Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2016.
The stories in The Expense of a View explore the psyches of characters under extreme duress. In the title story, a woman who has moved across the country in an attempt to leave her past behind dumps an empty suitcase into the Columbia River over and over again. In another story, a woman who wakes up mornings only to discover she s been shooting heroin in a night trance, meets her doppelganger on a rainy Oregon beach. Most of the characters are displaced and disturbed; they suffer from dissociative disorders, denial, and delusions. The settings Florida, eastern Washington, Seattle, and the Oregon coast mirror their lunacies.While refusing to look at what s right in front of themselves might destroy them, it s equally likely to be just what they need."