Neither Nor

Abstract

Neither Nor is a collection of eight stories that deal with characters reconciling with what it means to love and how to love well. Each character struggles in delineating themselves in the face of a vast linguistic landscape. Written primarily through an actively impersonal voice, the stories plumb the liminal distance between characters and also the distance they wrestle within themselves. This portfolio was most heavily influenced by the works of Renata Adler, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Amy Hempel, Søren Kierkegaard, Don Lee, Gary Lutz and David Foster Wallace, who’ve collectively shown me that (to borrow a line from Hempel) this is me “saying what I can’t say—this is the way I say it.”