To celebrate the final week of my chapbook sale, I’m talking about the inspiration behind both books, Sprawl and Illuminations. Each book was written at a different time in my life and emerged from completely different influences and styles. While Sprawl is a conventional short story cycle exploring politically charged topics around class, gender and sexuality, Illuminations veers into experimental forms and fantastical elements in order to create a dreamscape. Order both books to take advantage of the sale. Until October 31st, you can get 25% off the total order when you order both. To claim the discount, use the code OPENINGSALE at checkout in my Etsy shop.

Sprawl: Tales of Suburbia

Choose a spiral off the expressway, any one will do, into the land where neighborhoods bear names of the topography they replaced—Spring Creek Woods, Lakeside Farms, Autumn Oaks Manor.

In writing Sprawl: Tales of Suburbia, I wanted to challenge the conventional narratives around suburban America as places of conformity and whiteness. Inspired by my hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I wanted to reflect the diversity and class conflict I witnessed growing up. In traditional suburban literature, such as Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, the characters are privileged WASPs in a suffocatingly homogenous culture, who are struggling with ennui despite their material comforts. But this is outdated. In the 21st century, America’s suburbs are not only racially diverse but now experience a greater rate of poverty than cities. The book’s opening, “Sprawl,” is a sweeping panorama of this landscape, before zeroing in on the experiences of three young people in the subsequent stories.

Illuminations

By March, faithful reader, I found myself in the Land With No Heads. As you know by now, I had felt lost and loveless since the day I returned from overseas to find Ashley had abandoned our apartments, but I did my best to throw myself into my new ethnography. There was only one road in this country, which reduced my sense of aimlessness.

Illuminations begins with an epigraph from Authur Rimbaud: “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” In these four pieces, I abandoned literalism and concrete meaning in order to explore the unconscious mind. While immersing myself in the writings of Kafka, H.D., and Rimbaud, I became interested in how imagery can create free associations that trigger unexpected depth. I experimented with different writing styles, from iambic poetry to 19th-century travelogue, in order to take advantage of the sound and voice associated with each form.

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Thank you for joining me on this journey into my creative inspirations and explorations. As an emerging writer, it means so much to me that readers like you have connected with my work enough to purchase these chapbooks.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to order your chapbooks today! You can still get 25% off when ordering both books until October 31st. Just enter the code OPENINGSALE at checkout. I hope these chapbooks resonate with you and allow you to see the world in a new way. Thanks again – it’s readers like you that make writing life such a rewarding adventure.