Reader’s Response. Poets & Writers. September/October 2019.
Children, Caution. The Cleaver Magazine. Issue 24. December 4, 2018.
Phantom Tears. Ruminate Blog. October 30, 2018.
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
