Introduction and sample chapter from "Broken Covenant of Salt," a first project in the creative nonfiction genre. It explores my participation as an untrained farmhand and rural interloper during the last year of a small family farm (my wife's family) in northwestern Minnesota. Since my first visit to "The Sheep Ranch," I sensed an intense “salt of the covenant”—a phrase conjured up from a past life in seminary; the agreement between farmer and land, land and nature, weather and farmer—that my impending father-in-law and so many others like him felt for this place, the bitterness that often ensues, the cruelty it inflicts, the daily vicissitudes countered or exacerbated by jerry-rigged decisions, the confidence of experience, the satisfaction of plans going accordingly, the relief brought with every healthy newborn, the anticipation with each pound a calf gains, thankfulness for the sun, elation when an engine simply fucking turns over. And maybe it was just the trigger I needed, in Richard Hugo’s sense of the term, to better know my peculiar place called Baltimore.

Short story"Memory Foam," one of thirteen stories in the collection "Salt Box, Foam House." Six stories are set in adolescence (Salt Box) that explore overt physical violence and six are set in adulthood (Foam House) that explore subtle emotional violence, with a middle transitional story that acts as a fulcrum or tipping point from adolescence to adulthood. All stories are set in the late 1990s during the watershed burgeoning Internet years that began to mutate real communal relationships into the false sense of community cultivated in online isolation.

The poem “Each Terminus a Beginning” was crafted for an RFP issued by the Maryland Transit Administration to 14 finalists as part of an art installation project for the 21-station Purple Line light rail planned to run across the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Each of the poem’s 21 quatrains reflects upon the history, people, or environment of that particular station’s place. Although the MTA scrapped the art project, the poem stands as a representative mosaic of a rapidly growing and diversely populated swath of land with both a rich history and checkered past.

Sample chapter from the novel "Backbeat the Waves." Set in a time between glam rock and filthy punk, “Backbeat the Waves” washes over the summer of 1977 that changed Mercury Widdershins’s life. Merck’s life completely spazzes when his one-armed cousin arrives from Appalachia—as alien as a Wookie—bringing with her a weird look, strange words, a radical attitude, and ultimate questions. Together, they discover their own liberating music, their unique sexual identities, and their separate solutions to what the future holds. “Backbeat the Waves” explores liminal moments when people exist between things: city and country, adolescence and adulthood, male and female, perseverance and mortality. For a summer that witnessed the death of a universal “king” and the interstellar launch of human culture, the most dramatic events happened at home.