Selected Publications

A Good Mother

…It makes it feel like everything is always crumbling. Like those dreams where you’re standing on a cliff and then suddenly it’s gone and you’re falling and you kick out into nothing. Darkness hissing as it hurtles past your ears.

Waiting for the Mountains

It happens several hours after the Colorado border, around Fort Morgan. Everything is flat. Green has turned into dry, yellow, and broken. Sometimes there are cows standing in trampled grass. Only two strings of barbed wire between them and the interstate. They never try to cross it. Everything’s the same or not different enough to matter…

Small Town Opera

…For a brief moment after her death, Peter thought about finishing her list for her, like some convoluted plot for a made-for-TV movie. He pictured himself bringing home paint samples, driving to New York City in his rusted white Ford pick-up truck, an urn in his passenger seat. But his mom had been buried, not cremated, and he couldn’t see the point of going to New York alone or fixing up a dining room she would never see.