Junctions is a story collection about people at a crossroads, people who crave guidance from an absent parent or partner, people who don't know how to make their next move. Many of the stories are set in and around Charleston where characters push back against having Southern traditions dictate the way they live. Ghosts and spirits roam the pages, helping or trapping the loved ones they are haunting. Elaborate meals, simple comfort food, and even the ceremonial sacrifice of a pelican carry the burden of bringing characters back from the brink of self-inflicted madness and isolation. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships are picked apart and cobbled back together over and over. In Junctions the only way for the characters to reach the next step is to wade through the toughest parts of being themselves.

In Everything I See Your Hand is a collection of short stories that takes place in the "Little Armenia" neighborhood of East Hollywood, California--an ethnic enclave made up of immigrants from the former Soviet state who came to Los Angeles following the collapse of the USSR in the early '90s. These fictions are rooted in my own personal experience and are about dispossession, domesticity, and the tangled ties between generations, focusing particularly around the tensions that arose from assimilation and disillusionment, from changing attitudes towards sex and homosexuality, violence and masculinity. Many of the stories grapple with the idea of self-exile, or ruminate on the difference between leaving the motherland, and leaving the mother, or other familial bodies, in order to pursue grander desires: a better life in America, superior education in distant universities, love in marriages with foreigners, etc. The body, therefore, becomes a central motif in the collection, principally the hands and forehead, which are traditionally areas in which the destinies are written for the Armenian people. The Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their lives are already written, their futures already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure--if they can escape them at all.

Rusalka and Other Stories is a creative thesis composed of short fiction and the first section of a novel. The two stories - entitled "In Deep" and "The Rain" - are concerned with the troubled relationship between childhood and adulthood, and the complicated network of influences that construct us as human beings. Combining the tools of psychological realism, philosophy, and fabulism, these stories explore the boundary between objective reality and the imagination. The novel, entitled Rusalka, traces four generations of women from pre-World War II Poland to contemporary Chicago. The story begins in 1921 with a powerful Polish woman outside Warsaw making a devil's bargain: she must sacrifice her honor to give birth to a daughter, who will be beautiful and musically gifted. Each subsequent daughter born into the family is a refinement of the woman who came before, including the novel's narrator Luscia - an operatic soprano and new mother, raised in Chicago to see herself as the zenith of her family's strange legacy. In this novel Luscia shares the stories - both historical and fantastical - that shaped her childhood as she struggles with the decision of whether to allow her daughter to be tied to the same birthright.

These five stories present and trouble a question that has been posed in literature from courtly love poetry to Romantic anti-heroes to the writing born of Twentieth Century human and civil rights movements: what if one's individual desires are greater than or different from what she is allowed by her world, or half her conscience? Where should her fidelity lie? Unrepentant transgression and the penance one must endure after such a choice: in one way or another that recognition and impulse, and the aftermath of following it, is the force that moves characters through these stories. The stories are of romantic love, and the love is both literal unto itself and an allegory: the question of fidelity has to do with the self, as the characters' choice to attain the lover, in each case, is also an attainment of the self because it is an assertion of the "rightness" of individual desire against the decrees of a greater system. The "crossing" thus refers to that of boundaries: the characters make choices to push or break through what is sanctioned and what is untried; they transform; they become from one self into another as they resolve to defy, love, and simply be, drawing new lines through and around their worlds.