About

I’m a writer from Denver. I spent some time in my twenties trying to be an academic, working on Gerard Manley Hopkins specifically. An epiphany (yes! they’re real!) drove me to focus on my own fiction. I received my MFA from Syracuse University, and I’ve worked in various libraries over the past several years. Being accepted to Syracuse was not my epiphany, to be clear. I don’t know how that happened. I’m very grateful for it.

I write essays occasionally, but I’ve never been able to force the issue on that front. I’m unoriginal as a reader, and all the writers you’ve heard of and which everyone thinks are good, I also think are good, but especially: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Susanna Clarke, Tolstoy, Denis Johnson, Ted Chiang, Joy Williams, Frederick Buechner, Barbara Pym, Les Murray, Hopkins, Ross Macdonald, Kazuo Ishiguro, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.F. Powers, Saul Bellow, Helen Oyeyemi, Daniel Woodrell, Don DeLillo, Shirley Jackson, Annie Dillard, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gene Wolfe, Austen, Dickens, Bulgakov, your mom, your dad–everyone! I’m a lover. Except for Grapes of Wrath. What a trash-heap. I’d probably be more of a hater but my filter is very strong and I no longer bother with books I don’t want to finish unless absolutely necessary.

I’ve written for LitHub, The Millions, Literature & Theology, and more. I’ve got a newsletter, a Twitter account, and (I get bored, okay!) a podcast with my friend Bill Coberly.

The below is a poem I think is fun, surprisingly not by Hopkins.

FABLE FOR BLACKBOARD by George Starbuck

Here is the grackle, people.
Here is the fox, folks.
The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox
hopes.

Here are the fronds, friends,
that cover the fox.
The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle
looks.

Here are the ticks, tykes,
that live in the leaves, loves.
The fox is confounded,
and God is above.