OCD Sonnet #3, Cleaver Magazine, 2023
“Why I Love It: I can never resist a story that exists as a dream exists, completely legible while the reader or the dreamer is inside it and completely inexplicable as soon as one exits its confines. This story refuses to explain itself, to its readers or its own characters, and so both must simply take it on its own terms and allow it to do what it will. This simple little story about moving into a new-old house and being affected—and altered—by what it holds resonated strongly in me following my own move into a new-old house, and I expect it will linger in us.”
—Ariel Marken Jack
“A tightly coiled spiral told in the future tense (“In the ghost story, a boy will vanish”), it presents the meta-story of a ghost story about a missing boy, his single mother, judgmental townfolk, and a weird forest.... White’s story ends with the mother exerting her agency against the town. Staring into the forest, she will “call to its impossible clearings and black roots, beckoning them closer, toward the town that consumed her son.” This is an example of the unsettling numinous weird ... as a crisis point that emerges at the end of a weird tale—and draws the reader into active engagement with productive ambiguity.”
— Zachary Gillan, “The Brackish Pool: Towards a Critical Practice of Reading Weird Fiction”