This project started as inspections of violence in different forms, specifically childhood violence. I created scenes of lost youth and displacement and some kind of fragmentation, or eruption of violence, that seemed to also justify the fragmented nature of the scenes, and how they may have been jaggedly connected. Then I had a strong urge to novelize the characters I had written, I wanted to tell their full story. The narrator Christian overtakes the novel, so it could be described as an i-novel really. He isn’t always an active participant in the action of what’s happening in the scenes, but he’ll sit back as more of an observer. The narrator’s most salient feature is his need to connect, as he presents a series of failures in accessing, or being accessible to, his friends.

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Talking Underwater is a collection of short stories that examine the universal yet intimate terrain of human relationships. The characters—lovers, family, and strangers alike— consistently seek connection, inciting nuanced questions about vulnerability, pain, and the need to be seen.

"a testament to sacrilege" is an autofiction that handles queer identity, monstrosity, religious trauma, and mental illness. Refusing to bend into traditional narrative structure, the work instead fluctuates between the known and the not-known; a work that acts as wet cloth in either a balm or a drowning. What makes a monster? What does it mean to be good? Weaving narrative prose, essay writing, and memoir, “a testament to sacrilege” follows three phases in the life of the narrator and Mouse - a dissociative state the narrator is able to access only through trauma. Focused on the power of feminine relationships in the face of violence, the 40,000-word collage uses erasure text to simulate the experience of OCD as it is felt by the author. While the work is necessarily delicate, it is also hopeful - Mouse and the narrator learn to work through recovery. While the narrator is inevitably able to overcome her past, “a testament to sacrilege” is not interested in the specifics of suffering: instead, it is interested in what it takes to survive that suffering. The initial opening to “a testament of sacrilege” was the recipient of the 2021 Harvey Swados Fiction award.

Longing and avoidance are both in play in the lives of Liv and August, two single people at the cusp of middle age who meet while trying to help Santo, a young illegal immigrant, and his son find a place to live. The two circle about each other and eventually fall in love, but almost as quickly old patterns reassert themselves for both. These challenges must be acknowledged and a new way envisioned before the love Liv and August share can mature into something more durable.

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Racing Fire to the River is a novella about a poverty-stricken community in the Southwest navigating hardship, violence, and the tantalizing mania of an unclaimed lottery ticket jackpot.

The term "science fiction" has in itself a contradiction: if science is truth, and fiction is make-believe, how can the two come together? The authors, readers, and fans of science fiction have come together to create a set of informal rules for how to deal with this contradiction, allowing fictional science when it is realistic, rigorous, backed up by evidence (which I call empiricism), and free of any obvious bias (which I call objectivity). There are areas, though, where these rules break down. Some of these areas are tied to genre, centered on works that may or may not be science fiction or the larger umbrella genre of speculative fiction, including fantasy. But some of these areas seem not to have a clear cause, causing friction within the larger speculative fiction community. Studies of science and engineering, I argue, offer an explanation: realism, rigor, empiricism, and objectivity are frequently used to hold women and people of color to higher standards than other community members and epistemologically privilege white and male experiences. Women and people of color in science and engineering are told that their work is incorrect or unrealistic without basis; they are told that their work is insufficiently rigorous; they are told that their evidence is not as good as it is, or their work is attributed to someone else entirely; and they are told that they are not capable of being unbiased and producing unbiased work. I argue that these expectations have been translated into science fiction, potentially contributing to arguments and disputes that have caused significant conflict in the community. I look at novels that were nominated for a major speculative fiction award, the Hugo Award, between 2008 and 2012 to see how authors establish made-up facts in their texts. I then analyze online book reviews of those same texts to see if there are patterns in how readers respond to these speculations. Lastly, I look at statements by the authors themselves to document their experiences of both writing and how readers have interacted with them about the reception of their texts. I find that, much like in science and engineering, the rules about realism, rigor, empiricism, and objectivity are enforced differently against women and people of color, which potentially indicates that the cultural view of science has these inequitable norms embedded into it. / Doctor of Philosophy / The term "science fiction" has in itself a contradiction: if science is truth, and fiction is make-believe, how can the two come together? The authors, readers, and fans of science fiction have come together to create a set of informal rules for how to deal with this contradiction, allowing fictional science when it is realistic, rigorous, backed up by evidence (which I call empiricism), and free of any obvious bias (which I call objectivity). There are areas, though, where these rules break down. Some of these areas are tied to genre, centered on works that may or may not be science fiction or the larger umbrella genre of speculative fiction, including fantasy. But some of these areas seem not to have a clear cause, causing friction within the larger speculative fiction community. Studies of science and engineering, I argue, offer an explanation: realism, rigor, empiricism, and objectivity are frequently used to hold women and people of color to higher standards than other community members. Women and people of color in science and engineering are told that their work is incorrect or unrealistic without basis; they are told that their work is insufficiently rigorous; they are told that their evidence is not as good as it is, or their work is attributed to someone else entirely; and they are told that they are not capable of being unbiased and producing unbiased work. I argue that these expectations have been translated into science fiction, potentially contributing to arguments and disputes that have caused significant conflict in the community. I look at novels that were nominated for a major speculative fiction award, the Hugo Award, between 2008 and 2012 to see how authors establish made-up facts in their texts. I then analyze online book reviews of those same texts to see if there are patterns in how readers respond to these speculations. Lastly, I look at statements by the authors themselves to document their experiences of both writing and how readers have interacted with them about the reception of their texts. I find that, much like in science and engineering, the rules about realism, rigor, empiricism, and objectivity are enforced differently against women and people of color.