I recently finished my novel AKRASIA which imagines a broken-down America where privileged citizens live in walled-in communities designed to protect them from violence and disease, where the food is healthy, the water’s clean, and children attend top-notch schools.  Tilda Reiss, a third-grade teacher newly married and pregnant, and her husband Roger, a recently retired pro baseball player, have just moved into such a community in New Liberty, N.Y., one of thousands of SafeHavens built and operated by the monolithic healthcare corporation LifeSpan.  The honeymoon ends abruptly when Tilda discovers that her long-lost father and brother are still alive and she becomes obsessed with the idea of escaping the heavily-secured town to see them again.  Her impulsive efforts set in motion a cascade of events that cause LifeSpan’s picture-perfect façade to fall apart, and result in Tilda finding her own revolutionary voice.  Ultimately, Tilda and Roger must choose between accepting a corrupt system or venturing out into a riskier but more diverse and equitable world.

Before I started writing, I worked for fifteen years as a sculptor. How does a sculptor become a writer, you might ask? Well, I always wanted to be a writer but when I tried to write short stories in high school, all that came out were flying elephants and other such nonsense (at least that’s what I thought at the time). I worked as a journalist for four years at a small summer daily newspaper but eventually found creative fluency in sculpture and worked in that field for 15 years. In 1991, as my sculpture became more narrative, I took a short story writing class at NYU taught by Carol Emshwiller (a great writer of speculative fiction and the perfect first teacher for me), and the stories came pouring out. (I credit my visual art work for unlocking and freeing up my imagination, piece by piece by piece.) But it wasn’t until 1995, after an intense run of one-person shows, and after completing my video “The Surgery” (which won the Connecticut Film & Video Competition), that I seriously focused on writing. I wanted to let my imagination loose, unencumbered by physical materials. In 1999, I graduated with an MFA in Writing from Vermont College (whose program I highly recommend).

Before embarking on my novel, I wrote short stories and have had nine published in literary magazines including Bellingham Review, Connecticut Review, Confrontation, Gargoyle, Literal Latte, Crescent Review and Hunger Mountain. Like my visual art work, my short stories tend to straddle the realm between the real and the fantastic. My characters live real lives in the real world but odd things happen to them. They live in houses made out of gingerbread, spend the day killing aphids, have friends who claim to possess talking flowers. They wake up in a different body each morning, remain vibrantly alive when submerged underwater and meet eccentric artists who yank them out of their hum-drum lives.

I didn’t set out to write a novel, but one of my short stories became longer and longer. I once asked a friend who's published many novels why she wrote novels instead of short stories. “Because I want to spend more time with my characters,” she answered simply. And that’s what happened to me with Tilda and Roger.

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