Rein of Renegades is an introduction to the young adult contemporary fantasy novel of the same name. It is prefaced with an explication of various drafts written throughout adolescence. I am trying to reclaim things I've misplaced or dropped. Over the past few years, I've had much too many trinkets to carry. There went the melodramatic allegations from my teenage writing voice, cracked on a classroom floor. There went the ability to sit, stomach deep, so steadily grounded in another world, this escape blurred with the strawberry ice cream I dripped onto the campus concrete. Writing the ideal love becomes complicated, jaded, too realistic when the hands writing it are always reaching for someone who never reaches back at the right time

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Home Planet is a collection of travel essays about climate change. Like most works in the personal essay tradition, these essays reveal the mind as it works its way through a problem or question, all while inviting writer and readers to foster empathy as a mode of being. Also, like most works in the travel essay subgenre, these essays blend narrative, setting, and thought, suggesting important parallels between interior reflection and exterior displacement. Finally, since the essays in this collection take on climate change as their theme, they attempt to make meaning of climate-related subjects like extreme heat, mass extinction, and ice patch archaeology. Ultimately, the force that unites these essays is love. By describing, hinting at, and plainly stating love for people, landscapes, and more-than-human beings, the essays invite readers to consider their own relationship to the Earth, especially during a time of environmental crisis.

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Shallow Bones is a creative thesis examining the culture of persecution within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints alongside my own story of persecution as a gay man. The religion rose through persecution as Joseph Smith, the prophet of the church, faced harassment and personal attacks from outsiders. His assassination spurred devote followers to move west, away from their persecutors. Setting up in the Utah territory, early Mormons feared invasions to the point that they murdered pioneers passing through Mountain Meadows. Murderers hid their wrongdoing, and the religion has institutionalized a pattern of persecution—blaming others for attacks while denying responsibility for choices that harm others. The recent suicide of Jack Reese, a gay teenager in Northern Utah, has shown how some in the religion continue to persecute others while burying the guilt for these acts. My own story follows my own experience of persecution within the church. Self-hatred came from lessons I learned as a child, both within the church and from my families. I almost attempted suicide, but I decided to reach out for help. Unlike Jack Reese’s family, my family worked towards acceptance. Although the culture around pushed me towards despair, I learned how to accept myself. These historical and personal threads within the creative thesis come together to show that Utah’s violent history continues to push persecution onto people every day; however, I was able to find a way to love myself while surrounded by ongoing hatred. Even when the predominant culture actively discriminates against a group, people have hope to escape the cycle of persecution.

Desolation is Key: Essays is a collection of eight personal essays that revolve around the themes of the redemptive qualities of desolation in nature; the legacy of violence in the family and in the relationship between man and his environment; and the struggle of the speaker to reconcile her adult self to the burdens of inheritance and loss from her childhood. The content is a blending of exterior observation and interior meditation; it straddles the line between narrative journalism and memoir, which allows the narrator both to treat the exterior as an entry point for personal reflection, and to use the personal as a frame to connect with more universal human experience. In addition to thematic connections, the essays share a setting: Southern California, and in particular, the Colorado Desert region in the southeastern corner of the state. Circling back to this desert setting again and again works as a frame for the speaker to contemplate the death of her parents, and her relationship with her father, who died by suicide more than two decades ago. As the essays build upon each other, family lore and personal recollection aggregates and culminates in what eventually becomes a full picture of the situation surrounding the father's death, and the reasons behind its haunting legacy for the speaker.

On my good days, I find that I am often generous with my species. I let the driver in the Hummer merge into my lane with a wave, pick up litter, open doors for stragglers, and give loose change to beggars. On my bad days, I too easily curse (quietly) at the rude and the clueless, keep my hands in my pockets, my head down, and my shoulders hunched. My gait becomes slightly simian. That I can swing with graceful agility from one orientation to the other (often without anyone actually knowing) used to disturb me. I suppose I grew up believing I had to be one kind of person or the other. Not anymore. Perhaps I'm finally reconciled to the fact that I am human; that is, a creature with a consciousness, a being of sometimes-exhausting contradictions, a repository of living memories, an almost-virtuous and curious animal. I've landed, finally, in gray territory, which is where, as it turns out, I always hoped I would. The personal essays in this thesis explore this fluid nature of my (our) creatureliness. As a Catholic priest and a writer, my intention was to use the sacraments of the Catholic Church (Baptism, Eucharist, Confession, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Anointing of the Sick) as points of departure, and to allow each sacrament to provide me a lens and a perch through which (and from which) I might see our species anew. Aware that these seven sacraments mark the life--from birth to death--of a Catholic, I saw them as a useful and invisible thread that would give these essays thematic cohesion. Recognizing that this exploration was going to be more spelunking than mountain climbing, this sacramental thread became a rope with which I could jump down into some fascinating dark places without getting lost or stranded. In the end, these seven essays attempt to get at a few questions that have haunted me for years: Why have I not given up on my species yet? Why do I still believe in the innate goodness of human creatures? From where do I draw the strength to go spelunking into the darkest warrens of the human heart? These essays eschew the easy answers. They rather delight instead in dark places, illuminated, for a second, by one shaky candle.

This is a creative work in the genre of non-fiction writing, in the sub-genre of memoir. When Again Comes Back to You is a memoir that traces the effects of abuse as it works upon the life of a young girl who grows in the shadow of an abusive family. As the girl grows, and becomes a mother herself, the story explores how the effects of abuse can extend into the next generation.

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