Professor, Department of English (Creative Writing)

(Fall 2026)

In our world, a heightened and yet vacant mental state came to carry all kinds of practical applications: as a driver of intuition, as a means of communing with the great out there or with the dead. Soon, though, I learned that my mother had learned to cope with my grandmother’s alcoholism by mentally disappearing. Perhaps it was a form of transgenerational haunting that caused me to unconsciously internalize my mother’s own habits of dissociation. For me as for my mother, it became survival skill. This awareness leads me through explorations of my family’s past: my friend group’s coopting by members of the New York psychological cult the Sullivanians; a fake, Wiccan kidnapping at my college surrounding a well publicized rape and murder; how the man who later became the subject of John Guare’s play and movie Six Degrees of Separation inveigled his way into our family. Through mimesis, lyric nonfiction can both enact and shine a light upon the workings of the traumatic mind, and for this reason the form has gained popularity for telling nonlinear stories inflected by trauma. The nonlinear, repetitive, insistent nature of traumatic memory informs my project, just as lyric nonfiction can put words to what Cathy Caruth and others have defined as a type of irrational memory that is impossible to remember and impossible to forget.