New Short Fiction—“The Bride Revenant”

I’m very pleased to announce that my short story “The Bride Revenant” was recently released in Sans. PRESS’s Because That’s Where Your Heart Is anthology, a collection of short stories about passion and what makes the heart beat faster.

There are many highly enjoyable stories in the collection, including Joseph Anderson’s “The Girl Who Lives on the Moon,” which starts off the volume, M. Regan’s “FPS<TAG>,” which personally made me very nostalgic for my high school days spent on video game- and design-related internet forums (minus the disappearances!), and Ellen McCarthy’s “Call My Name,” a beautiful collage of memories interwoven by grief.

“The Bride Revenant” is about a deceased young woman who returns from the grave to be reunited with her grieving fiancé. The lore in this story is based on the historical knocker legends, which Claude Lecouteux discusses in The Secret History of Vampires (also a very interesting read).

You can purchase an ebook version of the anthology for 2 pounds (roughly $3) at Gumroad, or a print edition for $12 on Amazon. I hope you enjoy it!

New Poem with Rust + Moth

I’m delighted to report that Rust + Moth has included my poem “Regrowth” in their Spring 2020 issue. (Make sure to check out the cover art—it’s gorgeous!)

I wrote “Regrowth” about a year ago, one afternoon when I was knocked out with a fever. It’s about sympathetic magic in nature—a small taste of how I wish the world actually worked—and my sweet-spirited son. I won’t include a photo of him here, but—in it’s stead—here’s a recent sketch I drew of him one morning:

sketch-child-feb2020_2
My son, bottom lip not pictured

Some other poems I’d recommend checking out in the issue include Ceilidh Barlow Cash’s “Heartbeat,” Jennifer K. Sweeney’s delightfully detailed “Jennifers of the 1970s,” Remi Recchia’s “Self-portrait as Ghost,” and Diana Anhalt’s “Losing Español.” Read—enjoy!

A New Story & a Contest Win

This week my short story “Of Stench & Sisters” came out with Menacing Hedge’s Winter 2020 issue. This story is about a deadly illness that sweeps over a farm, leaving two young girls alone to deal with the effects of unburied decomposition. I wrote the first bits of this story one summer while a deer was decomposing on the street by my mailbox in the July heat. The smell was oppressive, and while I was dealing with it one night, I asked myself, “How could this situation be worse?” One of the rabbit trails my brain went down produced this story. Given the subject matter, it’s a bit of a grisly tale, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

Some other great pieces I’d recommend checking out in the issue include a pair of vastly different, but equally interesting, relationship stories—Jack King’s “Teegarden’s Star” and Kelle Schillaci Clarke’s “Me, Only Better”—as well as Katherine Fallon’s two poems on our multiplicities of selves (“my ordinary self” vs. “my extra-ordinary self”) and Eli Karren’s wry and reflective “Townie” poems (there are many lines I love in these).

In other news, another one of my stories, “Country Crypt,” won first prize in the 2019 Bucks County Short Fiction Contest last month. The judge, novelist Kelly Simmons, described the story as “…a gorgeously vibrant portrait of grief and dread [that] offers the reader abundant tension and story questions throughout…” and praised the “terrific opening paragraph [that] features a vivid description of the room and its dusty wonders, utilizing wonderful metaphors—like the desk drawer’s underbite—to make the home come quite literally alive.” (Yay—and thank you!) You can read more about the contest here.