Following is my list of works – short fiction, novels, theory, criticism, memoir, general nonfiction, and contemporary poetry collections – that develop the trope of disappearance. An additional list of articles will follow in coming months. Plays Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan and Other Plays [Mary Rose]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Read more…
This is a paper I delivered at the 2023 ALSCW conference in Houston earlier this month as part of the “Mystery and Secrecy: Ancient Origins, Modern Expressions” panel. I’ll likely cannibalize it toward later essays and eventually as part of the second disappearance manuscript currently in the works. the inflections Read more…
Indigenous women in North America disappear at ten times the rate of the general population. Cases tend to occur in Canada along Highway 16 in British Columbia, in the Pacific Northwest, and in the Dakotas, but the crisis is ongoing everywhere. The causes are various, but include a longstanding attitude Read more…
I started writing something for a Facebook group dedicated to cold cases. Within a few sentences, I saw that I was caught up in a logorrheic effort that wouldn’t work as a Facebook post. It repeats, though within a different frame, some parts of Disequilibria. * Hello, Fellow Cold-Casers! I’m Read more…
In Hisham Matar’s writing, I saw a rhetoric of missingness punctuated with lyricism. The strength of Matar’s keen lyric sense – the ways he captures small, vivid perceptions that convey a deeper and grander sense of place or situation – works as a tool for exploring missingness by catching and Read more…
I have come to write, think, teach, and believe according to categories of the world, and of the world as it recreates itself in my mind; those categories I call “tropes.” I borrow the word from rhetoric and literary studies, because they are two disciplines that have shaped me. “Trope” Read more…
In the podcast series “The Vanished,” produced by Marissa Jones, a recent episode focused on Madeline Babcock, who went missing in 1968. Generally, “The Vanished” episodes present lengthy phone interviews with people connected to the cases, framed in an overall narrative. When I listen, I’m searching for small details that Read more…
Disequilibria has its many chords. This blog series might lead to fruitful projects toward a second work, perhaps also within the scope of missingness. One way I’m thinking toward a follow-up work exploring missingness is to focus in a more sustained way on place and space as theoretical concepts, somewhat Read more…
Near the end of their two-year period of close friendship, Herman Melville passed on to Nathaniel Hawthorne a story he’d picked up in New England from a New Bedford lawyer. In the letter he wrote to Hawthorne, he argued it would make a fine piece of fiction. The story was Read more…
After a violent conflict with his father, Martin Guerre, sixteenth-century Gascon peasant of Basque origin, leaves behind his young wife, Bertrande, and infant son. Eight years later, Martin Guerre returns. The man claiming to be Martin knows everyone in the village. He possesses memories of intimate details. This Martin is Read more…