat, I watched as the road unraveled behind us, but of course the berries were gone. And although I was strangely sad about this, I didn’t say anything to my husband, because I understood that there was no easy cure for the emptiness I felt; I knew that even if we turned back and found that same spot, those same berries—even if I picked handfuls of the tiny, ruby-red spheres and studied them for the rest of our twelve-hour trip home—whatever it was that had risen in me, then so painfully disappeared, could never be retrieved by such prosaic means.
continue reading online at Tin House
"Knitting 101" in New World Writing
excerpt ▼
Knitting 101
1. Taking Chances
To the novice, the craft of knitting can seem a fussy and bewildering thing, but really, even fairly complex patterns are doable with nothing more than patience, diligence, and a modicum of skill. Still, one must always approach the activity of knitting with a keen sense of adventure. 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!”
2. Materials
You will need, of course, a pair of needles and some yarn. There are many options in both departments, but steel needles are cold, noisy, and unyielding, while plastic ones are much too slick, providing little to no traction. I advise wooden needles. Bamboo is fine and generally cheap, though the cheaper the bamboo, the coarser the grain, which can be annoying, because after a while—say five- or six-hundred stitches—you will come know every groove, no matter how shallow, in those needle tips. My point is, look for a good brand. As far as yarn goes, cotton is for masochists. Ditto linen and silk. Cashmere is expensive and, though beautiful, does not last. Acrylics—we won’t go there. But wool smells good, is generally economical as well as forgiving and friendly, meaning that it will, to at least a limited extent, correct a whole range of knitters’ mistakes in the all-important area of tension, as it is both naturally elastic and grippy. This cannot be said of the other fibers. Be sure to buy a beautiful color—one that makes you happy, or sad, or some other interesting emotion. And take special care to consider the texture. It must be of a consistency that will not bore you, which doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounds like. Tweedy, chunky, overenthusiastically gorpy yarns are the most monotonous of all after only a few dozen rows. On the other hand, completely smooth, unvariegated yarns, particularly in unnaturally bright colors, have been known to make sensitive types faintly suicidal.
continue reading online at New World Writing
1. Taking Chances
To the novice, the craft of knitting can seem a fussy and bewildering thing, but really, even fairly complex patterns are doable with nothing more than patience, diligence, and a modicum of skill. Still, one must always approach the activity of knitting with a keen sense of adventure. 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!”
2. Materials
You will need, of course, a pair of needles and some yarn. There are many options in both departments, but steel needles are cold, noisy, and unyielding, while plastic ones are much too slick, providing little to no traction. I advise wooden needles. Bamboo is fine and generally cheap, though the cheaper the bamboo, the coarser the grain, which can be annoying, because after a while—say five- or six-hundred stitches—you will come know every groove, no matter how shallow, in those needle tips. My point is, look for a good brand. As far as yarn goes, cotton is for masochists. Ditto linen and silk. Cashmere is expensive and, though beautiful, does not last. Acrylics—we won’t go there. But wool smells good, is generally economical as well as forgiving and friendly, meaning that it will, to at least a limited extent, correct a whole range of knitters’ mistakes in the all-important area of tension, as it is both naturally elastic and grippy. This cannot be said of the other fibers. Be sure to buy a beautiful color—one that makes you happy, or sad, or some other interesting emotion. And take special care to consider the texture. It must be of a consistency that will not bore you, which doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounds like. Tweedy, chunky, overenthusiastically gorpy yarns are the most monotonous of all after only a few dozen rows. On the other hand, completely smooth, unvariegated yarns, particularly in unnaturally bright colors, have been known to make sensitive types faintly suicidal.
continue reading online at New World Writing
"I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson" in Brevity
excerpt ▼
I Wish I could Write Like Russell Edson
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. And my daughter would be a bird in the tree, and my son would spend hours climbing on the rock, inspecting the lichen and watching the bird. In this scenario, I might bake some cookies and spread a picnic blanket in the living room and lean against the rock, which might or might not moan, and when the children weren’t looking, I’d tell the rock how much I missed him. Also, if I wrote like Russell Edson, I could show the family I grew up in, in one of the houses I grew up in, which would be a helium-filled environment, which would explain why three of us were forever floating several feet above the ground, but which wouldn’t explain why the fourth one, the one that produced all the helium (a toxic variety), never floated, but instead forged a deeper and deeper relationship with gravity. At least, from up there, we’d be able to see the part in my mother’s hair, the paleness of which would remind us that she was vulnerable, as all human beings are vulnerable.
continue reading online at Brevity
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. And my daughter would be a bird in the tree, and my son would spend hours climbing on the rock, inspecting the lichen and watching the bird. In this scenario, I might bake some cookies and spread a picnic blanket in the living room and lean against the rock, which might or might not moan, and when the children weren’t looking, I’d tell the rock how much I missed him. Also, if I wrote like Russell Edson, I could show the family I grew up in, in one of the houses I grew up in, which would be a helium-filled environment, which would explain why three of us were forever floating several feet above the ground, but which wouldn’t explain why the fourth one, the one that produced all the helium (a toxic variety), never floated, but instead forged a deeper and deeper relationship with gravity. At least, from up there, we’d be able to see the part in my mother’s hair, the paleness of which would remind us that she was vulnerable, as all human beings are vulnerable.
continue reading online at Brevity
LIBRETTO
The Strange ChildA full-length chamber opera with music by Julia Werntz.
info ▼
Julia Werntz's music employs microtones (tones divided at intervals much smaller than the standard half steps). Microtonal music may sound unfamiliar, but it rewards careful listening with an expanded emotional spectrum of musical expression. In this opera, Julia uses microtones to translate speech into song with great subtlety and ingenuity.
Firmly rooted in Hoffmann's fairy tale, Adrian's libretto elaborates on that text with such inventions as a singing stork who spouts philosophical aphorisms, a chorus of excitable birch trees, and a plot that turns explicitly on the kinds of cut-throat capitalist practices that Hoffmann's original story hints at more obliquely.
The Strange Child premiered at The Alloy Studios, Pittsburgh, PA, June 17 and 18, 2022. It was produced with the generous support of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, and the Heinz Endowments. The opera was commissioned by Kamratōn, a music group that "exists to challenge the boundaries of music performance, expand the contemporary chamber music repertoire, and celebrate the role of women as leaders in the arts." Its premiere was directed by Shana Simmons, with musical direction by Daniel Curtis, and singers and musicians from Kamratōn and Quince ensembles.