Essays

“No Great Name on Earth,” The Missouri Review BLAST, Nov 2023

Middlemarch as a lens on my mother's career choices, and mine

“I Must Be Making It All Up: On Sigrid Nunez's 'The Vulnerables',” LA Review of Books, Nov 2023

On the novel as pandemic pod

“Weeding or Writing: On 'Henry at Work',” Cleveland Review of Books, Sept 2023

In which Thoreau and I leave our comfortable lives to give farming a try

“The Birder,” The Paris Review Daily, April 2023

On the summer I met a birder

"An Interview with Elaine Katzenberger," National Book Critics Circle, April 2023

I spoke with the executive director of City Lights, the recipient of the NBCC Toni Morrison Achievement Award

“Reconfigured,” The Iowa Review, Winter 2022/2023

How a sense of scale shapes lived and literary experience

“When Corporate Language Kills,” Current Affairs, Sept/Oct 2022

On corporate jargon, Wittgenstein, and the opioid crisis

“Endless Particulars,” Fourth Genre, Fall 2021

On the role of the particular in literary and bodily attention

“Here Are Our Hands,” Clarion, Fall 2019

A relationship between a poet and a story-maker

“City Birds,” Pangyrus, Nov 2018

A meditation on Cambridge’s turkey population

“Answering Alternative Facts with Fiction,” Pangyrus, May 2018

The falsity of fiction as a response to political untruth

“Dismantling Communication—Literally,” Pangyrus, Dec 2016

On the power of the word “literally” used before metaphorical phrases