What I Write: A Shortlist
Updated in July 2023
I’m a beach mom, a chef’s spouse, a literature academic, and parent to a wonderful autistic child. These four facets of my life inform my essays, lyrical prose, and occasional poetry.
My Writer’s Bio (as a writer on Medium)
Free Substack Email Newsletter
Below is a shortlist of my writing by publication and topic. I constantly update it.
My Publications
If you’re a follower of my work, instead of following me wholesale you may just subscribe to any one of these focused publications.
These pubs are for collecting my writing. I don’t accept submissions.
The Lyrical Beach
The beach as material, metaphor, and memory. I’m a beach mom, and the beach mothered me. My consciousness, my inner landscape, resembles the beach in its ebbs and flows, in its shifting lines, in its unstable weather.
My Motherhood on the Beach
Moon. Womb. Sea
Boracay Island: Postcards from the Past and Present
Books and the Beach
Eat and Tell
A chef’s wife writes about home, food, and work. I wrote my way into forming a profound, even mystical, connection to food-as-language — oral, gastric, and poetic — with the help of my chef husband whose sensorial world differed from my dryer, more abstract world of words and books.
Coupling the Culinary and Literary Arts
The Depth and Drama of Dark, Grilled Vegetables
Pork Bone Tea Soup (Bak Kut Teh)
Metafictions
Temporal explorations. This is where I write about literature, where I experiment intellectually and creatively. I linger on themes like plurality, ambiguity, temporality, etc., and weave them into the ordinariness of my daily life.
My Family in Parallel Universes
Cat in the Moonlight
Returning to Many Old Notebooks, Many Old Selves
Living With the Stranger Within
Autism and Us
Discovering neurodivergence with my child. I opened this fourth publication for an emerging side of me as a mother to an autistic toddler.
I’ve lately become aware of how “autism moms” tend to write about their autistic children in ableist ways without realizing it, or without giving as much thought to what adult autistics say compared to doctors, therapists, and allies. I’m here to take on as many perspectives as I can, and to keep track of my growing knowledge and openness to this fascinating, magical, and profoundly unsettling world.
Topics
Parenting and Family
Surviving Parenthood as Minimalists, in Family Matters
I Relived My Child’s Birth in a Postpartum Dream, in Family Matters
Breaking Gender Stereotypes Through Play, in Family Matters
Parenting to Heal, in Family Matters
Sponge Mom, in Family Matters
Babies are Overwhelmingly Gracious, self-published
When Small Children Tear You to Pieces, self published
Toys and Letting Go, in Metafictions
Writing, Creativity, and Productivity
3 Grounding Habits for This Restless Creative, in 3 Things
The Unproductive Creator, in Metafictions
The Artist’s Secret to Longevity, in The Writing Cooperative
You Ache to Write Whenever You Read, in Inspired Writer
Education
Teaching Literature with Sparknotes, Google, ChatGPT, in Age of Awareness
Students Learn More, Not Less, During a Crisis, in Age of Awareness
Literary
Cat in the Moonlight (nonfiction)
The Strangeness of Pandemic Time (nonfiction)
Why I Wear My Grandmother’s Clothes (nonfiction)
Beneath a Beach Umbrella, A Couple (poem)
I See You Staring at Your Wall of Books (prose poem)
Film/TV Criticism
Terror, Beauty, Trauma in Bird Box Barcelona
The Real Horror in Haunted and Things Heard and Seen
Third World Exotic, First World Horror in Nocebo
Horror and Metafiction in The Midnight Club
Featured Work
Medium has kindly featured my work, twice. Here they are:
Letter to Students Who Are Struggling With Their Studies, in Age of Awareness
All That Hair, in The Lyrical Beach
