BE READY FOR THE WOMEN
Inspired by my love for the strange and the beautiful, Women in Strange Places: Stories is a collection of nine tales of suspense, psychothriller, urban dystopia, surrealism, and noir.
Playing Pretend
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The Distance Between Here & Space
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I Don't Hope for the Trees
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Swim
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We Die At Night
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The Impatient Clock
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A Drop in the Mercury
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The Tie
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Raging Love (for wherever you are)
Playing Pretend * The Distance Between Here & Space * I Don't Hope for the Trees * Swim * We Die At Night * The Impatient Clock * A Drop in the Mercury * The Tie * Raging Love (for wherever you are)
strange women
Ever since I read Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny, I’d always wanted to write a collection of stories with female main characters. There’s an exploration of soul, self, and body afforded by the darker genres that I love combining with a woman’s perspective.
In “Playing Pretend” and “I Don’t Hope for the Trees,” the lead characters confront issues of class, abuse, and trafficking. Otherworldly transitions through dreams and the womb in “The Impatient Clock” and “The Tie.” Among my favorites is “A Drop in the Mercury,” a crime story about the nature of evil.
The collection opens with my poem, “Happy Marvelous,” which was inspired by the song “Perfectly Marvelous” from the 1998 Broadway production of Cabaret. The poem engages the idea of ignorance as bliss—the happiness that exists as a peak between two hideous valleys. There is a clear before and after for the characters in the book, which also points to the resilience that comes from difficult times. You almost relish the descent from your happy peak, when you know that no matter how dark the valley gets, you will come up to the peak again… a bit stranger, too.
Strange places
While not exactly “strange,” this collection opened some very unexpected doors for me. As the book came out while I was living in San Francisco, I was already pretty active in the spoken word and art circles. I was incredibly fortunate to get the book into some amazing places on consignment including the legendary City Lights Books and Green Apple Books. I did a reading from the book at my alma mater, Beloit College, and a former professor taught “Swim” in a fiction class he was leading during a foreign semester at the University of Prague.
I promoted the book at a variety of forums and literary events, and created a themed blog and YouTube channel. It was 2009, and social media promo was in its very nascent, wild west stages. I created a series of blog posts that expanded on the plot and theme of each story. This took readers through everything from magic tricks to trauma recovery, crime statistics to sexual fetishes. The YouTube channel had a series of nine readings called Nine Weeks of Strange, where I read from the week’s story and promoted upcoming blog content.
