Merit Badges: A Novel
Winner AWP Award for the Novel and Friends of the American Writer Award
"Impressive vitality, droll wit, and affecting nostalgia. Eminently readable." -- Publisher's Weekly
“A beautifully crafted, perceptive and often funny evocation of some extraordinary, ordinary people. -- Shelf Awareness, Robert Gray’s Top 10 for 2010 (Bookseller Recommendations)
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Photo by Cory Docken
Recent writing:
Ambivalence Cafe (Great River Review): an essay about being 17 in Winona, Minnesota in 1976 and creating imaginary Rolling Stones albums, and about the role of music in shaping who we are.
Hope’s Propulsive Sinews (Notre Dame Magazine): a meditation on hope that begins with a consideration of Margaret Atwood and Flannery O’Connor but proceeds to an appreciation of the women who raised me.
Recent enthusiasms:
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes: I had been reading history for a few months, and then picked up this, and it reminded me what fiction can do, how it can be insanely imaginative and ambitious but also deeply human. In Ascension is set in a future where humanity becomes capable of deep space exploration; the result is microbial and cosmological, the story of a single flawed scientist and the sweep of life on this planet, deeply weird and oddly familiar. Julie Schumacher once taught a terrific class called Fiction: Large Canvas. This is the book we were all looking for.
