Writing Samples

The Carolina Quarterly, 2022, print edition

Here's an excerpt:

A tree has grown up in place of the skyline view from Skidmore Bluffs. It annoys me, this tree. I tell myself that nature is not the enemy here, and yet I grumble—nothing is as static as it seems. 

It used to be that you could see Portland’s downtown to the left with the arch of Fremont Bridge above the tree line. We called it a cardboard city. When the sun was close to setting, the downtown buildings took on a certain tan-pink glow and appeared shrunken, the way things look in tilt shift photographs. Here, a car the size of a rice grain. There, a skyscraper tall as a match. In those moments, the city looked not just compactable but flimsy, as if a summer wind could topple thirty stories, as if I could fold the buildings up and hold them flattened in my hands. 

I picture the city whole and folded, whole and folded, but I’ve lost track of where the intersections crease. Maybe there was always a tree in front of the skyline. Maybe it was always the top of the bridge I could see, the wave of the flag not the headlights of cars. Maybe there was nothing to be lost after all, only things to gain. Isn’t it beautiful? I want to want to say. Where there was only memory before, now, a tree.

Moon City Review, 2021, print edition

Here's an excerpt:

Four months before my then-boyfriend and I broke up, we sat across from each other at a rooftop restaurant in Bangkok, and he gave me a tiny, porcelain cat. Orange and striped, it resembled a cat named Tiny that his former roommate owned; Tiny had gone briefly missing only to turn up at the neighbor’s house renamed Shrek and newly adopted—or kidnapped, depending on who you asked. In miniature porcelain form, it’s had just one owner and currently lives in triangulated space on a shelf in my apartment, shielded from the forces of clutter and loss by journals whose pages are largely devoted to the boy who impressed the cat upon me in the first place.

At the end of six months traveling Southeast Asia together, Angst gifted me the cat for two reasons. The first was that we’d talked about getting such an animal when we returned home. Our trip had been emotionally tumultuous—we were struggling to find answers to the questions that returning home forced us to consider: whether to live together and in what city, and what that would mean. The figurine served as an unspoken offering. We will be together, it said, and we will get a cat. The second reason for this specific gift was its size: about one inch long, fully stretched, as if swatting at a fly. Following the standard rule of miniatures, this means that the cat is an ideal size for its form. Any smaller than 1:12 of its original size, a miniature object loses detail, becomes abstract. Of course, Angst wasn’t thinking about this when he bought the cat for me at the Chatuchak market nearly four years ago. He just knew that as a decades-long collector of all things tiny, I would appreciate its smallness. A true miniaturist probably wouldn’t be amazed by this particular miniature—there is nothing especially lifelike or impressive regarding its rendering—and yet it is the final remaining relic of that boyfriend on display in my apartment. 

I remember deciding to find a visible home for the cat when decorating my new bedroom after we broke up. I thought it was okay for the cat to avoid the confines of a drawer or the garbage because it looked innocuous enough just sitting there, and also because it reminded me of something that wasn’t quite Angst and wasn’t quite us. It was a representation of a certain time, a certain place, a certain state of being, and I couldn’t let that go. Though I’ve wanted to move beyond that era—and have tried to cover up the memories, to desaturate and make them flat—I often find I’m still attached. 

A dating error I made last winter picked up the cat once. He held it in his hand and looked at me as if about to say something, as if he knew something, but then just took a breath and returned the cat from whence it came. 

Blood Orange Review, 2020; Runner-up, Nonfiction Contest

Hobart, 2020

The Tigard-Tualatin Times, 2014; 1st Place, Business Reporting, Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association

The Tigard-Tualatin Times and The Newberg Graphic, 2014; 2nd Place Lifestyle Reporting, Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association

Four-part series. Read parts two, three, and four. (Part one linked above.)

Portland Monthly, 2014