This is where you can find my writing in the wild!
“Search Histories is preoccupied with ways of achieving security in a precarious world, whether that security comes from stable family, romantic relationships, gainful employment or side hustle, celebrity or beauty.”
Book Review of Search Histories, by Caitlin Farrugia Published by Full Stop
“Rejecting the dominant culture’s way of being comes with grief—a grief that the contributors to Weird Sister know well. Resistance to dominant culture has to be nurtured like a timid houseplant. The Weird Sister Collection is one such way of tending to the anti-patriarchal imagination.”
Book Review of The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture Published by Full Stop
“The book I ended up writing was in many ways a reaction to all the books I didn’t want to write, or was afraid to write, or was afraid to be perceived as writing. I didn’t want to write a narrative addiction memoir that was about redemption.”
“Heterosexuality and the family are two of the American sitcom’s overarching frameworks, and Lavery intends to see how the episodic nature of the sitcom destabilizes, reasserts, and propagates these values. . . “
Book Review of Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, by Grace Lavery Published by Full Stop
“Maybe it’s that I lost the wonder, that the astonishment at the heart of faith was dulled by over-intellectualization and the slow sterilization of my community and my own disillusionment with evangelical exclusivity. Six years in Houston—during which, I fell in love. I married an atheist. Our union, the definitive strike of my noncompliance. A death knell for my long-standing desire for religious approval. But not the death of my desire for spirituality and sacrament.”
Essay: The Chicken Harvest Published by Psaltery & Lyre
“For her to acknowledge the architected narrative in the final essays of Make It Scream, Make It Burn, but not acknowledge that she might be writing Splinters to convince herself of something, feels like a breach of trust…”
Book Review of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison Published by San Antonio Review
“The testimony becomes a way of refusing the world… The stakes are eliminated. Nothing else can happen to you. Everything is resolved. The story’s over.”
Essay: The Problem with the Evangelical Story Structure Published at Write or Die magazine
“Dixon maintains deliberate and methodical prose. She eschews contractions and any grammatical flourish that would expedite her consideration of loneliness…”
Book Review of The Loneliness Files, by Athena Dixon Published by Barrelhouse
“Brutalities is not a triumphant recovery memoir. To whatever extent “healing” happens, it occurs off the page. Steines refuses to characterize her past self as fallen, foolish, and wicked…”
Book Review of Brutalities: A Love Story, by Margo Steines Published by Full Stop
“Being in Nanny’s house, trying on Nanny’s clothes and sorting her trinkets, surrounded by the trappings of motherhood, I thought about expectations and constraints, the way that women are shaped by our environments and sometimes dictated by them.”
“Expecting Bluebonnets,” personal essay Published by Glasstire
