Fluid States

“A collection of lyric essays that considers the way subjects, stories, facts, and memories are as interconnected as streams in a watershed, Fluid States explores the interlocking issues created by the oilfields of North Dakota, the ephemerality of perfume, canning tomatoes, a fungus that infects and transforms mushrooms, and being the focus of internet hate.” — Kathryn Nuernberger

If you want to hear/read/find out more, Sundress Academy’s Poets in Pajamas invited me to do an online streamed reading, archived here. You can read an interview here and listen to another here. Reviews are available at The Rumpus, River Teeth, and Split Rock Review. And you can read excerpts including “Bear” at Parks and Points, “Consider the Lobster Mushroom” at Brevity, and “5 by (No) 5” at KYSO Flash.

Sweet/Crude

“This lush, language-driven meditation on the North Dakota oil boom is as perfect a jagged juxtaposition as the title implies. Part history, part geology lesson, part survey, part indictment of corporate greed—it’s also something much more: a song about the stubborn, sorry, beautiful mess we humans have become.” —Amber Sparks

Before its inclusion in Fluid States, “Sweet/Crude” was first published as a chapbook by Gazing Grain Press. You can read an interview about it here, listen to another here, and read an excerpt here.

Currently, I’m at work on a memoir-in-linked-essays about our family’s ongoing experience with open adoption. Essays from the project that have appeared online include “My Son’s Brother” at The Boiler, “Nervous Systems” at The Baltimore Review, “By the Book” at Great River Review, and “The Means of Labor” at Signal Mountain Review, who also interviewed me about it here.

After Fluid States, I apparently wasn’t done writing about perfume! New pieces include “A Digression” at After the Art (named a Notable by Alexander Chee for Best American Essays 2023), “Mosque/Musk” at River Teeth, “Scents and Sensitivity” at Zone 3, plus “A Crash, A Collage” at Nonbinary Review and “The Perfumer’s Organ” at Superstition Review, the last two available as both text and audio. Superstition also invited me to do a short (6 min) podcast to describe my process writing “The Perfumer’s Organ.” I also do flash book reviews paired with perfumes on Twitter under #perfumebookpairing.

And some other fun one-offs:

• My 15th-seed essay on the Throwing Muses’ “Not Too Soon” that made it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen in the March Plaidness (2021) bracket!

• My meditation on Major Tom, Laika, MST3K, and Covid, “Major Tom, or, On Coming Home, Completely Detached,” that lost in the first round of the March Fadness ‘80s Edition (2023) bracket.

• My “Midwessay: North Dakota” that was part of Essay Daily’s Midwessay project