About Ordinary Beehives
Ordinary Beehives is a Substack about literary fiction and adjacent creative works. Here I’ll offer close readings of craft, structure, and the topical questions contemporary novels are working through. Sometimes I’ll tackle a single work or across a writer’s body of work. As a fiction writer, I’m interested in how form and craft create meaning: why a novel is built the way it’s built, what its architecture asks of its characters, and what it gives the reader in return.
I came to fiction writing after midway through a two decade career of reading systems for a living. Strategy consulting at McKinsey & Company and policy work at the U.S. Department of Energy taught me how institutions decide, what they ask of the people who serve them, and where the official story diverges from the lived one. Fiction is the form that lets me stay with the people those systems pass through. I write about ordinary lives shaped by the institutions that hold them, and the ones that fail them.
The novelists I return to are the ones who treat ordinary lives with close attention and some bite: Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Nicole Krauss, Richard Russo, George Saunders. I’m also drawn to novels with structural ambition, where the form is doing as much work as the prose. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Cloud Cuckoo Land, Trust, The Bee Sting. Those are the books I’ll write about most often here.
I grew up in Northern New York, on the Canadian border, and live now in Washington, DC, with my family. I am currently querying a debut novel, and have a second underway. I’m active in the local literary community through the DC Writers Salon, the Writer’s Center, and Friends of the DC Public Library.
If you care about how literary fiction actually works on the page, the choices, the structures, the small mechanics that make a novel land, subscribe. New essays land every week or so.
Note on the name. “Ordinary beehives” is a phrase borrowed from Wilco’s “You Are My Face”, the second track on 2007’s Sky Blue Sky.
It’s Jeff Tweedy’s image for the daily work of staying alive to the people around you, the ordinary maintenance that holds a life together. It names what I’m drawn to in fiction and what I’m trying to do in my own writing.
