Stories & Essays
A Home for Vagrant Animals
An exploration of what is “natural,” infertility, IVF, and animals infesting my house.
Adventuring with my Disabled Mom Healed me Too
After my mom suffered a massive stroke that left half of her body paralyzed, my family and I decided to create adventures where none seemed possible.
A Year in Africa Peeling Oranges
Reflections on my year in Ghana, at 19, when I believed enough of my love could save anything. That saving was required.
The Blind Prophets of Easter Island
What watching Jacques Cousteau taught me while holding my boyfriend’s baby.
After Losing My Mom, I didn’t Know How to Be a Bride
The complications of becoming a bride without my feminist, non-traditional mom to guide my way.
The Gators Have Turned
A boat ride with gators through the swamp, a reckoning with the fantasies we invent in the face of tragedy
Seneca Review (print only)
In the Midst of a Public Catastrophe, I was in My Own Private Disaster
My community came together after a tornado in Tuscaloosa, but my private grief was isolating.
PERSONAL ESSAYS
ESSAYS ON READING & WRITING
‘This World Doesn’t Exist. We don’t Live there.’
An essay about Tessa’s research for “The Red Grove, and the dozens of women I asked to imagine how their lives might be different without the possibility of violence.
The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun
A love letter to the first writer Tessa fell madly in love with.
Who Will Finish Your Manuscript When You Die?
The story of “The Finishers,” Tessa’s writing group who have pledged to write one another’s unfinished manuscripts when they die.
Reading the Margins: on Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
On encountering a heavily annotated copy of Sontag’s cancer book a few years after my own cancer experience, and what it taught me about the margins.
What to read when you Want to Run Away with the Circus
A Queer, Biracial Coming-of-Age Memoir is Equal Parts Pain and Pleasure
Tessa’s New York Times book review of “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls” by T Kira Madden.
Reading recommendations for preparing yourself to flee.
OBSESSIVE, RESEARCHED ESSAYS
How the Coney Island Saved Thousands of Babies
Premature babies were expected to die. Then, a sideshow showman invented the incubator to display the world’s tiniest people.
After Seeing
A pilgrimage to Japan to meet the man who built a phone to talk to the dead. And, a chat on that phone.
A Record of Your Body Over Time
Born from my obsession with Jacques Cousteau, a quest to piece together mythic episodes from his life
The Histories of Jacques Cousteau: a Fairytale of the Drowned
The Phone of the Wind
An investigation of the myriad and wild ways women’s hair has been used in art, as tools, and as a final remembrance of those gone
An essay in Wildsam’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park Field Guide, about how a head injury altered my vision, allowing me to finally see in new ways
SHORT FICTION
Starbaby Blooms a Tuber Rose
Choose Your Own Adventure: By Ship into the Water
Monsters
Word Problems, Arcadia Magazine (print only)
Greed, Music, Viscera: Four Windows
EXCERPTS FROM THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
Published in Earlier Iterations
MORE TO EXPLORE
The Red Grove
The Electric Woman
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