Artist Statement v1
Enjoys forests, lakes, friendship. Reads books (on docks in the fog) (and on sofas with cats). Values empathy. Requires black coffee. Likes tattoos. Likes liking things. Prefers circuitous road trips, vintage leather jackets, glitter in pockets, dive-bar neon, B-side gems, hawk feathers, and summer storms. We are. What we practice. We. Are. The sum of parts. And parties. Ghosts of runaway pasts. Spell it out to cast the spell. See? See what I’m saying? Text means to weave. Art is another way to say Nice to meet you. I’m giving you my heart, even if you don’t want it.
Artist Statement v2
As a Creative Writer working across genres, I allow the identity of a project to locate the final form.
Earning a PhD in Creative Writing, focusing on the creative practice and critical/craft study of lesbian crime fiction and queer noir, I view constraints as generative—invitations to innovate within genre expectations and deepen reader engagement. I filter ideas through a phenomenological lens, mining the patterns and occlusions that shape awareness in (and of) a text. I love the creative dare of genre, and I strive to inhabit and subvert mystery tropes (e.g., the femme fatale and noir signatures) to shake the heteronormative, perceptual constructs that limit storytelling modes. Taking structural and temporal risks is intended to enrich the literary discourse and create multivalent work. I am passionate about developing popular fiction techniques that break new ground with thematic and stylistic synthesis. For instance, my crime novels, published with Gillian Flynn Books/Zando, weave lyrical patterning inside propulsive, traditional structures like Aristotle’s three acts to queer narrative design. I’m interested in redefining masquerade, revelation, and the encoding/decoding of “knowing,” contending that detective fiction is an epistemological form.
In my fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms, I foreground voice and the reimagining of place. Raw yet lyrical, visceral, obsessed—my lines are crafted to inject immediacy while simultaneously masking sleight of hand. The promise of queer futurity and the gritty beauty of the Rust Belt aesthetic inform my practice. I like work that sits on the edge of collapse, that interrogates itself as it almost topples. All my work is fueled by ferocious curiosity and united by an ethos of ache.
Experimentation is a vitally important element of my praxis, and I leverage multimodal tools like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Twine to explore the nature of creative writing, non-patriarchal narratology, and reading. I utilize VR to defy the X/Y access, visualize verse kinetically, and make 3D noir within an experiential, responsive, and immersive modality.
My critical work is driven by similar process-based explorations and expansive, interdisciplinary cross-pollination. My research interests are socio/cultural locations in crime fiction and how queer, trans, and historically marginalized writers are reinventing genre conventions, offering new spatialities and social comment within compelling mysteries. I am developing a collection of critical essays examining queerness in crime fiction, including “Beat the Clock: Queer Temporality & Distrupting Chrononormativity in Crime Fiction” (NeMLA 2024), the evolution of the femme fatale, and applications of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of reparative reading and Rita Felski’s generative criticality to examine what intersectional mysteries might engender.
