Photo: Mark Dellas
I Am Here
You Are Not
I Love You
Writer, publisher, filmmaker.
My first book is I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2025). I also made a short documentary film. I’m interested in the people that shape places and places that shape people—and the people and places that have shaped me. (That’s meant writing a lot about Buffalo, New York.) I’m also a cofounder and publisher of Foundlings Press, senior editor at Traffic East, and founder of the Carrowduff Arts consultancy and production company. News and new work are below. Follow my Substack for more frequent updates, conversations, and experiments.
Latest
Each of us knows that someday we will lose one another. But in this moment, the world is changeless, the map is teeming, and nothing is lost.
“Loss Is the Format: Remembering Buffalo’s Old Pink,” in Annulet Issue 8
To make an authorial leap into any Other is a high-stakes moral and aesthetic endeavor. To make the leap into a subject you love is heightened into an altogether different act, its violence arcing back.
“The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction,” in Public Books
Only after we are certain that we have finished a piece of writing can we know precisely what we have failed to say. Among other things, this failure points us to where we must begin writing again.
“A Hole at the Bottom of the Book” in Public Books
As an open atheist, the answer shouldn’t have mattered to me—but I wish he would have said, simply, “yes.”
“The Things We Choose” in Humanities Magazine
The Dug-Up Gun Museum is not an attempt to answer a question, to stay confusion, or even to bear witness, which means to attest to the truth of something. It merely aims to stun our conditioned apostrophe—an exercise in durational resistance to turning away.
Reviewing Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum in Colorado Review
Time continues at its plastic pace. Experience, like language, accumulates. And love, like writing, tends to want another word.
“Stet: On Cutting—and Keeping—Everything,” in The Millions