Writing

Fiction

Stella stepped off the curb and saw a car plow into her stroller, sending it and her baby flying. The force of it ricocheted up her arms into her teeth. She held her breath and imagined the moment between knowing and not knowing. The thought was so forceful, so vivid, she squeezed the stroller’s handlebar and looked both ways twice, then three times, confirming again and again and again that the sleepy, leafy street was clear before going.

Edges, The Dalhousie Review Summer 2023

She saved up thoughts to share with him later, but then, at night, they scattered like slips of paper in the wind. More troublesome was how in her head, everything came out as “we.” “We need more bread.” “We need to call the plumber.”

All Those Infinite Variations Minola Review Issue 30, 2021

It used to be that just by sitting in their wide, cozy chair I could take in some of their love to save for myself. Like being with them somehow fixed everything neurotic and weird and broken about me.

On Repeat Grain Magazine Spring 2020

A small, quiet space grows up around them, and inside it, she feels warm and cared for. Kids knock about in the background and push by to go in, but she does not notice them anymore. Only him.

Hunger Kenyon Review Online Jan/Feb 2019. If you want to listen to the story, you can do so here.

Creative Non-Fiction and Critical Essays

Let’s say she stripped back the artifice, packed up the projector, set it in a corner, and whispered into the dark space, so close you could feel her breath on your ear, “Now, let me tell you a story.”

That Kind of Girl The Kenyon Review Winter 2025

The overlap between the two novels lies in how they use genre to critique social structures that isolate mothers and force us to raise children alone, without the support of community and family. In The Push, we are shown how children can become sources of anxiety, terror, and entrapment within white, middle-class, nuclear family structures, in which it is taboo to need help. In contrast, in Beloved, children and family are sources of joy and support.

The Maternal Gothic In The Push and Beloved Ploughshares blog April 21, 2021

When friends come by and ask about labour, I spill the gory details. They avert their eyes, eat cookies, comment on the garden. It gradually dawns on me that my story makes people uncomfortable. It’s too messy, too much. In the absence of life-threatening complications, they want only one story. Of hazy pain, yes, but mostly the love, the calm, the brisk recovery. I cannot tell that story. It is not mine. 

A Mother is Not A Zero-Sum Game The Normal School October 21, 2020
Finalist for the Room 2019 CNF contest

In Belgium, the ambulance sirens always peak in the afternoon. Three times an hour. Four times an hour. Five. I lose count sometimes. Sometimes they don’t stop. They blur into the day’s rhythm like church bells, reminding us not of God, but of the virus, ventilators. Of our terrible, inexorable connection. You’d think the sirens would mute the sun and the spring leaves, bring down hailstorms, but they don’t. Spring just keeps blossoming.

Sirens Michigan Quarterly Review online April 17, 2020

Hard, heavy things held naked in our palms, turned over like talismans. We knew how they could cut. How heavily they weighed in our hands. But, also, in the crystalline edges, we each saw the rough lines of our own story, the way pressure and power could crack something as solid as a rock or a girl.

Submerged Hippocampus Magazine January/ February 2020
Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

At 11 am, on the first day of the anti-terror raids in Brussels, I receive a text from my boyfriend that reads, “Don’t leave the house.” Twitter reports say shots have been fired around the corner. I’ve been on the couch, drinking coffee and waking up, and had thought that noise was the sound of a motorcycle backfiring. Motorcycles are always backfiring around here.

Notes From Molenbeek Michigan Quarterly Review Fall 2019
Selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2020 and finalist for the EVENT Creative Non-Fiction Contest 2016.

“The body scan helps me find fresh descriptions for interior states. Instead of writing clichés about how my heart pounded or breath caught, it reveals the other, more surprising, ways emotion moves in the body. How vulnerability tingles in the shoulders, or how fear bolts down the hips.”

Writing, Mindfulness, and Two Ways of Seeing Brevity’s Non-Fiction Blog, March 20, 2019

Poetry

That time at the Wet ‘n Wild by the roar-
ing highway: the chlorine and exhaust,
the greedy seagulls, congealed ketchup,
pasty white boys, unbroken baseball caps
perched too high

Postcard Wish You Were Here Contemporary Verse 2 Summer, 2020 reprinted at Verse Daily December 20, 2020