The Turn

A Gothic governess novella for the twenty-first century, The Turn follows Baxter, a creative writing student turned live-in nanny. As a pandemic, wildfires, and memories of a fraught love affair flicker at the edges of her circumscribed reality, Baxter struggles to make sense of an increasingly threatening domestic sphere and to protect herself and the children in her care. Initially conceived as a serialized story in the nineteenth-century tradition, and drawing on novellas including Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, The Turn navigates issues including sexual obsession, reproductive justice, and the cult of academic celebrity to ask what bonds of love endure even when the world itself ceases to make sense. 

Forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books in 2026; preorder info TK!