A short list of my published or otherwise notable work.
Fiction
Darkness Within – My first publication, Darkness Within is a short story based on the murder of Kitty Genovese back in the 60s. It’s a very imperfect piece, but it means a lot to me personally because I can see in it the larval stage themes that will come back to haunt me again and again in later work. Published June 9th, 2010
Kids Only – Got a lot of memories of diners going back to when I was a kid. Poured a lot of that into this little stream-of-consciousnessy short story. I’m happy with how it came out. Thanks to the publishers at Oddville Press for giving this piece a home. Published April 18th, 2017.
Dragon’s Den – One time I was forced to sell a guitar at a pawnshop in the country and the guy there did me straight dirty on the deal. I never forgot that guy, and I ended up writing a gruesome little story about him. Check out Dragon’s Den at Every Day Fiction. Published July 11th, 2017.
Mirror, Mirror – Mirrors freak me out, so I wrote a little mythical fable about their origins. Thanks again to Every Day Fiction. Published April 17th, 2018
Essays
Music, Drama, and How One Ring Cycle is Like Another – I wrote this essay back in college when I was still considering music as a career and getting deep into classical. I wrote this essay to explore the continuity between composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner and the music of Howard Shore in the Lord of the Rings films. Gotta love those leitmotifs. Published April, 2014
Miyazaki’s Haunted Utopia: The Ghost of Modernity in Kiki’s Delivery Service – It’s hard to underestimate just what an impression the art of Hayao Miyazaki has made on me. If you cut open my head and look at my brain, I expect you’ll find some iconic Miyazaki images burnt in here and there: Totoro standing at the bus stop on the parietal lobe, that closeup of the Forest Spirit’s feet etched just under the cerebral cortex. There really is something enchanting about Miyazaki’s work, and one of my interests as an academic is trying to understand just how Miyazaki is able to create such mesmerizing work. In this essay, I look at Kiki’s Delivery Service-an excellent example of Miyazaki’s power to enchant-and read it as a utopian fairy tale of what 20th century modernity might have looked like. There’s no escaping history, however, and Miyazaki’s utopia is haunted by the ghosts of modernity, particularly the ghost of the Hindenburg disaster. Published January 19th, 2017
