Work samples

  • Isn't It Fun How We Shine: A podcast of flash nonfiction
    Isn't It Fun How We Shine: A podcast of flash nonfiction

    ISN'T IT FUN HOW WE SHINE is a podcast about a neighborhood in Baltimore City's Westfield area during the Great Recession. Written as bits of flash nonfiction and interspersed with interviews and behind-the-scenes reveals, the podcast will chronicle the struggles of neighbors during an international crisis they can't control. Tender and often funny, these vignettes shape several narratives as people work to keep their neighborhood intact. A woman will go door-to-door asking for loans to pay her mortgage. A fellow with a chronic illness will give his house back to the bank. But also a man will break in through a second-floor window to rescue a dead neighbor's trapped cats. And a retiree will make a memorable cameo doing the hokey-pokey in a John Waters film.

    Excerpts of the podcast's writing have been published in a variety of literary journals and been recognized as notable in Best American Essays. I invite you to visit "Isn't It Fun How We Shine" under projects to read examples of the flash nonfiction and to listen to audio.

    The manuscript takes its title from graffiti spray-painted on a neighborhood dumpster: "Do Not Stop / Isn't it Fun How We Shine." The podcast is currently in production, made in collaboration with Dr. Jeremy Wexler, a musician and composer. The project began with assistance from a Rubys grant funded by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

  • My Little All 'n' All: a song biography
    My Little All 'n' All: a song biography

    "What kind of song is that?" asked Lonnie Chatmon, fiddler for the Mississippi Sheiks, that moment in 1929 after his partner, Walter Vinson, played him a tune he'd just written.

    One answer? “Sitting on Top of the World,” first recorded in 1930 by the Sheiks, is a shapeshifter, having been performed or recorded hundreds of times in everything from jazz to bluegrass to Texas swing, folk, and rock and gospel. In that way it's a deeply American song, one that migrates across genres, regions, and race, and meaning.What kind of song? One that for decades has held me with an inexplicable grip. One that led me to a literary memoir-essay in The Georgia Review, which in turn led me to my newest and ongoing book project: to write a song biography and tell the tale of this amazing, transcendent work of American art.

    To read the essay, please see "My Little All 'n' All" under projects.

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About Michael

Baltimore County

I am a literary artist, working in fiction and nonfiction. Though I've lived all over the country, I've called Baltimore home since 2007, living first in the city and for the last two years just across the city line in Baltimore County.

I've authored three books and published individual stories and essays in some of the country's top literary journals including Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Southern Review, and Georgia Review. A one-time newspaper reporter, I shifted… more

View Michael's Resume
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FICTION: The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist: A Novel

"Pain has no limits. It's infinite. Like God."

This novel, published by Acre Books in May 2018, reimagines the life of Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist and anesthesia pioneer. Its first chapters received a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. It was a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year in Historical Fiction. The Los Angeles Review of Books called it "hypnotic" and "a fascinating story."

In December 1844, Wells encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas—then an entertainment for performers in carnival-like theatrical acts—and began administering the gas as the first true anesthetic. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity’s relationship with pain.

But that discovery would also thrust Wells into scandals that threatened his reputation, his family, and his sanity—hardships and triumphs that resonate in today’s opioid epidemic and our ongoing grappling with what hurts us and what we take to stop the hurt.

  • A tool of 19th-century dentistry for the cover
    A tool of 19th-century dentistry for the cover
    The cover of THE STRANGE AND TRUE TALE OF HORACE WELLS, SURGEON DENTIST: A NOVEL, designed by Barbara Neely Bourgoyne and published by Acre Books, May 2018.
  • The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist
    This video serves as a book trailer for my novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. The film was shot and edited by David Grossbach. The script and narration are mine. (I also served as camera and prop assistant)
  • Wells excerpt
    In this excerpt from The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, the main character has his tooth pulled while on nitrous oxide, the first instance of painless surgery in human history. "Thus does the map of the known world widen and its mysteries multiply."

    • FICTION: The Greatest Show

    THE GREATEST SHOW: STORIES, a collection of ten linked short stories published by Louisiana State University Press. Three of the stories received special commendation in the Best American Short Stories series as "distinguished stories."

    THE BOOK
    Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.

    Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore how kindness and time work in the aftermath of disaster.

    • Greatest_Baker.jpeg
      Greatest_Baker.jpeg
      The book cover for "The Greatest Show: Stories," published by Louisiana State University Press as part of its Yellow Shoe Fiction series. The cover was designed by Laura Gleason.
    • ania.pdf
      The story "Ania," first published in The Georgia Review, opens the collection "The Greatest Show."
    • Foreword Magazine reviews THE GREATEST SHOW
      This review of THE GREATEST SHOW from Foreword magazine calls the book, "an auspicious fiction debut."

    • NONFICTION: House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City

    HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY combines reportage and memoir to tells the true story of five young men who met as high school athletes and who as a group pledged their lives to Hartford, Connecticut, promising to bring college degrees home and to live and work in their broken city. It won the River Teeth Prize for Literary Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the Saroyan Prize and the Connecticut Book Award in Biography and Memoir. It was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

    The stories of the young protagonists involve murder, love, sacrifice, success at the highest levels of college football, marriage, birth and death, a beating at the hands of police, a drug-sting that fells a high school coach, and a final reunion of friends who have learned how hard it is to simultaneously love their city and live for the future. The book also traces the life of the author’s family through four generations as they live in and leave Hartford, abandoning the author’s ailing grandparents to a city that shows little mercy. The book explores essential questions: What happens to those we leave behind? How do we make peace with the past we have sacrificed? How do we make peace with ourselves when we can no longer help the places – the Hartfords – that we once called home?
     

    • The cover of HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE
      The cover of HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE
      The cover for HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY, winner of the River Teeth Prize for Literary Nonfiction. The cover background is detail from a quilt, "All that Amazing Jazz," by Hartford, Connecticut quilt artist Ed Johnetta Miller. Photo by John Ryan.
    • downs_hogh.pdf
      These are the prologue and first chapter of HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE: A PROMISE FOR A BROKEN CITY, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.