Guest host on Bloom with Tall Poppy Writers. October 2018.
via Amy Impellizzeri and Cynthia Swanson. #BloomBlogWeek
‘In conversation with Anna Quinn,’ author of THE NIGHT CHILD Anderson’s Bookstore, Naperville, IL. August 2018.
Welcomed with warmth and compassion at a reading of MODEL HOME. Honored and grateful.
Young Children: An Excerpt (fiction). Illinois Emerging Authors: An Anthology of Fiction. Z Publishing House. July 2018.
Excerpt:
I didn’t really believe the trailer home perched in the backyard of my family’s black and white ranch would bring me happily-ever-after, but I was willing to give it a try.
Anything was better than what was folded between those walls. I let my eyes wander to the kitchen window at the back of the house, where Mother surely stood, cigarette twinned in her fingers, watching, waiting.
I sigh and kick off my drug store flip-flops, lemon yellow, and assess my ankles: swollen. Golden. Toes: frosted pink. I lower to the old, low-slung sofa and close my eyes. My head bounces gently on the flimsy window behind me. Weren’t the swollen ankles supposed to subside once the baby was born? I poke at the puffy flesh with a finger. It bounces back, spongy, resilient.
I groan, wriggle lower so my back is wedged between the back cushions, like a hug. I cradle my head between the corded piping, poking at my skull, muffling the wails of Baby Amy.
How could she be awake already? Didn’t newborns sleep? A lot?
With every wail, the trailer sways slightly. How can one little pair of lungs generate that much energy? I hear it then, a hot wind whistling through the cracks of the cheap metal frames, a wail all its own, intermingling with the baby’s. Mom insisted on the window unit, the one pumping frigid air through the tight space, condensation dripping like the promises he made.
[cover image source: https://www.zpublishinghouse.com/collections/modern-anthologies/products/illinoiss-emerging-writers-an-anthology-of-fiction?variant=8031637241886. Retrieved 9.5.18]
Material. Pithead Chapel. Vol 7, Issue 5. May 2018.
[Cover art by Alexis Rhone Fancher]
Pretentious Backside: A Story of an Abandoned House. Common Ground Review. Fall/Winter 19.2 (March 2018).
Excerpt: “Today, if I didn’t have to stay alert for the children, I’d like to do absolutely nothing but dream into this whole back-of-the-house space where yard touches yard, touches yard—nine in all— pooled within the elliptical loop of Mayfair Lane, the sky a brilliant blue, and the tittering of leaves, legions of birds and squirrels, the errant chipmunk. For a moment, the sun sparks shards of butter-yellow and mystic white, a mirage on the less pretentious sides of homes, flattened and shapeless. A plastic pool perches on its side, a layer or sludge sluicing at the rim, a holdover from when the days were trapped under a bubble of humidity. From my vantage point, if I twist to the right, an overturned flower pot, its contents gritty and dark, smeared and marred across the patio of my neighbor, who, God-love-her, doesn’t have a green thumb to save her life.”
Growing Up with a Mother Who Experienced Psychosis. The Mighty. February 2018
Is Writing a Memoir Automatically Therapeutic? A Craft Essay on Writing about Mental Illness. Cleaver Magazine. January 2018
My Mother is Crazy. Manifest-Station. January 2018
Help! My Parent Has Bipolar Disorder. International Bipolar Foundation. December 2017.
Sorting. The Nervous Breakdown. November 2017
What I Had Wished I’d Said, but Didn’t. Juncture Notes. October 2017
Growing Up with a Psychotic Mother. Psych Central. October 2017
Interview with Laura McHugh in trade paperback edition of ARROWOOD: A Novel. Random House, June 2017
Your Mother Before She Was Your Mother. Gina Sorell’s Discover Your Mother Blog Series. April 2017. (MOTHERS & OTHER STRANGERS. Prospect Park Books, May 2017)
SPEAKING OF APRAXIA: A Parents’ Guide to Childhood Apraxia of Speech. Woodbine House, 2012. Editor: Susan Stokes.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
―Ernest Hemingway
