Pour one out for the chain-smoking grannies

Introducing MARVELOUS FREAKS OF NATURE! (my BOOK)

I’m sorry, but I just can’t be cool and wait to the bottom of this post to share this news. I have a book coming out! October 2026! It has an exclamation point in its title!

I want to wallpaper my house in this announcement. I want to have it shoot out from ATM machines nationwide. I want to bake it into king cakes instead of little plastic babies. I WANT TO SHARE THIS NEWS WIDELY!

If you’ve been reading my posts here, you’ll know that I struggle with being brave and with talking to strangers and with sharing my work. This book of fictional short stories is, in a lot of ways, my attempt at processing what scares me, as well as what nourishes me and keeps me up at night. What fascinates me and repels me. What gives me all the feels.

I’ve told a few close friends about this news, and some of them have asked me how long I have been working on this book. It’s a question that always brings me up a little short. Did it begin with the first few stories I collected as a part of my MFA thesis? With the first piece I published in a magazine? With deciding I wanted to write a book in the first place? With the first book I fell in love with? With the books my parents read to me as a child at bedtime?

Did it begin in the house where I’m from? The last one on a dead-end street? In the looming woods behind the house? Did it begin before I was born? With my grandmother’s bravado, picking fights in Depression-era Hells Kitchen? With my other grandmother’s whimsical penchant for pretending she was an opera star while sitting on the toilet?

You probably didn’t have a chain-smoking granny who sang bad opera while on the toilet. But you probably did have someone in your life who captivated your young imagination with her big personality. Her big presence. Her storied life. I hope the MARVELOUS FREAKS in my book reminds you of her. And of all the people who made your own life a storied one.

Stories, even fictional ones, especially fictional ones, are the way we connect to each other, the ways we recognize each other. Kazuo Ishiguro said it best in his Nobel speech:

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

We live lives of infinite stories. Some of mine are collected in this book. I hope you read it. I hope you share it. I hope you tell some stories of your own.

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