I swear this is a Linda Ronstadt quote, but the internet tells me it just sounds like something she’d say. Let’s go with that. I was born in suburban Orange County but I grew up in the Mohave desert of Arizona. That’s the weird desert, the primal desert: volcanic rock, scree and sky and scrub brush between here and the horizon, carved up by the highway and the railroad tracks. A stone’s throw from Las Vegas and the dry lakebed where Tim Burton filmed the alien landing scene in Mars Attacks! (I was an extra). You can read all about it if you have issue fourteen of Barrelhouse.

I read a lot growing up, but the first time I remember being transported by language was Pride and Prejudice. I was thirteen or fourteen. The sentence construction, the diction—it was like a code to crack. What did it mean, literally? I was determined to figure it out. And it turned out it isn’t just funny, it isn’t just romantic, it’s a spell cast with language and an invitation into another world.   

Today, I write literary fiction with fantastical elements — stories set in the uncanny desert, where the landscape is a character, the inner life of animals is indistinguishable from that of humans, and the human-humans do their complicated best. I'm interested in nuance: no one is all good, no one is all bad, and truest territory is somewhere in the middle, the place where things converge.

I’ve published short fiction in literary journals including Cutthroat and Portland Review, and I earned my MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. I’m a long form writer by nature and I’m seeking a home for my first novel, Ironwood. My current project is linked novels, all set in Sedona. If you’ve been there, you already understand, and if you haven’t—well, I’d love to show you around (not literally, I don’t live there anymore).

When I'm not writing, I'm roadtripping with my family, scouring thrift stores and estate sales for vintage textiles and chairs I don't have room for, and making slow, Sisyphean progress through a stack of New Yorkers under the supervision of two cats. All this to say, I believe in the physical world as an antidote to internet slop. I am a Virgo with Libra rising and a Leo moon, which explains everything or nothing depending on your point of view.

The Convergence, my newsletter, goes out monthly — a short list of things that found me or that I found: art, objects, books, creatures. If that sounds like your thing, I'd love to have you.