A Name Unbroken: The Body and the Archive

"A fascinating, time-crossed collection… an urgent narrative that breathes the air of colonial New England and, movingly, ends in forgiveness." –BookLife/Publishers Weekly 

"Hard to categorize but even harder to put down.  ... Dreamlike...like an impressionistic painting, with each element intriguing and beautifully rendered. The soaring writing, dreamy organization, and thematic clarity create a book whose substance far outpaces its brevity." –Kirkus Reviews

A Name Unbroken is a hybrid literary novella that braids the story of Susannah North Martin—hanged in 1692 during the Salem witch trials—with the contemporary memoir of her descendant, who confronts the long afterlife of religious condemnation and queer erasure.

The historical thread follows Susannah from the serving of the warrant through her examination, imprisonment, and execution. Rendered in intimate, lyrical first-person point of view, these chapters restore a voice that history tried to silence: a woman who refuses to confess, bow, or surrender her truth—even at the gallows. Interwoven is the perspective of Joseph Ring, a war-haunted neighbor whose fear and fractured memory help fuel the rising hysteria, revealing how private trauma can harden into public accusation.

Parallel chapters trace the modern narrator’s experience of being misnamed and judged—outed by rumor, scrutinized by institutions, and shaped by the same moral currents that once condemned his ancestor. As past and present converge, the book exposes how fear travels through generations, how communities create scapegoats, and how a single refusal—to falsify oneself—can become an act of survival.

A meditation on identity, inheritance, and moral panic, A Name Unbroken confronts how societies misread difference—and how a reclaimed name can endure beyond accusation.