WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

PETRICHOR: A NOVEL & JOY: SEVEN ETUDES

Terror against tenderness. That’s where Petrichor begins—in a childhood where love arrives only through its opposite, where a grandmother’s dying body is the safest room in the house, where lotion on bruises is how an eleven-year-old learns what care feels like. The novel follows Jorie across ages, from eight to fifty, through a family shaped by displacement, violence, and the patterns women inherit from the women before them: Francisca eating salt alone for sixty years after losing a child, Bernila raised by a cousin after her mother died in childbirth, Ines choosing the wrong husband to escape her father, Jorie deciding it ends with me. The past isn’t behind these women. It’s superimposed on the present, and the novel moves the way memory actually moves—images returning in new contexts, single moments holding multiple lifetimes, petrichor rising wherever dry ground meets rain.

Then the ground saturates. What was parched takes in what it needed, and something decomposes—not into loss but into loam. The terror that shaped the early pieces loosens its grip. The containers that held what couldn’t be held (yellow bows, plantains, three taps, salt) find their resting places. Jorie, long called Marjorie, becomes Jorie on her own terms.

Joy: Seven Etudes is the fertile ground. Seven pieces—boxing, sushi, housecleaning, seeing, presence, slowing down, water—each a practice Jorie returns to until the practice becomes a way of being. Joy here isn’t the opposite of what came before and it isn’t recovery from it. It’s what grows once the ground can hold it: the capacity to begin, the steadiness of attention, the body finally at home in its own motion. Braided with difficulty, not separate from it. A ground of being rather than a response to circumstance.

Together, the two works trace an arc from drought to saturation to fertile ground.

(October 2025 to date) 

PORTRAIT PROJECT: NAIOMI 

The longitudinal project (2020 to date) is more than just an attempt to capture identity formation but it also documents how relationships evolve when given space to breathe, how the camera records transformation that happens too slowly for daily observation, how the ritual of annual meeting—a deliberate constraint—creates its own form of connection.

I photograph Naiomi once per year—no more—with only occasional text messages between sessions. We save our conversations for these annual meetings, creating a rhythm that mirrors how relationships actually develop: through accumulated time rather than constant contact. However, during our last photoshoot in September 2025, she asked me to break tradition and meet more than once yearly—a request that itself documents how our connection had evolved beyond the project’s original constraints. I agreed, uncertain whether abandoning the annual constraint would transform the very thing I was trying to document. But we’re humans, first meeting as mentor/mentee, then as photographer/subject, then as friends.

View project documentation and photos

A serialized fiction following Darwin and Jeff, two roommates navigating gig economy precarity through the absurdist machinery of platform capitalism. All ten issues now available. Camus said imagine Sisyphus happy. Darwin says imagine him invoiced.

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CIPRIANI

A short story told over wine at Grand Central Terminal. Maya and Cecilia—two women whose lives once orbited the same failing venture—meet years later to talk about Susan, who has died. What emerges is a story about credit and debt, visible and invisible labor, and who gets to be the subject of a narrative. This story asks for a particular kind of reading.

Now available in digital format (free, suggested donation) right here.

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BUTTERFLY

A school principal tells her therapist about the graduate intern she couldn’t stop wanting. Told entirely through therapy sessions, the zine follows Caroline’s obsession with Vanessa — a fixation she can’t act on within the institution that introduced them, and can’t abandon either. The story moves through attraction, boundary erosion, sexual violence, and grief, with Caroline’s earlier losses — a miscarriage, a partner who left her in Bali, parents who needed only each other — surfacing as pressure that was already there before Vanessa walked in. Photographs between sessions function as silences.

Hand-stitched edition of 6 and digital PDF available here.

View project documentation

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A TRILOGY OF DISPLACEMENT: Neural Maps, Physical Journeys, and Digital Exploitation

The zine trilogy traces displacement across three interconnected landscapes. Together, these works map displacement as both destruction and adaptation. From Mateo’s cognitive reconstruction to Edwin and Stella’s fractured reunion to Erika’s moral compromise, the trilogy reveals how survival under displacement operates across scales—neurological, intimate, and systemic—refusing the consolation of redemptive narratives in favor of precise attention to how displacement actually works.

 

 

A Study in Cartography: Fragments and Patterns

A circulation experiment tracking how 25 hand-bound copies of a fragmented narrative find their readers. The story follows Mateo, a refugee child with selective mutism, through three separate booklets that require physical reconstruction of meaning—mirroring the cognitive work trauma survivors perform daily.The project tests whether art objects designed from specific consciousness patterns can locate readers who share similar cognitive architecture. Through strategic distribution at zine fairs, bookstores, and social media exchanges, the work documents which readers engage deeply enough to contact the artist post-reading.

Goal: To investigate whether direct circulation can create meaningful artist-reader recognition based on shared processing patterns rather than broad market appeal.

Method: 25 hand-bound copies with kettle stitching resembling neural pathways, systematic tracking of reader responses and circulation patterns.

 

Status: Completed – ongoing reader engagement study

 

View project documentation

 

NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger

A bidirectional zine that challenges how immigrant stories are told. Edwin’s narrative moves forward while Stella’s excavates backwards, forcing readers to experience displacement through form itself. Rather than presenting immigration as simple escape or achievement, the work reveals the hidden costs of survival—sexual violence, childhood trauma, and the weight of secrets that shape the storytelling. The physical format requires active navigation, making readers complicit in the disorientation that defines immigrant experience. This compression of multiple truths into one small object proves that some stories can only be accessed through unfamiliar paths.

Status: New release – seeking readers

View project documentation

The Long Game