Stories and Poetry

Below you will find a selection of my published writing. Click on the links to read the works. Click here for a more comprehensive publication list.

Nonfiction


Snowfall
Published by The Ravens Perch

That morning was made all the worse because it had snowed the night before. Flakes that fell slow and parallel to the ground, as if they were laying themselves down. Arriving with a shared intention. Maybe to give my young daughter and me a reason to sit quietly and watch them. A blanket for the earth because didn’t my grandmother always say that the winters of heavy snows are better for everything? Read more


Roadways
Published by CRAFT

Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately into each other. A handsewn quilt of many colors rolling up and over the gentle hills so common in Central Pennsylvania. Read more


Centralia
Published by Eastern Iowa Review

Centralia was one of my childhood fascinations. A once vibrant coal town my family drove through several times a year on the way to visit relatives. It might have looked like a town built on a cloud, everything shrouded in white vapor, but it was more that a tiny piece of hell had managed to escape and lodge itself underneath the earth’s crust in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Read more

Fiction


Homecoming
Published by The Bookends Review

Jillian Reese is sipping a venti Starbucks Green Tea Frappuccino on a bench in the Men’s Department of Nordstrom’s. So far, for the occasion of her fiancé’s return from a three-year deployment in Afghanistan, she hasn’t garnered the energy she needs to begin searching for something special to wear on the day she welcomes him home. Read more


Elias Wolf
Published by The Broadkill Review

Elias Wolf is a perfect name for a vampire, and the Elias Wolf who lived in my hometown of Putnum, West Virginia, certainly looked the part. Tall and rail-thin. Lustrous, black hair tapping his shoulders. Skin earthworm pale. Read more


Guest Appearance
Published by Verdad

During a library funding raising event, Candice was immediately attracted to Theo Lofton and his wife Liz. Having recently lost her mother, she was feeling unmoored and skittish, struggling with the idea of being the only one left of her birth family. When you are the youngest child, there is always someone to give you advice, a hug, a familiar voice that answers the phone in the middle of the night. Read more