This short story uses the tale of a man trapped in an office building's revolving door to explore life and death, fate and coincidence, and the strangely significant role that voluntary consensus standards play in modern life.

Revolving Door

This essay looks at the varied, messy ways people tried to cope during the height of the pandemic lockdown in New York City, and explores the anxiety, emotional distance, and resilience that era summoned up.

This Used to Be a City

This essay explore the strange alienation of taking a vacation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by profiling a trip to the Rockaway peninsula.

Cold Sand

This piece follows a college student, stuck in Florence for the holidays by a transit strike, who discovers a notecard he'd written years earlier that forces him to reevaluate a recent romantic relationship.

The Boyfriend

This piece explores a mass shooting from various perspectives, including the perpetrator and one of her victims.

Visions

This piece follows the wife of America's first lesbian frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination through a single 24-hour period that happens to coincide with a nail-biting primary.

Exit Polls

This piece follows two American college students studying abroad in Spain as they attempt their first ever threesome on the night before their flight home.

The Translator

This essay explores the experience of figure drawing through a close reading of a series of different poses.

The Figure

This piece, told entirely in dialogue, follows the relationship between two queer high school classmates in the days and weeks and months following their graduation.

Cross-Country

This piece follows a carful of closeted queer teenagers as they look for a way to push back against a rising swell of homophobia associated with the passage of Vermont's first-in-the-nation civil unions law in 2000.

Cabbage Night

This story explores the emotional journey that can come with the act of viewing a single piece of visual art.

Contours

This piece, which is an excerpt from my novelette "The Golden Age," imagines a city that has built a Williamsburg, Virginia-style historical recreation that serves up a false nostalgia for the “good old days” of the 1950s.

 

T.B. Grennan

Selected work