Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement:

I enjoy using the process of writing fiction to reach clarity through emotion. I’m drawn to characterization: asking questions, seeking resolutions through fictional folk pieced together like a mosaic. Using imagination as well as facets of my own experience, family, friends, and those of my past and present settings, I begin with character and push out.

While At Headlands:

Twelve years after the big bang of my debut work-in-progress novel, Peach Seed Monkey, the light at the end of the tunnel is blinding. I will have to wear sunglasses as I continue final revisions at Headlands. This is an American story; many voices convey the complexities of place and people—from pre-slavery Senegal, West Africa to present day southwest Georgia. At the story’s core, two people battle the consequences of history’s sweep and personal choice.

As an art medium, the novel’s unique strength is dramatizing inner conflict [Robert McKee]. I’ve gotten to know my characters infinitely since the time we met. From my Headlands studio, I’ll use that knowledge to also begin mapping the story’s development across three mediums—novel/play/screenplay—to eventually render Peach Seed Monkey large for the screen (extra-personal conflict) and intimately for the stage (personal conflict).

Selected Texts

The Waiting Room, 2011/2018

Brownland Browsing, 2012