Essays & Fiction
Oregon Humanities—"Merciful Debt"
Most of our debt was Mennonite debt, the kind you owe to a community that watches over you, the kind that draws sighs and whispered attention, the kind you can never repay.
Nonfiction. Full text here.
Shenandoah—"Noitatsefni"
Our rental contract specified temperance and modesty, which Mama said meant covering our shoulders when Howard the landlord could see or else we’d be out of the best house we’d ever had.
Nonfiction. Full text here.
River Teeth—"Tick, Days Three Through Thirty"
In the new forests of the apocalypse, we will shave all our hair so ticks have nowhere to hide.
Nonfiction. Full text online at Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads.
Portland Review—"Playing House in Fiction"
The rush I used to get from a good game of House is the same cozy urge adults feel when surveying a fictional landscape, projecting themselves into the zombie apocalypse or Earthsea or the strange rhythms of Regency suppers and seasons in London. Like plot-based suspense, the House hunger feeds on human curiosity. Only here the propelling curiosities are domestic and subsistent, and the rush itself entirely orthogonal to plot.
Nonfiction. Full text here.
WEst branch—"Milk-white cabbage"
There can’t be a cellar when the house is on chicken legs, but that’s where milady keeps the sour-cabbages. It’s just a trapdoor in the kitchen, and an iron ring for lifting. Someone carved a matching circle into the wood of the trapdoor so the ring nestles in and lies flush. The wood was wearing and wearing, though, as I passed over it, fetching and grinding and scrubbing for milady. She is so hungry.
Fiction. Read more.
gay magazine—"Thy dross to consume"
Frigid and loose. Harlot and mother. In the a capella Mennonite Church where I was raised, we had a third important dichotomy for the classification of women: soprano and alto.
Nonfiction. Full text here.
oregon home—"prince of my long nights"
My Prince was a beautiful stove, glossy cream and turquoise enamel, with warming shelves, a firebox on the left and a hot-water reservoir curling up wing-like on the right. I have a Prince to keep me warm at night, I wrote to lovers back home. I warned you I’d never be the needy one, is what I wanted them to read.
Nonfiction. Full text here.
Tahoma literary review—"West Fork tack & saddle co."
I twist Carla’s hand over her head to set her spinning, skirt firing every direction until slam! we’re right back home for the next eight-count. Right-left grand. The folks my parents’ age get the most bothered when I dance gent. The old old folks only care that I get it right, that I know how to lead.
Fiction. Read more.
salt hill—"haycliff"
Someone has to start spelling pizza phonetically. I’ve begun with my stuffed puppy from the Wal-Mart grand opening. Peetsa fit right inside my elbow and I named him in the parking lot, phonetic. That makes me Peetsa’s Mother. I told my sister who is Sugarplum’s Mother that she should spell it like Shuggerplum, but she doesn't spell anything yet.
Nonfiction. Read more.
fourth genre—"firewood"
We moved here so Papa could build the ski resort but that was done a long time ago, and then he spent a year fixing bridges and foundations after the flood. There’s not so much to do anymore. Last week another tractor trailer went off the mountain, so he had a job rescuing the stuff on it. Then he went hunting.
Nonfiction. Read more.