Some other cool stuff I’ve written and worked on.

Eikaiwa Bums Chapbook

Fiction and Nonfiction

• Do You Really Need an MFA to Become a Writer? – Insight into what opportunities grad school can offer aspiring writers, and whether you can get those opportunities more cheaply elsewhere.
• Painting’s Just My Day Job – How working as a housepainter helped me develop better writing habits. From Four Ties Literary Review.
• Why I Worked Unpaid Overtime for Two Years – Article about one of my worst Day Job experiences, for Medium.com.
• Just Before the Sakura-jima Eruption – Short travel piece about my trip to the Sakura-jima volcano, one of the most active in Japan. From the Stone Bridge Press literary blog.
• Apples Are Grown in Aomori – Photo essay about my trip to northern Japan, published in Eastlit.
• Leaked Literature: Why We Should Respect Salinger’s Wishes – Essay about the 2014 bootleg J.D. Salinger manuscript and how the author shaped Holden Caulfield before The Catcher in the Rye. From The Millions.

Let’s Talk About Japan Books!

My review column on all things Japanese literature for the TRAM art and culture zine.

• Natsume Soseki Made Easy (Fall 2021)
• Loneliness, Complicated Relationships, and Hiromi Kawakami (Winter 2021)
• Tales From the JET Programme (Fall 2020)
• The Woman in the Dunes and Hopeless Monotony (Spring 2020)
• My Top 5 Haruki Murakami Reads (Fall 2019)
• Translations by Donald Keene (1922-2019) (Summer 2019)
• A Double Dose of Ruth: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword & A Tale for the Time Being: (Spring 2019)

Podcast Appearances

• Indie Book Talk: Author Names and the MFA Thesis (Novel) – My chat with Emma G. Rose and Shelley Shearer about grad school, Japan, and adding an M to my author name.
• よっぱれ英会話 (Yoppareikaiwa, English Nomikai Podcast) – I talk University Life in Japan and America with host Emmalee Manes.
• Blanketing Covers: Covers of “Careless Whisper” – I discuss covers of George Michael’s classic with hosts Danny Getz and Jon Trainor.
• Adjunct Crisis: Labor Issues in Higher Education – Watershed Unfiltered Podcast Episode 2, co-produced with Jason Hertz, where we talk with adjunct professor Chris Small about working conditions in academia.
• How Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Changed My Life –  I read my essay for Episode 125 of The Drunken Odyssey for their Books That Changed My Life series.

Book Reviews

For Shrapnel Magazine:

• Dirty Birds, by Morgan Murray (2021)
• Polar Vortex, by Shani Mootoo (2020)
• You Suck, Sir, by Paul Bae (2020)

From The Charleston Anvil

Fiction and nonfiction published in The Charleston Anvil art and lit mag. (Hard copy only)

• I Got Yelled at in the Books-A-Million Cafe for Reading a Sex Scene (Issue 4) – The title says it all.
• On the Rationality of Couplehood (Issue 3) – Some brief thoughts about relationships.
• Blissful Ignorance, Namelessness, and the Cigarette Smoking Man From The X-Files (Issue 2) – How reluctant we are to accept things we don’t want to hear.
• One Nation, Indivisible (Issue 1) – Short story about a telemarketing call gone awry.

The TRAM

From 2019-2021 I co-edited the TRAM (Toyama’s Random-Ass Magazine) a local art and culture zine for the English-speaking community in Toyama, Japan. Check out our old issues here.

New Hampshire Writers’ Project Anthologies

In 2018 and 2019 I served as editor for the Concord branch of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project Anthology, a yearly publication of local writing. It was a cool project to work on with a lot of great local writers.