Memoir

In February 2017, I had been planning my retirement and writing a post-apocalyptic novel about how an eight-year-old girl would save the world, when the apocalypse itself came for my youngest child. My 30-year-old son sustained a devastating brain injury from a mysterious illness. Months later he was diagnosed with an uncommon cancer and an extremely rare autoimmune encephalitis.

In the spring of 2018, I began writing about my son’s brain injury. Mother of Millions is an experimental memoir where lyric essays appear with photographs, erasures, poems, and other writing. It’s about family survival. It’s about folded paper cranes. Unicorns. And tacos.

It isn’t a traditional story of triumph over illness and disability. My son survives, but his recovery, such as it is, remains a mystery, shrouded in loss and possibility. No one in our family sees cancer as something to be grateful for or as something that happened for a reason. My son hasn’t become a saint. Neither have I.

Persimmon Tree called the opening pages “. . . a bold and harrowing essay.” The manuscript was long listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project 2023 Literary Awards, where the review team said

. . . this manuscript is brilliantly crafted. Your voice is authentic and powerful. The experimental sentence fragment style is something 99% of other authors out there would make a mess of. You pull it off, and you do so in such a way that we couldn’t figure out how you pulled it off.

Usually, experimenting in memoir is a mistake and we’ve told hundreds of other memoirists not to do it. You need to keep doing it, because you might just change the genre.

I am currently seeking a publisher for the manuscript. The following pieces are excerpts from Mother of Millions.


TitlePublisherDate
How Many Is Not Supposed to Be a Trick QuestionOut of Line: Who Defines?
Halfs, Steps, In-Laws &
Belonging
July 2024
Apocalypse / How to fold 1000 cranes Persimmon TreeSeptember 2023
On my counter           Poetry in Public
Iowa City UNESCO
City of Literature
Spring 2023
Winter Haiku for My FatherPoetry in Public Iowa City
UNESCO City of Literature
Spring 2022