Everything I write comes back to attention: what it asks of us, and what it makes possible between people.
Fiction
London, 1580. Anne Houghton belongs to a family of Catholic merchants keeping their faith in a country that has outlawed it. Her other siblings died in the pestilence; the Houghtons want only to be safe. But her uncle rages for the old religion, and Anne, ever the peacekeeper, has learned to stand between them, and between her family and her friends and neighbours, all Protestant.
Then Edmund Campion, her childhood tutor, almost-brother, and dearest friend, returns to England as a hunted Jesuit priest. Hiding him means deceiving Alice, Anne’s best friend since girlhood. Anne has no choice. Nor does Alice, who works for Sir Francis Walsingham as the hunt for Edmund begins, believing this to be the only way to protect her friend. And William, who has loved Anne since they were children, is hunting Edmund, too.
When Edmund is taken, Anne must reckon with what her silence has cost and with who she has lost.
The novel, Will You Wait for Me, is complete, and I’m revising it now.
Essays
I’m writing about mirrors, medieval and modern: the stories we tell with them, and how AI and the screens around us turn the people we live among into images. What happens to human relationships when the three-dimensional world is flattened in this way? I’m also at work on the history of embodied education, in the Middle Ages and beyond.
For a general audience: “Rehabilitating Chaucer?” The Sundial, February 2023.
