Current Project

Pictures of No Renown is a novel of 63,800 words with a realistic historical setting and a fabulist premise. For readers who love to come close to characters via the distinctive voice of their era, as in Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Pictures of No Renown is the tale of two roving daguerreotype artists in California’s gold rush. After one loses his life in troubling circumstances, he looks for his future, while his widow is left to seek her own creative path.   

Lathrop is an alcohol-soaked miscreant who awakens to find himself dead. Abandoned among adventurists and scoundrels, Flora must make her way as an artist. Cut loose from all he loves, Lathrop narrates their quest to discern: what to do when it seems we’ve run out of time?