SELECTED ESSAYS
 

Travesty Show: An Illustrated Correspondence
with Nicholas Muellner in Jewish Currents

Those older Ukrainians who claim they have no idea what happened to the Jews, I am told, are precisely the ones who know: Their knowingness is signaled by their pretending not to know.

This Is Not a #YomHaShoah Instagram Post
Jewish Currents

If I type #NeverAgain, it’s to ask that my grandparents #NeverAgain be instrumentalized, #NeverAgain put to work, not for Nazi gain or your gain or mine, not for likes.

On Not Eating the Marshmallow
The Kenyon Review

See, maybe hope is always fear-fueled. A kind of violent running from the present. Refusing to sober up or come down, you stay high on potential, on the future, on “will.”
 

At the Shiva
Gulf Coast

The cardboard boxes decorated to resemble tree stumps were something to grieve for in themselves.

Home of the Harlequin Ladybird
Tin House

Now I greet them when I come home—“Hey, guys!”—in the same voice I use to greet chin hairs before I pluck them, each wiry time they arise.
 

Trump Dads
The Rumpus

And our Clinton moms go to sleep beside them, as they have for so, so many years.
 

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge
The Nashville Review

She wheels the bike uphill to look for the rest of her groceries, but all she finds is a cucumber roughly halved at its waist, and she pretends it isn’t hers.
 

Not Weird About Brooklyn
The Paris Review Daily

It seemed typical of New York that the person to answer the ad would be someone of my precise demographic, as if the posting’s imagery and syntax could communicate only with people exactly like me.
  

Recurring Dog & Rare Thing
(9 Years, 13 Dreams)
The Collagist

A dog so ugly it looked like a glass bottle; so stray that when my sister was walking it and it got lost and we found it—looking just like a medical waste container—we couldn't be sure it was it.
 

The New Oxford American Tells a Story
Okey-Panky

Not another word passed between them. See BATON. See BUCK. See HAT. See LIP. See MUSTER. See PARCEL. See TIME.
 

Are You My Mother?: An Unfaithful Imitation
The Seneca Review

You could say the pull toward narrative is so strong, it destroys truth.
 

Fallacy in Puffy Paint, c. 1992
Electric Literature

There was a time when I wandered the earth with a puffy-paint penis on my shoulder.  

CRITICISM & OPINION
 

Entering the DreamSpace
Jewish Currents

What kind of resistance is rest?

Against Copyediting
Literary Hub

Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive?

Against Impossibility
Jewish Currents

Who benefits when we decide—or accept—that the splinters of history are “beyond repair”?

The Best Sex I Ever Had Was (Also) a Narrative Structure
Literary Hub

On expectation, eagerness, and enjoyment.

What Your Draft Says About You
Literary Hub

What if the moments of resistance we encounter in our drafts—and in our drafting process—were trailheads, capable of leading us deeper into the work?

Practice Imagining Change
A Workshop Manifesto
Poets & Writers / Literary Hub

We can teach writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise, and doing so will help us avoid reproducing systemic oppressions, damaging students psychologically, and stunting creative work.
 

Not Another Holocaust Book
Jewish Currents

Could it be that the only way to write about the Shoah today is by hardly writing about it at all?
 

A Non-Mother's Hunger for the Writing of Motherhood
Los Angeles Review of Books

How do these mother-writers mother my writerhood?
 

Against Clichés Against Clichés: A Manifesto
The Millions

WHEREAS: it is a cliché of the creative writing workshop to discourage a writer’s use of cliché...
 

When Plagiarism Is a Plea for Help
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Next time a student hides her thinking behind someone else’s, what I’d like to do is not fail her, but try to help her not fail.
 

Don't Eat This Marshmallow
Los Angeles Review of Books

It’s hard not to love a book with “marshmallow” in its title, the same way it's hard not to love an experiment with a marshmallow as its mascot.
 

Instability & the Essay
Essay Daily

The essay is an action, as unstable and open to interpretation as any struggle between selves.
 

Won't You Be My Wireless Neighbor?
The New York Times

To belkin54g, Cooley and, above all, to the blessed Belkin_G-Plus_MIMO of Ditmas Park: Thank you.

Writing Offline
Electric Literature

Painters, actors, musicians, you have it so easy! You veritable farmers! Alone and unbothered out there with your seedlings: watering, harvesting, bearing fruit.