What is a real life? A well-lived life? And how do we define either? Baby Bird & the Electronic Abyss is a collection of personal essays that questions and explores escapism and existentialism as experienced at music festivals and campsites around the United States. Within this collection, festivals are illustrated as more than just spectacular stages and bright lights—they're depicted as fascinating, budding utopias that encourage creativity, generosity, and positivity from attendees who abandon inhibitions, and oftentimes logic, in the name of fleeting freedom from the routine of their "real" lives. The narrator strives to live a fulfilled life—what many might call a well-lived life, if not a privileged life—but she struggles to identify her life as meaningful as she works to disentangle the falsities of her "real" life as typically defined by society, a corporate, desk life in between festivals, and her electric life, an actualized but less publicly-accepted life at festivals. She repeatedly contemplates her relationship with art, and whether or not art offers a sort of immortality to those who pursue it. As a festival-goer, she finds that the art of music takes her away from her own art, writing, but her writing is about the festivals, so a love/hate relationship grows with the festivals over time. Many of these essays, such as "In a Tent, a Home," "Rebecca," "We Left Town," and "I Don't Wanna Wear No Shoes," ruminate on how dislocation and travel can be fulfilling occasions for further ontological inquiry. Other essays, including "They Call Me Baby Bird," "Monterey, Babe," and "When the Fire Dancers Come Alive at Night," focus on music and entertainment, and a kind of resulting debauchery that compels the narrator to reflect on her moral incontinence, inability to identify reality, and jaded self-appraisal.

Go Ahead, Daytona is a collection of essays meant to explore the experiences and lessons learned through law enforcement. It juxtaposes hope with cynicism and encourages the reader to explore his or her own biases through the lens of a narrator believing police work is something to be lived down, rather than up. The essays depict struggles with hypocrisy, sex, homelessness, violence, moral ambiguity, and self-awareness.

Hunting Down Pigs is a hybrid collection of personal essays, ranging from lyrical to braided, which more often than not defy labeling. The essays explore themes of loss, faith, and self-reliance. Growing up Mormon, with all its strictures, and losing her dad at a young age, made faith an issue that the narrator grappled with continuously throughout her life. The narrator questions the validity and purpose of religion in essays like "Possibilities" and "Going to Church." Specifically, the narrator explores the doctrine of the Mormon church and the effects of such a strict upbringing. When divine intervention fails, the narrator must learn to transfer her faith in God to a personal faith in herself. In essence, this is a coming of age story for the late bloomer, for the forty-something woman who has realized or needs to realize that you can't rely on God or a man to save you— you have to save yourself, and in doing so you will receive the gift of faith in yourself.

(In)Tangible Things is a collection of memoir essays and poems that examines loss, pain, and identity. Many pieces explore familial ties through separation, secrecy, and divorce, while other stories and poems observe the author's connection to drag culture, sexuality, eating disorders, and time itself. Using techniques such as framing devices, backwards storytelling, and delineated narrative, the author invites the reader to experience memories and moments from his past that show consistency and change, betrayal and forgiveness.

Heavy Hit Me is a memoir series linking obesity to sexual desire and its corresponding fear, linking fantasy to the lived loneliness of a girl too distrusting of her own body and attractions to live outside her own head. Told through essay, found letters, and shifting points of view, Heavy Hit Me explores the breadth of its protagonist's chosen isolation. It shows how the many itches of insecurity craft a young woman never challenged to really know and love herself—until now.

Golden Years is the culmination of the author's studies in Creative Nonfiction writing, with attention to hybrid forms of the genre, combined with her professional background in screenwriting, and research interests in nostalgia and cultural preservation in the modern age. In the collection of essays, the author blends established forms of Creative Nonfiction, such as the braided essay, with literary conventions borrowed from other forms of written communication, such as the screenplay ("You Must Remember This," "Driver's Seat"), the cookbook ("Tip of my Tongue"), a travel guide ("A Trolley Runs Through It") and fabulist fiction ("Selkie on the Shore"). Through these hybrid forms, Golden Years explores the narrator's fascinations with music, cinema, and fashions of the past, with crafting the perfect pot of vegetarian chili, and with marine mammals. Through the blending of personal essay with cultural criticism, the author explores how these loves have shaped her relationship with the world around her.

A mosaic of past and present, mother and daughter, body and spirit: A Kind of Ghost inhabits memory and imagined spaces, haunting and begging to be remembered.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.