The Loneliest Thing in the Universe
Human Meme
People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing...
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The Pharmacist's Bell: Introducing Beautiful Numbness
Human Meme
I was ten years old the first time I understood what art does. Not what it says it does. Not what we teach that it does. What it actually does. The production was Hello, Dolly! at a community playhouse in a town where amateur theatre was both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. I was a child in the ensemble, old enough to have memorized my blocking and young enough to believe that what we were doing mattered in some way I could not yet name. The show went fine. The audience clapped politely. Nobody stood. Then the orchestra played the curtain call. An experienced actor standing next to...
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Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy
Human Meme
Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available. This episode explores what the book is, why it matters, and what it reveals about language, embodiment, and the nature of human communication. Let me begin with a claim that may seem strange if your experience with language has been limited to speaking and listening: The face is grammar. Not expression....
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Standard Deviation
Human Meme
You have a number. Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of time you hovered over a photograph before scrolling past, from the route you took to work last Tuesday and whether you lingered outside that coffee shop or walked directly to the train. This number has a name in China. They call it a Social Credit Score. But the American version has no single name...
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Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands
Human Meme
Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing new content, to select among productive options while maintaining discourse coherence. That mouthful of a sentence appears in the opening of Depicting Space, and I want to unpack it for you, because hidden inside that description is something important about human cognition. When you speak English,...
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Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella
Human Meme
For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources. The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them. The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate...
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The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Human Meme
Have you ever dreamed something true? Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet. Most of us have had this experience at least once. We wake up unsettled, the dream still clinging, and then something happens that makes us pause. Makes us wonder. We shake it off. We tell ourselves it was coincidence, pattern-matching, the brain's talent for finding connections where none exist. We go on with our day. But what if you couldn't...
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The Corollary of Every Prayer
Human Meme
What does it mean to say amen? We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine. But what happens when someone refuses to say it? I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional Fiction. Because the two are inseparable. The methodology creates the meaning, and the meaning demands the methodology. Let me start with a scene.
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The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction
Human Meme
The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record.
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The Last Living American White Male: A Novel
Human Meme
What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. Education. Marital status. Employment. Each checkbox a small act of self-definition performed for an audience that will never know your name. The systems do not care about you. They care about the...
info_outlinePeople sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing something you did not know before, not because the author lectured you, but because the character's experience rearranged something in your understanding.
But the specific creative archaeology of this collection, the work of recognizing that these twelve pieces belonged together and then preparing them for publication, that involved a different kind of effort. It meant going back into stories I had written years ago, sometimes decades ago, and asking whether they still meant what I thought they meant. Some of them did. Some of them had grown into something larger while I wasn't looking, the way a tree you planted as a sapling has become something you cannot get your arms around. And some of them needed work, not because they were broken but because I was different, and the book they were joining was more demanding than any of them had been on their own.