This story was shortlisted for the Sean O'Faolain International Fiction Prize, and appeared in Southword (17), journal of the Munster Literature Centre.
"Amid the tumult and clamor of my classroom, he was easily lost: a slim, handsome boy with long arms and a careful, almost elegant manner."



GOOD I:

Since I left the Delta...

GOOD II:

"You knew my name."

GOOD III:

"Their voices may start too quiet to hear: an echo, a whisper. But maybe they haven't had the opportunity for volume."

GOOD IV:

"This is how change happens: A teacher offers what they can. A child opens a book. And years later, a young woman is bound for college."



GOOD V:

"I thought that through sheer force of will, I could right injustice, overcome poverty. Save a child from the life they were born into."


GOOD VI:

"Rail-thin, he walked slowly with almost comic intentionality, as if placing his feet in invisible foot-sized squares."



Listening to Leo London

This review of Mr. London's recently released album first appeared at The Rumpus.

Something Once Learned

This essay first appeared at Brevity.
"Faraway a train whistle howled once, twice, and then there was the muted click of wheels on track, rising to a roar as the train neared, falling again as it receded. In the quiet the train left behind a woman called out in Spanish, the words unintelligible, only the rhythm giving the language a name. "



The Files of the Living

This essay first appeared at Eclectica.
"In these files, in the hundreds of pages of notes, the record of all these lives and his struggle to heal and help, to ward off death for another day or week or year, only here, in the sheer volume of it, do I understand how staggering a task, how great the stakes. How terrible the responsibility."

Race and Response
This essay on racists in Eugene, OR, first appeared in the Eugene Weekly.
"He told me I was Jackie Chan. He told me I did the karate, and he cut a couple demonstrative chops through the air. He told me he liked my fried rice and was sorry about the death of my cousin, Bruce Lee. He said I should not talk to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl beside me, that the races are best left to themselves."



What Was Good
This piece on the demise of the Oregon Wrestling Program first appeared in the Eugene Weekly.
"Wrestling is more Springfield than Eugene, more cowboy hats than rasta caps. It is weigh-ins in icy, echoic locker rooms, cold mats at morning meets in rural gyms with wooden bleachers. I remember well: I was a three-time state finalist, and with my coach, a blond bear of a man named John Scott, I sought out the competition where it was."


The Wrestler
This piece, dedicated to the memory of Stanford Wrestler and Assistant Coach Tod Surmon, appeared in Stanford Magazine.
"After practice, I'd drive with Tod in his fresh-waxed, cherry-red 3000 GT out those back roads in Los Altos doing 80, 90, 100, windows down, stereo bumping. I'd yell over the wind, glad to be alive."

Questions of Authenticity
This essay on race, culpability, and the aesthetics and politics of representation first appeared in Luna Park.
"All art fails if it is asked to be representative. The purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty."



Gone
This dialect chapter of my novel first appeared in The Arkansas Review.
"Walls is bare but for a magazine picture Mama got taped of that New York City with that green-glass skyscraper-building so tall it pointy roof poke holes in the sky. Mama always used to say we gone move there someday, up in a paint-house at the top of the world, which don't make no sense cause it easy to see they ain't no paint or house or nothing, just that long needle top and them white fluffy clouds."