It has been so long since I posted that it’s ridiculous to even mention! But after many years of a way-more-than-full-time job, I’ve been freelancing the past couple of years and so have had more time for writing. Stories have been written, novels completed, more stories and novels begun. And some of those have started making their way into the world!
Earlier this year, the Indiana Review published my story “Two People,” which starts off with the sentence: “As I awake one morning from difficult dreams, I find my husband has transformed into two people.”
It’s a story that’s deeply personal for me, and I was thrilled to see it find a home at a wonderful journal like Indiana Review. It felt even more special since it won their annual Fiction Prize contest, which was judged by K-Ming Chang, a brilliant author who I admire deeply and whose dense, queer, fantastic stories make my mind twist and my heart do somersaults. Here’s her incredibly flattering description of the story:
“Two People” is wondrous and strange, as slippery and mysterious as an underwater creature. It’s stunningly attuned to the elusiveness of intimacy, belonging, and desire. It explores the multiplicity of selfhood and the limitations/expansive possibilities of being known (and of knowing oneself). This story is captivating and uncanny, philosophical and funny, meditative and urgent: in short, as multifaceted as existence itself. I read it with rapture and awe. There’s a description of a beast that moves with “sacred beauty,” and this story is an embodiment of those words. It’s pure alchemy, written with precision and pulsing with life, and I was completely submerged inside its language. Readers will come out of it entranced and transformed.
–K-Ming Chang, Award-Winning Author of Bestiary and Gods of Want
Order the latest issue of Indiana Review to read the whole story – as well as a slew of other brilliant fiction and poems.
Another story, “The After Party,” came out in the anthology Speculatively Queer: Stories of Queer Possibility, an inspiring anthology of optimistic queer spec fic. This one starts with the line, “The land of the dead is a party that never stops, and you can stay as long as you want.” It imagines an afterlife of self-actualization, healing encounters, and a really excellent DJ. After all the dystopian turns of our own real-life timeline in the past several years, the stories in this book offer refreshing optimistic imaginings of queer futures and possibilities. And what an honor to share a table of contents with writers like Charlie Jane Anders and Aimee Ogden, to name just a couple.
More exciting writing news is soon to come! (And hopefully updates more than once a decade!)
