The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in...
This collection of poems focuses on a range of content. They pose many questions that consider issues surrounding driving, cars and independence, as well as masculinity, fatherhood, domesticity and parental identity. The collection consists of three parts, Freeway, Menace, and Control. Freeway contains poems on driving and cars, some of...
This novel-in-progress is an attempt to struggle with the complicated process of forging one’s identity in the murk of urban Northwest life. The protagonist of this piece is confused, to put it lightly: bi-racial, torn between the affections of divorced parents, unsure about his religious views, and baffled by his...
There Were Bears and Rumors of Bears is a collection of stories that explores spiritual injury and recovery using a variety of interior and exterior narrative approaches to depict the profane and sacred, the mundane and non-ordinary, aspects of experience. In each story, the characters encounter situations in the physical...
You Stay Here is the beginning of a novel that centers on the notion of family, community, and the expectations that drive our interactions within these circles. The novel tells the story of brothers Mills and Nance O'Malley as they interact with their parents, Richard and Margaret. The brothers own...
Always Talk to Strangers contains the first seven chapters to a novel. The novel focuses on the friendship between Amanda and Maria, two fourteen-year-old girls who are experiencing their last summer before high school in Madison, Wisconsin. Their friendship is a complicated one: Maria was kidnapped four years ago, the...
A collection of short stories about the Gardner family, spanning several generations, but focusing on the children of Len and Laura Gardner, Brooke, the second oldest, in particular. Set primarily in Utah, the collection tells the story of family members' struggles with one another, with their religious faith, and with...
In Night Dreamer Walks, the first eight chapters of a novel of the same name, John M. Groves imagines the predicament of a young Native American man living 8,000 years ago in Oregon's Klamath Basin. Beginning as a story to avenge his father's death during an unusual outbreak of tribal...
Something Mortal I Could Fall Upon is a collection of poetry exploring geographical, emotional, and cerebral permutations of home. These poems ask: What is home? What does it mean to give up a place? How does, or can, one rebuild the home? Although it is clear the speaker loves the...