writing
When We Get Home
Short story featured in Saints + Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2018.
Finalist in festival's fiction contest.
excerpt
When we get inside, the first fucking thing she does is ask me to tie up the garbage and take it to the curb. For ten years I’ve been gone-baby-gone, and already we’re back at it: Mommy Dearest turns Dyke Daughter into House Bitch. I’m back only because Jacob, my brother—he died three days ago. He’s dead. So here I am to bury him or honor him or forget him or do a solid murder-suicide so that his funeral marks the occasion we all wind up dead.
spending
Prose poem featured in Instant Prose.
excerpt
I'm sad to see in the phonebook he still exists. I use a quarter meant to get a sandwich meant to fill my stomach meant to stomach this call to call the bastard my ear drawing out the phone's ring like a slinky down the stairs each stair hitting the beat holding the weight calling the next calling each each and every time.
chopper propels
drama at walnut
Arts article featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
excerpt
At first, it seems an impractical, maybe impossible, feat for a musical: Land a helicopter on stage at the story's climax and, with two actors safely secured, make it fly away 40 seconds later.
Oh - and do it in America's oldest theater, where old-school sandbags and ropes still make up the bulk of backstage technology.
But show after show, the cast and crew of the Walnut Street Theatre's production of Miss Saigon have done precisely that.
At Allegheny County Jail, creative writing classes release pain, channel rage
Article featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
excerpt
Jason Toombs' hands steady the papers he's clutching. His name is called -- on this day, an invitation, rather than the more typical order.
for clarion, plant's closing an economic, emotional loss
Article featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
excerpt
There's a hum here, soft yet ever-present.
The noise is drowned out during the din of the day, but late at night the sound of the Owens-Illinois glass plant reverberates through this town of 6,000 people.
Mayor Andrea Estadt calls it the "heartbeat of Clarion," an enunciation from a plant that has been a centerpiece of community employment and pride for 105 years.
But when the glass plant closes July 1, Ms. Estadt said, it'll be silent here.