Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my fiction blog!

This site features my novella, "Dreams Before Waking," a story about a young man who runs away from home and finds himself drawn into the world of professional wrestling. I posted this work serially, in chronological order, so if you'd like to start at the beginning, you have to jump down to Post #3, Chapter 1. I've also included on this blog my essay on Charles D'Ambrosio's short story, "The Point," and another essay I have written on Marilyn Robinson's Gilead. And finally, stories and essays I have published in other venues are linked in the bio at right.

I live in Dubuque, Iowa. These days, I am focusing more on flash fiction. My most recent short-short, The Vacuum, was published in Flash Fiction Magazine in May of 2025.

I do not have lofty ambitions as a writer. I have no illusions that I can make a living at this, or that the world needs my stories. But I love to write. And of course, I want to have my work read. I am so glad I have found an audience for my work in this blog, and I hope it continues. Thank you for reading, and please drop a comment!

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Dreams Before Waking Chapter 1

1. Signs I used to think of fate as an academic term. Fate was AP English. It was Mrs. Culpanada, drifting into the rows between desks and staring us down. “Why did Oedipus kill his father?” she’d say. “Bad timing? Road rage? No, it was his destiny. His fate .” And she leaned into that word like she was mashing it into our brains, forcing us to see the world with ancient eyes. But at the time I couldn’t believe in fate. Chemistry was my favorite subject. Life was made up of molecules endlessly combining and recombining. It was complex, and it followed certain laws, but there was no cosmic engineer making it happen. Oedipus Rex was a children’s story, a fairy tale. I could see it no other way. Until I became Oedipus. There were signs beforehand, the first appearing in a thunderstorm in March, when I went out into the pounding rain to fetch Pill’s toys. We had been hanging out in the living room, Pill playing on the floor with her ...

DBW Ch 17 & 18

Yukiko had dreamed she was holding a bag of persimmons, a sweet, lumpy armful, bestowed on her by a devious woodsprite. The woodsprite had cast a spell on the persimmons, and if Yukiko ate one, she would be forced to live in the woodsprite’s cave behind the waterfall, at the base of a Mizuyama. Still she wanted badly to eat a persimmon, to savor the delicate flesh as she used to when she was a girl, when she would lie in the grass under the persimmon tree behind the summer cabin, the sky growing dark, the stars beginning to show, and the voices of her parents drifting out through the screened windows. But she was holding a pillow, not a bag of persimmons. At 4:32 in the morning, according to the green numbers floating in the dark. Her new wake-up time, for whatever reason. Insomnia was the latest onslaught. She had tried sleeping pills and herbal remedies, had tried drinking alcohol and not drinking, had given up co...

Kirsten's Fiction Notebook

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