Shirley Jackson’s Lottery as Allegory for Fraud Prevention Laws (I’m going to spoil an eight-page short story easily found on the internet, so maybe read that first if you haven’t already read The Lottery.) The Lottery is set in a small, unnamed, presumably American community where inhabitants are excitedly gearing up for the annual event […]
A Day in the Olympic Peninsula This is an excerpt from an upcoming nonfiction book titled Hermit Crabs that chronicled a year-long trip in a travel trailer with my family of five people. Lauren is my wife, and my three boys are named Wolf, Bear, and Lynx. This excerpt was about a day spent on […]
The Littlest Insurgent In between larger projects, I am always working on silly short stories. My fourth collection will be out sometime in 2026. This short story was inspired by a quip in my parenting memoir, Parenting as a Contact Sport in which I compared babies at naptime to the Taliban. As a linguist, I […]
Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter. I wanted to create a space where I can reach out directly to people who might be interested in what I have to say. I have relied primarily on Facebook for the last several years, but their algorithm buries anything that is more than a few hundred […]
This House Is Not Our Google Home I say that I married into a year-long trip around the country in a travel trailer. It was a second marriage for both of us. For each of us, our first marriages were with someone philosophically incompatible. When searching for a second spouse, each of us had checklists […]