My query-letter pitch:

Imperfect Patience*, a literary novel of about 76k words, follows a woman’s odyssey beyond grief. It is a novel of love overwhelming adversity.

Thena Justice was building a new life near Seattle after the death of her mother and breakup of a terrible marriage when her former husband murders the neighbor-babysitter and their daughter before committing suicide. Lost in grief and guilt, Thena first hides in a friend’s converted garage, then in a tiny cottage on the Pacific coast, thrashing her way through anguish, apathy, anger, and routine. Instead of returning to Puget Sound, she moves to Portland, Oregon, the city where she was born, takes the bus to a retail job each day, and keeps her head down until a child crying in the night wakens her sense of agency and hope.

My work has earned an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, Arts & Letters fellowship, Soapstone residency, Pushcart nomination, and publication in journals such as the Brevity blog, The MacGuffin, CALYX, The Humanist, North American Review, and anthologies on running and race. I have BFAs in studio arts, and an MFA in fiction from Pacific University. I live and teach in the NW corner of my home state of Oregon. My house has been home to six generations of my family, which like most has seen its share of tragedy.

I have written the novel I searched for when I faced my own life troubles, a story proving the pathway back from unimaginable loss. Women, especially, do this all the time. I have little faith in fairytale romance, but I do believe in grit, I believe in recovery, and I believe in love. I believe stories can sometimes save us.

---

Currently, I am writing nonfiction and science fiction, but later this year I will begin revising another realist novel—a completed draft that will go through several more drafts. You can also read more about revision.

*I have gone through several titles (at least five). If someone decides to represent this novel, perhaps they will help me name it too.