My debut short-story collection is now available from Homebound Publications! You can get it here.
I started writing the first of these stories at the University of Tennessee, in my first-ever fiction class. Since then, I’ve added more over the course of my MFA program at the University of South Carolina, where this collection served as my thesis. Finally, after many revisions and additions, the collection won the Landmark Prize for Fiction, tying with Emily Grandy’s Michikusa House. The prize was publication, so now I have my first book published!
These stories are the culmination of my Southern lit exploration. I realized my main question for the collection was, how do you survive as an outcast in the South? It’s a region of beauty and brutality, of artistry and alienation, of community survival and vicious hierarchy. Behind every swaying scarf of Spanish moss hides an alligator, so how can anyone make it in this environment, still less anyone who falls outside of the genteel mold? In Songs on the Water, characters wrestle belonging from their circumstances, whether for queer love, womens’ freedom, spiritual transcendence, healing from old and persistent grief, or deliverance from young and pernicious despair. These fights are against history and prejudice; they offer nature and community as allies. For any Southerner who has both loved and hated the heavy air, or for anyone who loves a place that doesn’t love them, these stories offer quests both large and small to declare oneself against a culture and landscape that means to shape its people.