I write fiction about ordinary people shaped by place and by the institutions that hold them or fail them.
I grew up in a small town in northern New York and ended up inside big institutions, where I spent twenty years writing about people in aggregate and learning how far the official story can sit from the actual one. I came to fiction midway through. It’s the only form I’ve found that lets me stay with the people such places hold.
I’m drawn to family sagas, to quiet books rife with internal and interpersonal conflict, and to structurally ambitious novels, where the shape of a story carries as much meaning as its sentences.
I’m currently querying my debut novel. I live in Washington, DC with my family and a standard poodle named Almanzo.