What I'm Writing Next

A novel in development

She Would Be Next

A medical school removes a troubled physician from its residency program and quietly allows him to move on.

Then another institution does the same. And another.

Years later, when members of one of the committees responsible for his dismissal become targets, a female physician and professor who served on that committee begins looking back at decisions everyone believed were finished.

What she discovers forces her to confront an uncomfortable question:

When an institution protects itself by passing a problem along, who bears responsibility for what happens next?

A novel of psychological suspense about professional silence, institutional self-protection, and the danger of believing that removing a threat is the same thing as resolving it.

A novel in development

The Geography of Everlasting Life

After Oliver and Sygne Thorson's lifetime of possessions is divided into numbered lots and sold at auction, their belongings scatter throughout a small Nebraska community.

Then something strange begins to happen.

A battered black roasting pan finds its way to a woman who begins cooking for a lonely neighbor. A worn pocketknife seems to carry its former owner's instinct to help. A harmonica and a porcelain angel begin to matter to their new owners in ways no one can quite explain.

Elaine, the auctioneer's mother, knew Oliver and Sygne well enough to recognize what others cannot: the buyers have taken home more than objects. Something of the couple—their habits, generosity, resilience, wounds, and ways of loving—seems to have traveled with their possessions.

But as Elaine traces what Oliver and Sygne have left behind, the mystery turns toward her own home and the husband she lost years earlier. Her resentment toward the harm he caused has made it easier to remember his failures than the man she once loved. Slowly, Elaine begins to wonder whether allowing what was good in him to live on requires her to excuse what was not.

The Geography of Everlasting Life is an upmarket novel with elements of magical realism about the complicated inheritance of love: what the dead leave behind, what the living choose to carry forward, and whether we can forgive what hurt us without forgetting it.

A public-domain edition

The Middle Five

Francis La Flesche · Foreword by Monica Messer

Originally published by Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five offers a rare and deeply personal account of Omaha boys navigating life at a nineteenth-century boarding school during a period of profound cultural change.

Monica discovered La Flesche's work while researching the Omaha Tribe for a novel and was moved by the wit, humanity, and historical value of his story. This edition is intended to help bring La Flesche's work to modern readers while honoring his voice and perspective.

As you read, begin with La Flesche's original preface. It is essential to understanding the spirit of the book and the world he was trying to preserve on the page.