The Blog Jawn

18 Jul 2022

01 May 2022

04 Mar 2022

23 Feb 2022

Recap: A few weeks ago, I lost my ish over some dumpster fire technology that I have to use. Most especially, I found myself in quite a tizzy thanks to a very goofy checklist formatting situation.

13 Feb 2022

My novel is a love story. It is also a meditation on what it takes to build a functional relationship in the aftermath of significant trauma. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least partially inspired by my own experiences with abuse and mental illness.

13 Feb 2022

This week, I embarked on a journey that is likely to help me not only finish my novel but publish it. I’m working with a group of people who have built an interesting model that challenges the paradigms of traditional publishing and supports aspiring authors in meaningful ways.

18 Mar 2021

Last month, I confessed to having started a novel–something I’d not seriously considered since the 8th grade. It didn’t take long for me to begin experiencing the thing I feared most: the crippling friction between the needs of a long story, with a vast word count, and the slow, perfectionist tendencies I possess as a poet.

01 Mar 2021

Preemptive Apology: I have not taught my usual load of composition and critical reading college courses over the past year because pandemic + (2 x school age kids) + (lifetime x mental health) + adjunct pay - home workspace. So, I don’t have my usual audience for my this-is-the-best-piece-of-writing-happening-right-now schpiel. At least you know what’s coming.

20 Feb 2021

The conditions of how and why are not important, except to say one night I had the clearest image of a scene that I ever had so I decided to write it without any expectation of what it was or what it would become. Another scene followed. Then, the characters in the scenes began to reveal themselves to me – not just what they looked like, their inner monologues, or the obvious problems they brought into those initial scenes. But the schools they went to, the music they listened to, the way they felt about their families growing up, the stuff that made them tick.

15 Jan 2021

In December 2019, a little more than a year ago, I read Pride & Prejudice for the first time. I had managed to avoid Jane Austen until I was 41, counting her among the many dead white writers who’d gotten plenty of attention and surely didn’t need mine. I believed Austen would be outdated, stiff, and boring; her work struck me as something one had to read, not something one chose to read. This was, of course, based on no actual facts aside from it being written in the 18th-19th century and being read by the snooty English Lit majors, who prided themselves on reading only the “classics” (as opposed to the pretentious English Writing majors, like me, who prided ourselves on reading only the most contemporary poets).

12 Mar 2019

As I worked on this website over the past few days, I’ve been asking myself: “How do I start the blog jawn? What do I call it? How do I introduce myself?”