I continue to be fascinated by the short story form . . . particularly how book-length works containing stories can be unified by connected themes, motifs, and elements which take the work into the realm of the novel. I especially choose to work with montage forms to collect my stories because it allows me the liberty of evoking a greater sense of place than individual stories allow.

My first collection, Centaur of the North, winner of the Premio Aztlán and Finalist in the Associated Writing Programs Competition, is just such a montage, evoking a sense of the border regions of South Texas by exploring the importance family lore, legends, and cultural origins on personal identity.

My second book, In Lithuanian Wood, is a novel-in-stories that expresses a time of opening up of former-Soviet republics in Eastern Europe through the sharing of stories about the Soviet occupations - stories stemming from the rapid economic and social changes after the collapse of the Soviet regime in the early 1990s. Vilko Valanda [Engl: Hour of the Wolf], the Lithuanian translation, has been recently released by Mintis Press.

B. Horror and Other Stories, is a collection of stories related thematically around notions of "monsters," which, appearing in the flesh, seem pale by comparison to other "monsters" that haunt people in these times. Stories in this book trace, fictively, the response to fear in our times, which range from the comic to the tragic, to those deeply mixed reactions that characterize so much of contemporary life.

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