|
Essays: "To Traverse This Somber Age" (Sewanee Review, late 2025) Near the end of the 1933-1934 school year, Simone Weil received a letter from one of her former students, a girl named Simone Gibert. As the summer of 1934 approached, Simone Gibert wrote to “Mlle. Weil” saying she was restless. She was grateful for what she’d learned, but she was struggling with a sense of academic ennui, as were a number of the girls who’d studied Greek or philosophy with Weil two years prior and were now finished with their coursework at Le Puy’s lycée. The girls were cooped up in their homes studying for the bachot, France’s state-sponsored baccalaureate exam, with no solid idea as to why. "On the Margin of a Psalm" (Bennington Review, late 2025) Recently, I rearranged the furniture in my apartment’s living room in Iowa City. After I pushed the bookshelf into a new corner and mounted the TV to the wall opposite its first place, I texted my mother a question. I’ve been wondering, lately, about our data sets. How many statistical truths do we share, have we shared? How many of her data points as a 37-year-old woman circa 1995 can be superimposed over my 32-year-old self in 2023? "No Peaceful Dreams: On Conscientious Objection and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem" (Root Quarterly, 2024) In November 1940, the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry, England, destroying the Church of England's Coventry Cathedral in the process. It took two decades to redesign and rebuild the church, and in 1962, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem debuted there to mark and bless the cathedral's reconsecration. Britten's score was unique, and not universally beloved... "Tripod" (Black Warrior Review, 2024) Winner of the 2023 Prairie Lights Prize in Nonfiction I’ve drawn a boundary between me and the tripod. It’s leaned up in the corner of my bedroom, its third leg lifted off the hardwood floor, suspended. Positioned that way, it looks like it’s beckoning me, taunting me, or rejecting me. Maybe a strange combination of all three. The tripod was never supposed to be here... "On Nodding Terms" (Arts & Letters, 2023) Fourteen years ago, I left the southern suburb that grew me up and headed north for college. That suburb, my place of origin, is probably still best characterized as “semi-rural.” Today, visitors there will see just as many Teslas as horses on the roads, a sight that is not strange to the people who have never left... "Preces" (The Other Journal, 2023) I was too slow to take a picture on the first morning. I didn’t see her until I’d backed out of my spot. Seeing her alive, her neck held high, stunned me. I lived by a traffic-congested intersection in Greenville, South Carolina, across the street from an abandoned lot, a bus stop, and a homeless shelter. Jacked-up trucks roared past my bedroom window through most hours of the day and night, so I was amazed that a chicken had decided to amble down the littered sidewalk, hang a right into the alley beside my apartment building, strut past our dumpsters, and loiter behind our parked cars... "Cease and Desist" (Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, 2022) It's 1936. George Orwell publishes his narrative of an execution in an antifascist magazine. Apparently, he pulled the trigger...It will be important to remember that Orwell's pen did nothing for the elephant... Criticism: "Transgressive (Un)Scripting: Metajournalistic Discourse and 'Sonic Friendship' in The Trojan Horse Affair" (Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 2025) The Trojan Horse Affair, an eight-episode podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times, garnered more than 13 million downloads in the four weeks following its February 2022 debut. Hosts Brian Reed and Hamza Syed attempt to root out the origins of a faked conspiracy to radicalize Muslim students at secondary schools in Birmingham, England and the nationwide political hysteria that ensued in 2014. Despite its success as an immersive, serialized narrative podcast, it has largely failed as impact journalism... "It Really Was Child's Play: (Mis)Adventures in Gilman's Herland and Gerwig & Baumbach's Barbie" (Hopkins Review, 2024) In 1894, Charlotte Perkins Stetson was embroiled in a brutal divorce and preparing to give up custody of her nine-year-old daughter, Katharine. She was in a valley, psychologically and economically, as her mother had recently died, her best friend and possible lover Adeline Knapp had left her and was feeding gossip about her to New York City's tabloids, and the writing and lecturing she did as a public intellectual was bringing in little money... |
This essay—a portion of my MFA thesis—was selected by John Jeremiah Sullivan as the runner-up essay in Sewanee Review's 2024 nonfiction contest.
    |