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I was in the bathtub when I started writing this collection.

I had recently decided to quit a job I had once loved. It was winter, and the only way I could get warm was curled up under hot water, and the job I had once loved was killing me. There were knots in the small of my back and I wasn’t sleeping. My body felt like this far-off thing, but my body was also refusing to let me keep going along a road that wasn’t safe. There are words for this that my therapist uses, things like “allostatic load” and “window of tolerance.”

But I didn’t want an explanation. I wanted somebody to tell me how to make it go away, because I knew that if it didn’t, I would have to uproot my whole life. “Uproot,” a word deceptive in its violence. Being torn from soil that no longer has nutrients.

People told me I was brave for moving on, but the choice to quit my job didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like gravity. But I kept thinking about the idea of choice.

I didn’t realize how obsessed I had become with it.

In the bathtub, I began to write this dreamlike moment, and the possible choices that one might make.  I wanted to know that I could be okay. I wanted to know that staying submerged could be an answer, and I wanted to know that I could burn it all to the ground, and mostly, I wanted someone to come along and tell me what would happen next so I wouldn’t have to carry it anymore. But nobody could tell me that, and so I wrote another question, and another.

Glass Labyrinth is a poetry collection. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book. Mostly, it’s a culmination of thoughts, feelings, and memories from one of the strangest years of my life. It’s a dreamscape through a city inside a forest, or up a hill you’ll never reach the top of, or through a therapist’s office where every question leads to several more. It’s a match lit over a pile of dandelions. It’s an offering. It’s an apology and a love letter.

Often, I’m not quite certain what it is.

Maybe you’ll read it and get to decide for yourself.  

Glass Labyrinth comes out in June 2025 through Thirty West Publishing House.

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New poetry collection coming out in June! Glass Labyrinth is a choose-your-own-adventure exploration of grief. Each poem ends in a question and how you choose to answer it will guide you through the book.

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Man, I want queer fairytales too, but what I really want is for them to follow traditional fairytale tropes and structures while they do it. I want rules of threes and true names and quest stories and impossible tasks and disguises and riddles, I want blood and death and happy endings. I want more stories in the shape of oral folk tales, but with queer people in. Modern reimaginings where ‘and the prince was really a princess’ is a solution to the problem of the narrative are great, but I’d like to see more where it’s an uncommented-upon fact that there are queer people in this fairy tale, but the tale has other, very traditional problems (the princess won’t laugh, the cow has gone dry, the bridegroom intends to murder and eat the bride) that they need to solve by being kind and clever and brave and a little bit rebellious, as well as whatever their identity may be.

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EPIPHYTE (aka Monster Novel) is officially out on Submission! This novel was born of my need for horror stories that are queer in nature, and of course, my lifelong obsession with fairy tales and folklore. Think The Hazel Wood meets Jennifer's Body and you might be getting close. Logline: A grad student wakes up in a fairytale forest with her estranged childhood best friend, and they find themselves trapped in a story that can only end in death for one of them unless they use the rules of fairy tales to find their way back to their real lives. [Image descriptions: Slide one is a collage with images that reflect the story of Epiphyte. Slide two is a longer description of the book, containing the following text: EPIPHYTE Horror Fantasy Olivia and Isabella are best friends who haven’t spoke in twelve years because of a rift between their families. When they wake up in a cottage in a fairytale forest together, their memories of their real life are gone. The fairy tale begins with an invitation to the prince’s ball, and the story restarts each time they answer “no.” When they finally agree to attend the ball, Isabella becomes inflicted with a fatal illness called the Hunger. Trapped in a story that grows more tightly around them each time they misstep, and just as Olivia begins to accept that she’s always felt more than just friendship toward Isabella, they are forced to work with the rules of fairy tales in the hopes of escaping the narrative– and saving Isabella’s life. END ID]

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So excited to to have my novel moving along the slow path towards (hopefully!) publication.

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Image ID: a collage made over the acknowledgements page of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Collaged over the page is a house made of bricks, with strange round blotches coming out from where a chimney might be. Cut out from the brick are the words "fairy tales" "mother" and "man." Around the blotches are a series of cut out words, which together read "The wolf is a bad animal because some principle has said so." Laid over the brick house are three orange roses and an image of a white man in a suit holding a sign with the repeated phrase "no word please." The shape of a door is created with cut-out words, which read "The wolf's badness is some / thing that / the adult wants to destroy"

Page one of a project in which I dismantle a book that's never worked for me and try to work it into something that does. Originally published in Our Favorite People in the Room, a First Matter Press anthology available here.