Essays and Short Stories

My essays and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines, and web-sites including “Uncle Greg, the Giant Chicken, and the Murderous Pottery Wheel” which appeared in CRUSH: 26 Real-Life Tales of True Love, edited by Andrea Richesin this past spring.

 

 

Crush: 26 Real-Life Tales of True Love

Readers will fall head over heels for this nostalgic and irreverent collection.

Twenty-six bestselling authors return to the teenage bedrooms, school hallways and college dorms of their youth to share passionate essays of love lost and found and lessons learned along the way. Whether heartbreaking or hilarious, their soul-baring honesty reminds us to keep reaching for true love wherever we can find it and for as long as it takes. Their intimate reflections will fascinate and move any reader who remembers her first love.

Read an Excerpt  Quotes and Reviews

 

Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond

This intimate collection of writing explores the complex relationship of mothers and daughters. In The Mother Load, Jacquelyn Mitchard, even as a grown woman and mother herself, feels nothing truly bad can ever happen if my mother is around. Joyce Maynard recalls My Mother at Fifty and talks about how her mother’s decision to stay in an unhappy marriage because of her and her sister helped her through her own painful divorce. Tara Bray Smith, whose mother battled drug addiction, discusses grief, pain and acceptance in her essay In the Offing—the wonderful thing about adulthood is realizing that we are all deficient, and after a certain point no one is accountable for that but ourselves. The beauty of this collection, edited by Richesin (editor of The May Queen) is the realization that, despite mothers good and bad, suicidal, depressed, divorced, neglectful, all the women here remain hopeful—for themselves, their mothers and their own children, who they understand are undeniably shaped by all that has happened and can use this knowledge to face what lies ahead.

Read an Excerpt      Quotes and Reviews

 

 

It’s a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths About Life in Your Twenties

These provocative original essays aim to empathize with, encourage and inspire 20-something women. It’s a Wonderful Lie will pick up where Quarter-life Crisis left off and will offer perspective and wisdom. Writers will shed a light on what one should and should not expect from what you’ve been led to believe are the best years of your life. The essays range from comedic to reflective and pensive, all looking at the uphill battle that exists as women live through their first jobs, loves, and losses. Cleverly titled essays such as, ‘My Own Mr. Big’, ‘Twentysomething Seeks Same for FRIENDSHIP’ and ‘Tradeoffs: Why I Sold My Soul for My Apartments’ will look back on the various areas that tripped up women in their twenties the most. The contributors then move forward, figuring out that while this crucial decade might have its many downsides, the pluses are numerous. It’s a Wonderful Lie entertains, encourages and empowers women who are living through their twenties now, about to graduate from college, and, finally, those who have loved and lived through it all.

 

Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy From Our Top Writers

As contemporary parenting relationships now encompass such a broad array of forms and guises, the experience of pregnancy includes more emotional, professional, and interpersonal challenges than ever before. Mothers and fathers now face the usual anxieties about difficult pregnancies, financial planning, and the inevitable Lamaze classes, alongside new worries about balancing the professional and artistic goals of two independent parents with the responsibilities of parenthood, struggles with fertility and modern fertility treatments, and explaining a pregnancy of an untraditional couple–or a single woman–to family and friends.

In this groundbreaking anthology of short fiction from America’s most popular and critically-acclaimed young writer’s, editors Emily Franklin and Heather Swain give voice to the fear, frustration, hope and humor that all play a part in the simultaneously unique and timeless experience of pregnancy in twenty-first-century America.

Contributors include critically acclaimed and bestselling authors such as Steve Almond, Arthur Bradford, Laura Catherine Brown, Heidi Julavits, Fred Leebron, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, and Anne Packer.