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...
The eight stories in Wild West Love Songs explore issues such as loss, suffering, and betrayal, but perhaps the most consistent theme is the examination of the ways we are haunted by our past. All the protagonists in these stories are haunted. Sometimes they are haunted literally, by a ghost...
Ellis, a booming mid-sized town in California's Central Valley, is packed with farmers and commuters, and plagued with a dwindling sense of itself and its history. Set against the backdrop of a failed murder-suicide, a secret affair and a wealthy local mogul's attempt to develop the town into something it's...
This collection of poems discusses the human body, the desires to have control over that body, and the memories contained within. In some poems, the body is overt; in others, the probing
spills from man into the animal world, and even poems that depict landscape often do so in bodily...
This thesis is the first half of a novel in progress called Things I Lost In Istanbul. In the selection, Simon Wells, an American expat living in Turkey, is trying to ignore the changes taking place in his life and in Istanbul--his adopted home and sanctuary. The novel tracks Simon's...
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...
The Yogiebogeybox is a novel-in-stories. This novel explores spiritual transcendence and the connection of art to that spiritual journey. A variety of points of view are employed in the narrative in order to depict the journey of the protagonist, Ant Malo, through this journey. Some of the narrative threads are...
This collection of loosely-linked stories explores the lives of a set of characters who exist in the margins of society, but quietly so. In the opening story, "Two-Minute Histories," an ostensibly negative act—breaking and entering, among other verifiable crimes—is demonstrated to lead to some positive outcome such as a moment...
The Spillways is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: identity, memory, loss, illness, labor, suffering, and grief. At times, the poems investigate place−in the physical and natural world−as a driving force of the speaker's identity. Many of the poems also consider the role of work and...
The Skipping Stone is a collection of poetry investigating a wide range of themes: self-displacement, southern heritage, identity of the Self, loss, and grief. At times, the poems confess a kind of anxiety associated with experiencing the death of loved ones, acting as a coping mechanism for loss and self-exploration....
If home is the hearth, a place of safety and centeredness, it is also the portal, the magic door. From home we go out into spaces more humanized and technologized, or into spaces more natural, more other-than-humanized. We dress up and head downtown, or we pack up and head for...
Vladena Aleksandra Dmitriev, in her collection of fiction and nonfiction The Mercurial: Stories and Essays, examines the conflicts inherent in language, whether in her own experiences as a non-English speaking immigrant from the Soviet Union to the submersed anger and resentment that emerges quietly in disintegrating relationships. What unites these...
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...
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...
The Gospel: According to Matt is a novel, told in the first person, simple past tense, depicting the struggle of a young man attempting to make sense of his relationship with his estranged father as he wrestles with a growing crisis of faith. Matt is deeply sincere in his desire...
This collection of poems and essays is about the folklore of family and the shadowy imprint family myth can leave on its members. At the center of the argument is a struggle about coming to terms with these shadows from a speaker trying to find a sense of a self...
As I began to explore the evocative nature of language, the creation of themes and images, and the rhythm and beauty of words that I feel must accompany meaning, I discovered that I had always seen and heard and felt the world as many of my characters do; in this...
Set in the dryland farming country of Eastern Oregon in the late 1950's, this novel follows a year and a half in the life of a young girl as she comes of age. A water rights dispute, the plight of nearby ranchers, disappointments in her own family and a harrowing...