recent essays.
literary, creative works of nonfiction
"Mother, Time"
Slant'd issue 03 | Nov. 2019
"Claudia Kishi Rules!"
Audible | Aug. 2019
Essays
less recent essays.
BARRELHOUSE MAG | AUG. 2018
Bourdain wasn’t afraid to seek the hell out of the pleasures in life, and unapologetically so, because he understood that life is made up of more than chasing paper and status and security and familiarity. In fact, it is about none of these things at all: for him, and for Thompson before him, life was about seeking newness and embracing the unknown, of wanting to push past the boundaries of comfort in order to understand others — but also, themselves — more deeply. Self-indulgent feels, then, to be a weirdly appropriate way to mourn this man.
DRAFT JOURNAL | FEB. 2017
If there is one thing more difficult than getting an idea off the ground, it is, perhaps, keeping that idea afloat, and fresh, and shuffling in a generally forward-moving direction. Though to be fair, phrases like “more or less” and “better or worse” may not be quite the right ones to apply to the expansive gradient of creation mentioned here — but it is at very least a start.
Back in the spring of 2015, three New School classmates and I founded The Seventh Wave, a 501(c)(3) arts and literary nonprofit bent on creating online and offline spaces for conversation and opposition to flourish. We were all from different industries of expertise and experience spanning education, graphic design, journalism, and the service industry. How we structured the organization, we agreed, would need to allow for each of our personalities and backgrounds to not just exist, but to also breathe organically. We wanted our strengths to show through in each of our roles within the beast we were creating.
LITERARY HUB | AUG. 2016
The importance of being an inclusive journal goes well beyond the aesthetics of being seen as “progressive”; it is making a statement by inviting a diverse array of voices to connect and mingle and challenge each other at a time when divisiveness permeates the news, when groups are being pitted against one another, when declarations are being made in black and white. Either you are for something, or you are against it. In literature, and in art, we argue, you can just be you, in all your complicated, contradictory ways—which is, perhaps, the loudest declaration of all.
NARRATIVELY | JAN. 2015
I was born with a weak sense of smell – not quite anosmia, the inability to perceive odor at all, but a decidedly duller olfactory gland. The physiological connection that most people have linking familiar scents with particular memories is lost on me. But part of the beauty and mystery of being human is how the body and the mind can work together to compensate for our shortcomings. Where there is a will, there is a way – that sort of thing. And so, for me, songs have become my sonic guides, my means of finding my way back to certain memories and people and places that exist in this mental, temporal map I’ve rendered over the years.
