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Out of the Woods

Out of the Woods centers on Cassia Smith, an Indiana-born, thirty-something editor and writer for the U.S. Department of Labor who carries with her the scars of difficult childhood and teenage years. The novel follows Cassia and the people around her as each one tries to envision a better future for themselves and for a larger community.

At the opening of the story, set in the fall of 2011, Cassia arrives with her boyfriend at his brother’s house deep in the Pennsylvania woods for a weekend visit. Henry has hidden out in the former hunting lodge to escape responsibility for an affair with one of his graduate students. Cassia is both repulsed and challenged by Henry’s complacency concerning his own guilt. Before long, however, despite her doubts about him she agrees to return to the lodge to tend to Henry as he recovers from an accident.

Their interactions that follow are a part of a larger process Cassia engages with as she brings herself to recognize her own her capacity to write the story of her life. Events in the background of the story, from the rapid increase in the use of smart phones to the promises of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement, present tantalizing paths forward for the novel’s characters. Henry’s 17-year-old son is drawn to the occupation in Zuccotti Park, while his 14-year-old daughter is following in her mother’s footsteps toward more mainstream political activity. Cassia’s boyfriend, Andy, is a longtime activist looking to be vindicated by the success of Occupy.

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100 Voices: An Ecological History of the Modern World

Currently being assembled from a wide variety of published and unpublished materials, 100 Voices: An Ecological History of the Modern World draws on the latest scholarship to recount humanity’s recent history through the voices of ordinary and extraordinary people who shaped, articulated, and lived the modern experience. The voices featured are not those of the often-quoted movers and shakers of history but of lesser-known writers, such as artists, journalists, bureaucrats, and travelers, whose words reflect the feelings and conceptual worldviews of their times and places.

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In Charleston’s Light, Summer 2015

“In Charleston’s Light” is an extended poem series that brings us face-to-face with social and personal violence in America. These poems focus on events in a year marked most dramatically by the killings of worshipers at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, but it was the time, as well, of the killings of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and too many, too many more.

 Into a grove / a man ran. / Across the grove / a man saw. / In the grove / a man shot.
/ Witness is disruption. / Disruption is violence. / Good violence.