Friends, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted on here. After I shared my eulogy for Vida (my mother), something sort of stopped in me. I couldn’t find it myself to displace her from the top of this feed. But, now that my new book is on the horizon, it’s time.
My new baby is called ARTIFACT: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives. It was a hard one to write. Like Siberian Exile, this one is quite short and dense. Those qualities have become a signature of my writing style.
Artifact is about the stories we tell ourselves after mass shootings. Each college campus shooting leaves a record: archival collections, monuments to the dead, government-led inquiries, internal university investigations, and lawsuits. In it, I seek to understand university and college campus shootings that involve students and faculty of those institutions. Importantly, this isn’t a policy book or even primarily a book about gun culture. It’s a book about memory, especially institutional memory. It’s about the how wounded universities have become and wonders how things can get better. My materials for the book included university archives, memorials to victims, conversations with survivors, and more.
As always, I’m happy to talk to students, colleagues, book clubs and the like. If you want to get in touch, please come find me via my faculty page here.
