Fiction
I am currently revising two novels:
Once Home: What if, after the fear, catastrophe, and rage, the end of the world felt like the piercing ache of lost love? In the near future, a forty-four-year-old woman, a foul-mouthed sculptor and aspiring poet, wakes up from a nap in the windswept dunes of Cape Cod and believes she is the only person alive on earth. The landscape around her has transformed: the sea level has risen and she is stranded on a newly formed island. Faced with unprecedented aloneness, she must navigate her new reality to survive and find meaning in this wholly altered world.
Over four seasons, the unnamed protagonist seeks food and resources, befriends a pair of ravens, and attempts to finish a self-portrait that has confounded her for years. But as she grows comfortable in her new reality, she begins to have strange experiences, periodically slipping into full-body hallucinatory memories, and conversing with the reflection of her younger self in the mirror. As she reckons with her solitude and the mystery of what has befallen the rest of humanity, she aches for her dear friends and the love who slipped out of her grasp too soon.
An exploration of nature, grief, memories, art, and love, Once Home explores how we might embrace the beauty and the ferocity of our world, and discover the magic and hope of our own existence on this planet, before it’s too late.
The Darkest Skies: The story of two gifted scholars of the natural sciences who are entangled by dark supernatural forces on a wild and mysterious island nation in the North Atlantic. The Darkest Skies was shortlisted for the 2024 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition in the novel in progress category.
After losing his beloved grandparents to a tragic and mysterious accident, James Tippet arrives in the Luran Islands to study forest ecology, hoping to start anew and heal from his grief. Instead, he finds himself haunted by vivid dreams of wild places, tormented by a family secret discovered in an unfinished and unsent letter, and unable to connect to the people he meets, including his fellow scholar Emma Shore, whom he hides his feelings for.
Meanwhile, Emma won’t rest until she uncovers what happened to her missing professor, lost during an expedition in the mountains over the summer. Obsessing over the details of the investigation and questioning the official story, Emma holds out hope the professor might still be alive.
When another beloved member of the community disappears, strange weather settles over the islands, and James’ mental health declines, Emma fears that James might be next because of clues she finds in her professor’s disappearance. She begins to think that he’s not just being haunted by his dreams, but hunted within them. Together, they must find their way through an ancient supernatural forest, unravel secrets held for generations, and overcome their own feelings of sorrow, fear, and isolation to save what matters to them most, or risk losing each other and the place they've come to love.
Mixing elements of fantasy, folklore, dark-academia, and ecology, this is a story about the relationship between our vast inner emotional landscape and the complex ecological world.
