"['They Could Have Been Yours'] is the kind of short story that makes me want to jump onto my desk and shout: The American short story is alive and well!"
- Speer Morgan, Editor of The Missouri Review
Published Short Fiction
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They Could Have Been Yours (Reprint)
Apex Magazine Spring 2023 | Issue 136 Originally Published in The Missouri Review (spring 2022) "IT'S 8AM ON A MONDAY, AND I'M CURLED IN BED, eating cereal from a plastic bowl and browsing the Site, indulging a secret, bitter part of myself that likes to keep tabs on the past. I’m used to seeing every type of announcement, but there’s something about J’s engagement post, something I hadn’t expected, that pricks me like a tack. Perhaps it’s that no one wants to see a former lover happily engaged, especially not first thing in the morning, or maybe it’s the constant commenting of mutual friends, continually pushing the post to the top of the feed. He has a beard now and longish hair; still attractive, but in a cusp-of-middle-age kind of way. He’s wearing angular sunglasses and grinning, arms around a petite, rabbit-faced brunette, the ring on her finger thrust into the foreground like a small glittery moon..." continue reading |
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Speech Lessons
Ghost Parachute April 2023 YOU BEGIN WITH TONGUE TWISTERS. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers,” you say five times, then smile at the students. “Your turn.” They are assembled around you in a circle on the rug. You are not the classroom teacher, but a Speech Arts specialist who inhabits different classrooms throughout the day. The students watch your mouth, the contortion of your lips, or maybe they’re noticing your freshly-whitened teeth. Nine-year-olds do notice these things. “Red leather yellow leather,” you say three times, then as they join in, you lead them in a slow crescendo, like a war chant. You tell them that good speech is a kind of game, and when someone asks who wins the game, you ignore your first response and say, “We all do.”...continue reading |
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Men
Ghost Parachute March 2023 Art by Brett J. Barr JOE COMES TO THE DOOR OF OUR HOUSE, BEARING A CASSEROLE. He’s courting our mother, finding ways to see her in between their weekly meditation group meetings, where interactions are limited to deep breathing and Sanskrit chants. The houses in our Cheektowaga neighborhood are close together (too close), no yards, the trees all stumpy crab apples, and everyone – skateboarding boys and porch-rocking grandparents – can see him standing there...continue reading |
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Box of Ghosts
The Bureau Dispatch Fall 2022 | Volume 4 YOU'RE SIXTEEN WHEN THE WOMAN THRUSTS THE BOX INTO YOUR HANDS on the street, so forcefully that you catch it hard against your chest. It’s shoe-box sized and wooden, with a fancy metal latch. She's no one that you know, but she's wearing a white dress, long and outmoded, and you imagine she might be some ancestral countess, a distant cousin perhaps; maybe you are related to vampires. She stares at you for a long instant with sad-seeming eyes, then slips past you, gone in the crowd. You open the box on the way home: It smells sweet, like incense, but there’s no incense in it. It’s empty. The next day, you decide to use the box for pencils, but when you open it... continue |
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They Could Have Been Yours
The Missouri Review Spring 2022 | Issue 45.1 "Now and Forever" "IT'S 8AM ON A MONDAY, AND I'M CURLED IN BED, eating cereal from a plastic bowl and browsing the Site, indulging a secret, bitter part of myself that likes to keep tabs on the past. I’m used to seeing every type of announcement, but there’s something about J’s engagement post, something I hadn’t expected, that pricks me like a tack. Perhaps it’s that no one wants to see a former lover happily engaged, especially not first thing in the morning, or maybe it’s the constant commenting of mutual friends, continually pushing the post to the top of the feed. He has a beard now and longish hair; still attractive, but in a cusp-of-middle-age kind of way. He’s wearing angular sunglasses and grinning, arms around a petite, rabbit-faced brunette, the ring on her finger thrust into the foreground like a small glittery moon..." Continue reading • Interview with Joy discussing this story + Joy's audio recording of this story • order issue |
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Before
Fairy Tale Review Spring 2022 | Lilac Issue & Featured Online "LET'S TALK ABOUT THE FAIRY GODMOTHER, BEFORE. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice, fairy-status undiscovered, role of godmother yet realized. It doesn’t matter how all that will come to be, only that right now she works at a diner, spends the day penciling people’s orders on a notepad and running back and forth from the kitchen to her tables, carrying plates of eggs and buttered toast, a practiced smile on her face." Continue Reading | Full Lilac Issue of FTR |
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The Jackal
Conjunctions Fall 2021 | Online Exclusive "FRIDAY NIGHT, AND YOU HAVE DONE THE UNTHINKABLE. You've taken your father's Jackal Ghost bowling ball from its locked hard-shell case under your mother's bed - the ball that looks like a purple and black version of the earth, a jackal's head rising from the swirls - and gone to meet Teddy and Zeke and Evan and Marya, most importantly Marya, for a night of bowling, the game your dead father was obsessed with: the game that, according to your mother, ruins people." Continue Reading | Listen to Author Read | Spanish Translation (Manuel Calvillo de la Garza) |
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House of Stars
Gulf Coast Summer/Fall 2020 | Vol. 32, issue 2 "...LATER, SHE CRIES ON THE COUCH until she feels empty of everything, even tears, then she goes to the bathroom to check on the universe. It's swirling and shifting, a soup of stars, the dark, yawning center as inviting as sleep." Read the complete story |
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Belly of the Beast American Short Fiction November 2019 | Web Exclusive IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT, AND THE BEAST HAS SWALLOWED MY HUSBAND. One minute he was there, the next, gone—just a shout, half smothered, as the creature engulfed him. I didn’t see the actual swallowing. I arrived seconds later, in time to see the wolfish thing licking its jowls. It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen... Continue reading | Author Interview | Listen to Author Reading |
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Ron
Tin House Spring 2018 | Candy Issue | 75 I MET RON MYERS at an amateur astronomers' club, our identical Celestron SkyMaster binoculars slung around our necks - an unusual omen from the start. We clustered around the telescopes, listening to the lecture about Vega, faint and barely visible against the backdrop of light pollution. Ron was watching me, I could tell. Continue reading |
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A Boy Who Does Not Remember His Father
SmokeLong Quarterly Issue 60 | 15th Anniversary Contest Issue IN THE BOY'S MIND his father could be anyone: A taxi driver or a chef, an actor or a judge. Someone who lives in one of those tall, shiny office towers in Albuquerque. Maybe his father wears those skin-tight suits and steps onto the backs of whales to cheering crowds. But his mother has said that his father is none of those; that his father is far away, hiding. Continue reading | Read author interview |
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We Are Trying to Understand You
TriQuarterly Issue 153| Winter/Spring 2018 WE FOUND THE WOMAN living under a fishing boat. Our cameras picked up her movements. We are guessing the food sources were more abundant near the beach, and she was able to survive unnoticed for some time. We thought she'd stay there, but she walked out on the highway, along the lines of deserted cars. When she found one that drove (a van), we let her make it into the San Joaquin Valley before disabling it. Continue Reading |
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End Grain The Iowa Review Winter 2017/2018 IN HER FINAL DAYS, my wife begins hoarding furniture. She's grown so weak that she can't leave her bed, but she insists on flipping through local catalogs, circling all the wooden chairs, end tables, and nightstands she wants in red marker. Continue Reading |
How to Survive on Land
New Ohio Review
September, 2016
2016 Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest Honorable Mention
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY MOTHER, a mermaid: For years, despite her handicaps, she embraced land life in Okanogan, Washington—the drizzly winters and sun-soaked summers—with a steadfastness both impressive and exhausting. She read us stories with the ardor of a human mother; bagged our lunches; brushed our hair.
Continue Reading or Listen to Joy's Reading
New Ohio Review
September, 2016
2016 Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest Honorable Mention
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY MOTHER, a mermaid: For years, despite her handicaps, she embraced land life in Okanogan, Washington—the drizzly winters and sun-soaked summers—with a steadfastness both impressive and exhausting. She read us stories with the ardor of a human mother; bagged our lunches; brushed our hair.
Continue Reading or Listen to Joy's Reading
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Night Circus PANK December 2016 YOUR EX-LOVER HAS BUILT a circus outside your window. It's the kind of thing you might have found cute five years ago, when you first heard him say "I'm an artist" and "I make things for a living" and you hadn't wanted to scream through your empty apartment, to tear down your memory of him... Continue reading (or listen to Joy read) |
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The Forgiveness Machine F(r)iction December 2016 THE FORGIVENESS MACHINE ARRIVES in a box with bubble wrap. It’s small, sleek, and Pam sets it on the table. She’s already written each item she’ll forgive on blank two by four inch flash cards, in black ink, as stated in the directions, and she stands admiring the machine that will change her life, tracing her fingers over its lunar contours. Continue reading |
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Squirrel, Leopard, Goat
Tin House, The Open Bar August, 2015 IN MY SISTER'S TAXONOMY, our father is a squirrel. She’s eight, I’m five, and we both agree on this, although if we didn’t, she’d have the final word. Our father: Limpid squirrel eyes, a narrow squirrel face, prominent squirrel teeth. He scampers and leaps and takes nibbles of everything, even applies. "Pure squirrel," she says, and I not wordlessly. Continue reading |
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Alone in a Room: Writing & Craft Newsletter
Monthly Newsletter Alone in a Room is my monthly writing newsletter, featuring craft musings, original writing prompts, what I'm reading and thinking about, upcoming events, and general inspirational/literary goodness! It's free to subscribe, and you'll receive the latest issue delivered direct to your inbox! (If you don't see it, make sure to check spam & promotions folders.)
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Moonlight Reading at Park Hill Orchard Easthampton, MA |
- Alone in a Room: Newsletter -
Welcome! Alone in a Room is my monthly writing newsletter, featuring craft musings, original writing prompts, what I'm reading and thinking about, upcoming events, and general inspirational/literary goodness!
Visit Alone in A Room Page / First Post! |
