novel

Until the Words Come is a breathless literary novel about the challenge, joy, and madness of translating ideas into words.

A librarian and aspiring writer abandons his latest project so that he can focus on his newest obsession, Grandma with Flowers—a seemingly endless fragmented novel—with the hopes of finally completing a full-length work. While he contemplates the failure of his previous projects, wondering why the words have always stopped coming, the reader is dropped into flashes/slices of his daily life of answering disorienting reference questions at the library, chasing after a recluse poet, and picking up little pieces of paper dropped by his partner, the editor. 

Routine dissolves into daydreams and digressions as the librarian plays pretend games of sinking through the library floor or becoming trapped in a maze, imagines a doppelganger stealing his laundry, and questions if his favorite animal really exists.

As Grandma with Flowers continues to grow, so too does his excitement and deep anxiety about whether his work is heading to a conclusion or standstill as he reckons with the question: who is Grandma with Flowers and what would it take to fully tell her story?

Excerpts from until the words come:

• “Climb Inside” – The Journal
• “Little Bits of Paper” – The Los Angeles Review
• “Fever dream wedding procession” – 3:am Magazine
• “What Comes through” – hex literary
• “A Request to be Left” – Michigan Quarterly review, mixtape