recent stories & essays
"Enormous Wings," The Kenyon Review Online
"You no longer remember, but we landed in Puerto Vallarta in the second week of June, and it was cloudy and rainy and windy, but warm. We walked along the oceanfront past statues made up of combinations of different creatures—a half man-half seahorse, a creature with one horn, a squiggly figure with many arms waving around its neck. We walked until you grew tired and complained, but you were six, and I couldn’t carry you." Read the whole personal essay here.
"How My Best Friend Willa Cather Helped Me Beat Stage Fright," Lithub
"I fell for Willa Cather in graduate school-fell so hard that I named my daughter after her. But 20 reading years later, I remembered her like a long-ago crush: something about a big girl, a big prairie, a big plow, and tha''s about it. Then, last summer, while browsing around a used bookstore near my home on the central coast of California, I picked up a wilted paperback. . ." Read the rest here
There Once Was A Man Who Longed For A Child, Joyland
"A few mornings later, the man woke to remember that in the middle of the night he had heard mewling. He had stumbled out of bed, shuffled into the hall. A thin cry, like a kitten, from downstairs. In the moonlight over the sink, the barleycorn’s mouth was a little sienna-colored O, its potato eyes still closed, crying in its sleep." Available online here, or listen to it on Audible here.
The New Guard Volume IV has been released, featuring "Ghost Deer"
Adapted from Micah's novel-in-progress, "Ghost Deer" is the winner of the New Guard Machigonne Fiction Contest, judged by Joe Wenderoth. Buy the book here. Now also available as an audiobook.
"The Last Vacation," Brain, Child, November 2015.
"One night the magnifying glass boy said to the youngest, 'Let’s talk about our relationship.'
"She didn’t look up from her book, 'There’s nothing to talk about. You just annoy me.'"
Available online here.
"King of Chains," Saturday Evening Post, May/June 2015. (First published in Catamaran.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 20th century! Take a seat. You will observe such wonders! Mercurial escapes, absurd and endless construction, utopian dreams, outrageous savagery! Wait, we still have a few tricks up our sleeve."
Available online here.
"Mudwrestling with Edith Wharton: A Literary Pilgrimage," The Toast, February 2015.
"In his essay, Franzen reminds us that after Wharton wrote in bed each morning, she tossed completed pages 'on the floor, to be sorted and types by her secretary.' Thinking of this, I kicked one of her perfectly round shrubs in frustration."
Available online here.
"Back to the Beginning: Why I Write," The Rumpus, June 2014.
"In the beginning was the word. And the word gave us hope that there would be another word and that word would be amazing."
Available online here.
"Old Boyfriends Behaving Badly," OZY, December 2014.
"We laughed and laughed like we were high — until he drove up an exit ramp onto I-89.
"'Wrong way,' I said, not laughing.
“'Different way,' he corrected me."
Available online here.
"Ghost Deer," The New Guard Volume IV, adapted from Micah's novel-in-progress.
Winner of the New Guard Machigonne Fiction Contest judged by Joe Wenderoth.
Excerpt available online
“On Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Reindeer Moon," Tin House Volume 15, Number 3, p. 89-92.
"We will live, we will eat fat, our mouths will shine."
Available in print here.
“All Tied Up: Saturday Rumpus Essay: Homeland and the Female Fabulists," The Rumpus, April 2013.
"I was immediately captivated. Obsessed. It was the first time I’d seen a layered exploration of an American woman’s psychological response to the war on terror."
Available online here.
"Saturday Rumpus Interview with Ben Strader," The Rumpus, January 2013.
Available online here.
"Karen Joy Fowler's What I Didn't See," Tin House Online, September 2013.
Available online here.
"The Comeback Tour," Chicago Quarterly Review, Volume 14, 2012.
“Something shot up into her nose, like a super-sized portion of wasabi.”
Available online here.
"Breathing Room," Epoch, Volume 50, Number 1, 2001.
"She opens the door, walks out, closes it, and thinks, Maybe I’m a monster.”
Available online here.
“Escaping the Ending,” Encyclopedia Vol. A-E, edited by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis, and Kate Schatz, 2006, p. 249-252.
Available online here.
Stories There Once Was A Man Who Longed For A Child, Ghost Deer and King of Chains are now all available on audlble