I was gathering sticks in the field when someone waved to me from a window of the state prison. It was early summer, crickets vibrating all around. The sky ripe with dusk. Against the stout concrete building, I could just make out the motion, a distance away, the arm extended from the tiny slit of a window, waving.
Mom couldn’t understand why we were so interested in him, the old man who shuffled through the park, waving his metal detector over the thick summer grass, digging up hub caps and toothbrushes and bolts clodded with rust-colored dirt, bent nails, flattened sardine tins, and old roof tiles that came apart in his hands like scales. We couldn’t explain it either. We only knew that we were fascinated by him.
Years before the divorce, Wayne and Nancy moved into the house that had been the site of the famous Hobson murders. It was a Victorian-style with two upstairs bedrooms and a narrow driveway. The outside needed to be repainted and they’d long planned on remodeling the bathroom, but in the time he lived there, Wayne always thought it was comfortable enough.
A train pulling through the gray winter on the morning after Christmas. Sky still dark, snow melting in the drizzle of rain, windows fogged so the scenery ticking past feels almost like a secret—a peeling billboard, chewed-up utility pole, scrawl of graffiti—all of it glimpsed for just a breath before it’s gone, miles behind, windows fogged again. Boston to Rensselaer, Rensselaer to Syracuse. That is the itinerary. But early in the trip, somewhere just outside Worcester, Massachusetts, a man leaps in front of the train and is killed.
For a whole week, Mike Cobb was swinging around this gold chain necklace that he bought with money saved up from playing Shit Plate at lunch. Shit Plate was short for “Mike Cobb’s Million Dollar Shit Plate,” which Kyle Scheuller always hollered out in this game-show-host voice, like, “Welcome, folks, to today’s episode of Mike Cobb’s Million Dollar Shit Plate!” It was a game in which we all mixed up the grossest stuff from our school lunches, put down whatever change was in our pockets, and if Mike ate the whole thing, he’d get to keep the money.
Complete List of Publications:
Books:
My Prisoner & Other Stories (Ohio State University Press / Mad Creek Books, 2025)
Short Fiction:
“The Corrections Officer,” The McNeese Review, 2025
“The Wrong House,” Arts & Letters, 2024
“Lake Shore Limited,” The Forge, 2023
“The Cursed Treasure of the McDaniels Kids,” Hobart, 2021 (republished in HAD)
“The Familiar Dark,” Confrontation, 2021
“My Prisoner,” Electric Literature, 2021
“Shit Plate,” Epiphany, 2021
“The Storyteller,” The Baffler, 2020
“You Have to Talk to Mary Anne,” december magazine, 2020
“The Death of the First Cyborg,” Hobart, 2019 (republished in HAD)
“Letters from Toby,” EPOCH, 2019
“Vacancy,” Stone Canoe, 2019
“Blindness,” Hobart, 2019 (republished in HAD)
“How I Came to See the World,” Water-Stone Review, 2017
“Together & Alone & Separate from Everything Else,” Salt Hill, 2014 (republished in Recasting Masculinity, Social Justice Anthologies, 2020)
“Panhandling,” Nashville Review, 2013
“Happy Birthday,” Permafrost, 2013
“Our Fathers,” Stone Canoe, 2012
“Hand-Me-Downs,” Redivider, 2011
Non-Fiction:
“My Two Babies,” Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, 2025
“Harriet,” Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads, 2021
“The Waiting Game: Fighting Delay as a Union-Busting Tactic,” The Forge, 2020
“Inauguration Day: A Reading Reflection,” Entropy, 2017
“Niners,” Gulf Coast, 2015
Poetry:
2 erasures, DIAGRAM, 2024
“Two cars crash,” HAD, 2024
Two erasures, ctrl + v, 2024
“our sloping future,” Booth, 2024 (republished in Booth issue 20, 2025)
Two erasures, HAD, 2023
“once upon a time,” HAD, 2023
“Self-Portrait as a Poorly Played Piano,” Sip Cup, 2022
“Letter from State Prison,” The Florida Review, 2017
“Wildlife,” New South, 2017
2 poems, Pretty Owl Poetry, 2016
Comics:
“Magician’s Sleeve,” with Nate McDonough, Grixly, 2021
“House of the Eyeball,” with Nate McDonough, Grixly, 2020
“Rare Breeds,” with Nate McDonough, Grixly, 2019
“The Coma,” with Nate McDonough, Grixly, 2018
“You’re Never Alone in the Woods,” with Nate McDonough, Grixly, 2017
“Perseus,” Found Hat Press, 2008
Craft Essays:
“Notes on the Peripheral Narrator,” Fiction Writers Review, 2021
Tyler McAndrew 