Fragments of a Father
Daylight waning, I was about to give up. I’d been walking through the Long Island woods for two days, trying to find the site of the military plane crash that killed my father and five other servicemen over fifty years earlier. My only guide, besides abbreviated newspaper accounts from way back when, was the accident report I’d recently received from the Navy, which included a cryptic hand-drawn map of the area. So much had changed in the intervening decades that I could no more than partially match the map to the wooded landscape before me, yet from what I could tell, I thought I might be close to—perhaps right on top of—the crash site where I stood. But how would I know if I found it? What would still be there decades after my father’s death?
Fragments of a Father is a memoir about a grown son’s search for the site of the plane crash that killed his father—and for reconnection with the man he kept at a distance until middle age. The revelations he uncovers lead him to new appreciation of what mourning a loss involves, and what it means to retain no more than pieces of the parent he wants to understand.
Books & Essays
Motives for Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, 1999.
Despite urgent calls for reform, composition, literature, and creative writing, remain territorial, competitive fields. This book imagines ways in which these three realms of English studies can reconnect through their mutual interest in metaphor. Because it highlights both similarity and difference, metaphor helps us reflect on the deeper questions—social, cultural, and political—that continue to shape debates about the purpose of English studies. In this sense, metaphor isn’t just a literary device; it’s an everyday tool that can guide new ways of teaching, learning, and connecting across disciplines.
Books in Progress
Fragments of a Father: A Memoir. (My search for the details behind my father’s death in a plane crash when I was a child.) Completed August 2025; currently seeking an agent.
Teaching College Writing: An Unconventional Perspective. (A book that challenges commonplace assumptions about writing instruction.)
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“From “Low-Stakes” to the Real Deal: Student Writing, the Weekly Assignment, and Topics- Based Curricula.” Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies. Peter Moe and Stacey Waite, eds. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2022.
“Syllabus.” New Literary History Vol 50, No. 3 (Fall 2019): 457 – 460.
"An Intimate Rankness: Updike and the High Art of Description." The John Updike Review Vol 6 (Fall 2018): 37 - 44.
"Inventing the Writing Program: How to Name What We Do When, However Old, It's New." Association of Departments of English Bulletin No. 155 (2018): 42 - 26.
“Questions We Can’t Answer: The Secret to a Good Writing Assignment.” Association of Departments of English Bulletin No. 154 (2015): 51 - 56.
