ABOUT 

This website and its accompanying blog were conceived in the summer of 2015 while I was sitting on my balcony in Tacoma, Washington. First and foremost, and because I was feeling a bit down about my artistic accomplishments, I wanted to create a "live" space in which I could celebrate my body of work, namely the publications relevant my memoir-in-progress, What Remains: Notes from the Field of Foreclosure, which chronicles my experience emptying and cleaning foreclosed homes in the wake of the Great Recession. Second, I saw the blog as an opportunity to come at the subject of the memoir, as well as at the memoir itself (an ever-evolving entity), from a fresh angle. Even though I have met many accomplished writers who have confessed that writing itself, let alone writing a publishable BOOK, is not easy, such confessions have been few and far between and none that I have heard have made my writing process, particularly the process of writing my memoir, any less lonely or difficult. Even some of my closest friends are mostly mute regarding the struggles they have endured while writing their books. Thus, another mission of this website, namely of the blog, is to develop a space in which I can honor the dead-ends and failures in which I might otherwise simply wallow. In other words, I want to believe these dead-ends and failures are not only an inevitable or necessary part of the process of "finding" my story but are also part of the story itself, which is, ultimately, a story not about failure so much as it is about hope, what remained in the box when Pandora closed it.