Selected Published Works
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An Unfortunate Accident
An Unfortunate Accident, a short fiction piece I wrote in Fall 2021 that is set in 1990s Berlin, was published in the 2022 Dream volume of Fiction International.
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Sugar and Salt
I wrote this memoir piece when I was diagnosed with COVID-19 in Spring 2020. I think of it as a fever dream. My favorite lines come at the end, but please read it at Wraparound South.
I prayed that after the virus is done with us, and the earth’s winds have blown its spider’s web away, when we have mourned those we must mourn, and taken off our masks, that we will see, and hear, and be happy to know, that none of us is the same.
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Song For a Massacre Survivor
In journalism, we strive to breathe the same air as the humans we report on, to do our jobs best. But there is always a line that we must navigate between professionalism and empathy. To avoid sickness, during the pandemic, that line has included literal, physical distance. Song For a Massacre Survivor is about a moment that line disappeared for me while I was reporting in Kosovo. Meditating on Noli Me Tangere helped me finally find the words to describe it, and to reflect deeply on what it takes to heal.
Books
Writers on Writing: Inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors
You can read more about my thoughts on writing in my interview with Chip Scanlan in his book Writers on Writing: Inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors.
Chip is a writing coach and an award-winning former journalist and former director of writing programs and the National Writer’s Workshops at The Poynter Institute, one of the world’s top schools for journalists. Please buy his book!
On the Brink
In 2004 I wrote On The Brink for Tyler Drumheller, a senior CIA official who was determined to tell the world the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq was not justified by US intelligence. Publishers Weekly described the book, which was translated into several languages, reprinted in a UK edition and is held in libraries and taught in classrooms to this day, as a "lucid account of the Bush administration's intelligence breakdown."