Books
Novels and collections — the longer roads.
The Cartographer of Small Hours
Every night, Wren maps the sleeping city for a department that may not exist. When maps of un-built places begin arriving in her own hand, she has to decide whether she's charting the future or writing it. A novel about the loneliness of small hours and the quiet power of paying attention.
The Weight of Blue
A restorer of damaged paintings takes a commission she can't explain — a canvas that changes when no one is looking. Part ghost story, part meditation on grief and the things we can't quite finish.
Everything the Tide Returns
Twelve linked stories set along a single stretch of coast, across a century of tides. A lighthouse keeper, a girl who collects other people's letters, a town that remembers a storm that never came.
North of Ordinary
Two estranged siblings drive north to scatter their father's ashes and find the map he left them leads somewhere that isn't on any map. A road novel about the distance between people who share a name.
How the books talk to each other
None of the four is a sequel to any other, but read together they keep circling the same small set of questions: what we inherit without asking for it, what a map can hold that a photograph can't, and how much of a person survives in the objects and habits they leave behind. North of Ordinary is the most literal about inheritance; The Weight of Blue is the most literal about the objects. The Cartographer of Small Hours and Everything the Tide Returns both use a single guiding image — a map, a tide — to hold a much larger structure together, which is probably just a habit of mine dressed up as a technique.
On research, such as it is
I'm not a researcher in any rigorous sense — I'm a noticer. The lighthouse-keeping details in Everything the Tide Returns came from a handful of afternoons spent asking a retired keeper the kind of small, unglamorous questions novelists ask: what does the silence sound like, what do you miss, what did you used to worry about at 3 a.m. The restoration details in The Weight of Blue came from watching, more than reading. I trust texture I've stood inside more than facts I've only looked up, even when the facts would be more accurate.
A note on reading order
The books stand alone — start anywhere. Readers who like a slow build tend to begin with Everything the Tide Returns; those who want a single thread to pull, North of Ordinary. If you'd rather test the water first, most of these novels grew out of — or alongside — pieces in short fiction, which is a smaller, faster commitment. New work is announced first in the newsletter, and if you're curious how a book like The Cartographer of Small Hours actually gets built, that's the subject of process.