PROSE and POETRY.
If I understood mathematics, I would've studied to be a theoretical physicist. These are the folks who sit by lakes sketching thought experiments on the surface of the water so they can make sense of the world. They know that concrete observation and sensory experience can't explain the whole picture. The important questions and answers arise from thinking "what if." Fiction goes after truth in the same way.
For both the scientist and writer, fiction is more logical and provides more clarity than does reality. Einstein was a huge proponent. Besides telling us that E=MC squared, he also explained "if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Books and thought experiments are created by the imagination, and yet they are structured, well planned, and introduce characters (whether a Great Aunt or an electron) who impeccably align with a purpose. Unlike life, we have control over our imagination, and just as quantum mechanics tells us that for every person's circumstance there are an infinite number of possibilities, we can look forward to an infinite number of stories. One writer chooses one possibility and a second chooses another. The hero lives. The hero dies. The hero falls in love, or falls down a flight of stairs, or climbs the stairs, or a mountain, or the hero isn't a hero.
Stories give us the most fundamental of all truths: We are beings of infinite possibility and we live in a world without limits.
FICTION
A novelist shares the fate of Scheherazade: to survive death, her story has to keep the reader in suspense and wondering what will happen next. The strangest thing about fiction is that it makes more sense than what is real, and it's certainly more truthful.
POETRY
A poem is not something to be understood or interpreted. Its meaning isn't necessarily in its verbs or metaphors. A poem doesn't really tell us anything. It communicates through touch and sight. It gives us a light by which we might see the world (or a part of it) . Sometimes, when the light is bright enough, a poem can show us who we are.
ORANGE 5 is my debut novel currently being edited. When I first started the book, it was set in the future. In very quick order, our present has nearly caught up to the book's timeline.
Seventeen year old Kerrick Loudin has kept himself in the dark long enough and its time he learned the reason his brother was murdered by British Intelligence when they were both kids. Strangely, the person most able to help him is his brother's killer.
The Bizarre History of My Mother's Italian Family is a partially fictionalized and illustrated story about a mysterious painting that was passed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years. It tells the tale of how individual stories weave across time and space like threads of silk created by everyone who has come and gone and are no longer remembered. It is the story of how lives that have been lived are part of what is now.
On Being in A World That Belongs to Others is a book of over 40 poems along with illustrations on my experiences as a wife, mother, daughter and woman in a world where others take precedence. These are poems about enduring, escaping, remembering, and searching for a voice. Due out 2021.