Category: Literary Journals

I have a new story in The Hopkins Review

Spring is over — but the Spring 2019 issue of The Hopkins Review has just come out, and it has a story of mine in it!

“Dumbo” is about a floor of smart girls in college who all happen to have hooked up with the same guy. Here’s a short excerpt:

We lived on the girls-only floor for the science scholars. The opportunity to live there was sold to us and our parents as a privilege and a perk, a reward for our high AP Biology scores and violin playing and community service projects, and as good girls we checked yes, we would welcome this social privilege, come to us at long last after the lonely years of high school. It was only after we arrived that we found out a floor of female scientists was not valued highly in this keg-stands and undie-runs college. We were, on the whole, not lookers. Glasses wore coke-bottle lenses. Skinny tied her hair in ponytails that gave her scrubbed face a tight, pulled-back look. Amoeba’s soft, doughy limbs resembled pseudopods, slowly extending and contracting around cheap, cakey treats. Lisse was the exception, with her dark-red hair and big boobs. She wore makeup and tight T-shirts. She curled her eyelashes. On Sunday nights she slathered her face with an algae-green mask before going to bed. “My mom swears by it, for soft skin,” she said when we asked about it in the morning, the mask now hard and cracked like a putrid eggshell. Later, alone in our rooms, we wondered why our mothers hadn’t instructed us in any of these feminine wiles.

This story is part of a longer collection I’m working on called Defects, which you know about if you subscribe to my love notes…. Hope you enjoy the read —

July 15, 2019
I have new stories in The Southern Review and Confrontation

I’m excited and honored to have a short story each in the Summer 2018 issues of The Southern Review and Confrontation — two of the literary journals I most admire!

“Alone or Someone Else” in The Southern Review is about a young woman who gets pregnant after a one night stand with an action film star. Here’s a short excerpt:

Even after I was showing, I kept working at the lingerie shop, the trashy one in Westwood. All my coworkers were UCLA students a half decade my junior. They were nice to me. Carly told me not to worry, they’d never fire me while that Nasty Gal lawsuit was still news. Lana confided that her mom had raised her kids alone by going back to stripping: “And we turned out just fine!” Between Lana and Carly, I always had someone to hold my hair while I puked. “It’ll be hard sometimes but totally doable,” Lana would say, rubbing my back.

Is your interest piqued? Get 25 percent off this issue or a subscription by using the code FRIEND543 at The Southern Review’s store.

“Hands” in Confrontation is about a guy who, well, doesn’t like his hands — an insecurity that ends up having deep repercussions on his life. Here’s a short excerpt:

The first memory of your shame, though you didn’t realize it as such at the time, is of your mother. She looked old even then, in her forties, sitting in her nightdress next to you half-tucked into bed, massaging a medicinal lotion into your hands. It was a nightly ritual you were used to, something your seven-year-old self assumed all mothers did with their sons, although the sensations of this particular night are the first ones you remember because there was a twitchiness in her eyes. This made you uneasy, enough so that when your father also came in the room, holding your baby sister Annie, and stood leaning against your desk, you realized you’d almost been expecting this.

Pick up a copy of the issue at Confrontation!

Both stories are part of a longer collection I’m working on called Defects — though honestly, I’m not actively working on it, since I’m trying to focus on the novel I’m also writing. It’s so hard to find time for all the projects I want to pursue —

I hope you enjoy these stories —

July 26, 2018
8 tiny pieces in New Flash Fiction Review

Are they micropoems or microstories? I’m not sure — but eight of my tiny little prose works are now up in the latest issue of New Flash Fiction Review! Here’s one to whet your appetite:

The Good Day

I braced hard but what I feared did not happen.
For that I am grateful.

Each one’s about ten words long, so they’ll be a quick read. Hope you enjoy them! Let me know what you think —

Thank you to Nin Andrews, guest editor for this prose poetry issue. I’ve been a huge fan of Nin’s work since I read Why They Grow Wings back in grad school, so to have her read and take my work was a real treat.

Image from New Flash Fiction Review

June 21, 2016
My novel-in-stories Cake Time to be published by Red Hen Press

I’m excited and honored to announce my novel-in-stories Cake Time won the Red Hen Fiction Manuscript Award!

The book will come out in spring 2017 if all goes according to plan.

Thank you to everyone who read, critiqued, and listened to the stories in this work the last few years — including Peter Steinberg, Edan Lepucki, Paul Mandelbaum, Chris Corning, Travis Koplow, Tanya Knox, Shilpa Argawal, Katherine Motoike, and Carolyn Peters for your valuable feedback and Lauren Eggert-Crowe, David Rocklin, and Zoë Ruiz for giving me opportunities to share pieces of Cake Time at readings.

I’m so grateful to have you all in my life! Looking forward to working with everyone at Red Hen Press! And thank you in advance to the future readers who will pick up Cake Time —

January 21, 2016
Book review in Los Angeles Review: Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen

My first publication of 2016 is a book review of Berit Ellingsen‘s post-apocalyptic novel, Not Dark Yet:

Bombs. Strikes. Hate crimes. Droughts. Every nightly news broadcast seems catastrophic enough to require a visceral reaction from us—but what should that reaction be, exactly? In Berit Ellingsen’s novel Not Dark Yet, Brandon, the introspective protagonist, finds himself teetering between two extreme responses: a complete withdrawal from society, and a violent push to revolutionize it.

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Review. You can also pick up a copy of Not Dark Yet at Two Dollar Radio, one of my favorite indie publishers!

January 19, 2016
2 flash fiction pieces in The Los Angeles Review

The Los Angeles Review‘s brand new fall 2015 issue is now out — and contains within its pages two of my flash fiction pieces! Here’s an excerpt from the first, “The Panel”:

We, the six closest friends of the couple, were called on to serve on the panel. Our task was to determine who was in the right, the wife or the husband. To aid us in our decision we received a twenty-minute recording of an argument between the two, which we listened to carefully three times over the four-hour deliberation period.

Read the rest of that — plus another piece called “Social Psychology” — by picking up a copy of The Los Angeles Review, Volume 18.

The issue also contains a short piece called “Delorean” by Bryan Hurt, one of my favorite writers and a friend from grad school. Also, don’t miss Ryan Habermeyer’s “A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction” — which combines space travel and sex and loneliness and madness.

Lastly: Come hear me read “The Panel” and more at The Los Angeles Review’s reading! That’ll happen Thursday, November 12, 7 pm at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 1010 Foothill Blvd, La Canada Flintridge, Calif. You’ll also get to hear The Los Angeles Review’s own fiction editor, Sean Bernard, and contributor Anna K. Scotti.

November 3, 2015