Interview in Coil Magazine

Excited to be interviewed in Coil Magazine by writer Gwen Goodkin about my latest novel, You'll Be Fine: 

"[Being a writer is] like being the catcher in the rye to a world of sometimes very poorly adjusted people who radiate tension like Chernobyl and you have to dismantle them to avoid meltdown. Other people, I guess, play Sims." 

To read more, go here.

Writers Digest: Seven Things I've Learned So Far

My second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, just released this week, and it's been a long road, from the first story to the first draft to the first novel. It's hard to write and even harder to be a writer. But I've learned a lot of things, and I talk about seven of them today at Writers Digest:

Readers love to be surprised and challenged, and it starts with the writer challenging him or herself, going to uncomfortable places

To read more, go here.

New work in The Brooklyn Rail

Brooklyn Rail, June 2015

I have an excerpt of a novel-in-progress in the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail. My last few novels have been more traditional, in terms of having a plot and a firm point of view, but for this I've been revisiting the forms that served me so well in Could You Be With Her Now, maybe even more abstract. A member of my family committed suicide last spring, and I've been fascinated by writing a novel in which the pieces are "put together," erroneously or not, based on the information at hand, people's recollections of events, things left behind. For we can never know what's going on in someone's mind, can we, why they decide to pull the trigger? All we have are the flotsam and jetsam floating in the —there is no black box.

There are some great novels out there that already approach this vein—Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and Michael Kimball's Dear Everybody, which I consider a departure point for my own work here:

"She gave life to the sudoku digest by the bedside and the collected poetry of Sylvia Plath, open on the floor to—dear God—"Lady Lazarus," to the Dearform slippers next to the bed and the plaid robe with pilled elbows and irregularly bent lapels."

To read the entire excerpt, go here.

Forthcoming Novel with Queens Ferry Press

Excited that my novel The Summer She Was Under Water has been acquired by Texas publisher and independent juggernaut Queens Ferry Press. The release date is August 2016. Many thanks to Erin McKnight and the folks at QFP for including me in its terrific roster.


Founded in 2011 as an independent publisher, Queen's Ferry Press specializes in literary fiction. The press currently releases 6–12 titles a year, many from debut authors, and is the publisher of Shadows of Men, the 2013 recipient of the TIL Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction.

8/9/13: New Story at Monkeybicycle

I started a new novel this month (because I am a glutton for punishment), and the first bit is over at Monkeybicycle today. Thanks so much, Jesse Bradley and Steven Seighman, for posting it!

Jill Hankey slept over, when Justine was seven. Jill, who would later call her a lesbian and suck off most of the boys in ninth grade, brought Tiger Beat and Seventeen magazines. Justine’s mother made French bread pizzas in the toaster oven.

“Simon LeBon or John Taylor?” Jill made what Justine thought were false equivalencies; shouldn’t Nick Rhodes be factored into the equation, or Liam from Kajagoogoo? “Ricky Shroeder or Justin Bateman?”

To read more, go here.