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Category: Fiction

Fiction

I have published more than a dozen short stories, in Glimmer Train, Raritan, Confrontation, Construction, Failbetter, Northwest Review, Pank and Eclectica among others. Links to my published stories are below.

My story “The Physiology of Heartbreak” was nominated for Best of the Net for 2017 and received an “Honorary Mention” in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open, as did my stories “Something is Terribly Wrong” and “The Story of Our Divorce.” “The Last Highway” was selected as a notable story of 2014 by the storySouth Million Writers Award committee. And my story, “Dear Mr. Sugarman” was a semi-finalist in Ruminate’s annual William Van Dyke Short Story Contest.

I have two novels in search of agents.

“Crossing the Bar Road” is an exploration of inheritance and identity. It tells the story of Penelope Singer, an American writer in her late fifties, who returns to her family’s summer house in a resort town in the Canadian Maritimes following her mother’s death, profoundly ambivalent about their relationship and her ability to take over the house — a whimsical early 20th Century architectural gem designed by Canadian architect Edward Maxwell.

As the novel progresses, she explores her own memories of the place and reads her mother’s journals, focusing on her first love for Charlie, now a local contractor helping her keep the house standing and her complicated relationship with her best friend and frequent antagonist Ada. By the end of the novel, she realizes the chief obstacle to her inheritance is not, it turns out, her relationship to the past but her willingness to embark on her future and take ownership of her own life.

“The Good Doctor” tells the story of Mark Simon, a Vermont doctor tired of his marriage and disillusioned by his job, who goes in search of his previous success as a young doctor helping out during Katrina. On the way to New Orleans, he picks up the trail of his 19th Century ancestor, also a doctor, who battled Yellow Fever as a young man in Mississippi, New Orleans and Cuba. Like his ancestor, Simon’s travels end up leading to love, not in Cuba but in Puerto Rico, where he meets his long lost college girlfriend, Teresa, still his true love and also rekindles his love for music, writing songs about the ancestor for a rock opera. Mark and Teresa’s reconnection gathers strength, but so does Hurricane Maria, which hits the island just as the two of them settle into Teresa’s mother’s beach house in Rincon. They survive the hurricane and Mark plunges into trying to help in its aftermath. Though their romance is rekindled questions remain as they return to New York where Mark finishes compiling his research into his ancestor and tries to come to terms with his more recent past.