I have an essay up on LitHub! It’s about Anne Sexton’s networking skills, social anxiety, and the time I hid behind a column at a writing conference.

Check out What Anne Sexton Taught Me About Self-Promotion

My short story Double Feature was in a recent issue of The Maine Review. I hope it’ll make it online eventually, but in the meantime, if you see a copy, check it out.

I wrote about paleoartists for The Washington Post. Excerpt:

Most people know what a Tyrannosaurus rex looked like. Its snarling teeth, slashing tail and tiny arms make it one of the most recognizable dinosaurs that roamed the planet. Yet if it weren’t for paleoartists, the T. rex would be just another fossilized skeleton in museums.

Check out What did dinosaurs look like? Paleoartists enliven what would be only bones.

I’m excited that my short story “Sleep Disturbance” will be included in the 2019 Best Small Fictions Anthology.

“Sleep Disturbance” was published last year in The Forge Literary Magazine. You can read it here.

For the fabulous new magazine The Journal of Alta California, I wrote about the mysterious fire that took down Jack London’s mansion in California wine country. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

In 1898, Jack London was trapped in an Alaskan cabin while, outside, winter froze everything to icy stillness. “Nothing stirred,” he wrote later. “The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick.” London, then 22, had come to Alaska to make his fortune in the gold rush, but all he’d found was a small amount of dust worth $4.50. A diet of bacon, beans, and bread had given him scurvy. His gums bled, his joints ached, and his teeth were loose. London decided that, if he lived, he would no longer try to rise above poverty through physical labor. Instead, he would become a writer. So he carved into the cabin wall the words “Jack London Miner Author Jan 27, 1898.”

In the 1960s, that bit of graffiti helped verify the cabin, and it was divided in two. Half of the cabin remains in the Klondike, and the rest was moved to Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront, where London grew up. The day I visited the Oakland cabin, the farmers market was going on, and smoke from cooking sausages wafted through the air. The cabin stands in the center of the square, surrounded by palm trees. Drought-resistant grasses cover the living roof like fur—something London, a pioneer in sustainable agriculture, might have appreciated.

Read The First and Last Lives of Jack London.

I’ll also be speaking about Jack London on May 19th in Book Passage in Corte Madera with Jack London scholar Iris Jamahl. I hope you can come!

For Slate, I wrote an essay about how I waste time by spotting liars in clips on YouTube.

It all started with a click on a YouTube talk by former CIA Officer Susan Carnicero. As I watched, riveted, Carnicero went over how to tell whether someone is lying. When asked a question, she explained, a person’s behavior will betray their dishonesty within five seconds. They shake their heads no when making a positive statement or nod yes when denying something. They get angry or display inappropriate levels of concern. They repeat questions or avoid direct answers. They smirk or avert their gaze. Taken alone, these behaviors may indicate other emotions, like anxiety or shyness, but if two or more appear—a cluster, Carnicero called it—then you may have a liar on your hands.

“When you finish this 45 minutes with me, you’re going to know just enough to be dangerous,” Carnicero said. She was right. I gleefully applied my newfound knowledge to dozens of online clips of politicians, murder suspects, and celebrities.

Red The Rest Here.

For Longreads, I uncovered a shocking part of America’s history. In the 1880s, thousands of Chinese-Americans were driven from towns up and down the West Coast. Their neighborhoods were destroyed, their belongings stolen, and their lives threatened. The first incident of anti-Chinese violence started in Eureka, near where I grew up:

… That night, the mob looted Chinatown. Teams went into the countryside to inform Chinese people living there that they too had to leave. When some 60 men fled into the forests, they were tracked down and dragged back to the dock. By morning, gallows had been erected with an effigy hanging from it. A sign read: “Any Chinese Seen on the Street After Three O’clock Today Will Be Hung to This Gallows.”

Read the article here.

The image depicting the Seattle riot against the Chinese, discussed in my article, is from here.

I have a new article up at the Smithsonian. It’s about Stephen Bishop, a slave who was also one of America’s first cave explorers. He discovered much of Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest cave system in the world.

… Using ropes and a flickering lantern, Bishop traversed the unknown caverns, discovering tunnels, crossing black pits, and sailing on Mammoth’s underground rivers. It was dangerous work. While today much of the cave is lit by electrical lights and cleared of rubble, Bishop faced a complex honeycomb filled with sinkholes, cracks, fissures, boulders, domes and underwater springs. A blown-out lantern meant isolation in profound darkness and silence. With no sensory impute, the threat of becoming permanently lost was very real. Yet it’s hard to overstate Bishop’s influence; some of the branches he explored weren’t found again until modern equipment was invented and the map he made by memory of the cave was used for decades.

Read the rest here.

Even though I didn’t get everything I wanted, 2018 was a successful year of career achievements, travel, and adventure. Highlights:

* Kyle completed his first year as CSO at Purism, a company that makes privacy-oriented laptops and is working on a cell phone. He signed a book deal to write about computer-y things and spoke at several conferences, including the Freenode in Bristol (link is to his talk). I love his integrity, work ethic, and pretty much everything else about him.

* In addition to polishing up the two books I wrote (email me if you want to know more), I published a lot this year. I’m most proud of breaking into The New York Times with my article on Eugene O’Neill, as well as The Washington Post with an essay on Writing and Motherhood. Some other publications I’m proud of:

Bohemian Tragedy: The rise, fall, and afterlife of George Sterling’s California arts colony in Poetry Foundation.

Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, The Posthumous Author in Longreads.

My Year of Smoke: Finding Echoes of Frankenstein in the California Fires in LitHub.

Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for Ploughshares.

Sleep Disturbance in The Forge Literary Magazine.

* Gideon turned six and went into first grade. We worked on swimming, Spanish, reading, math, and piano. He won second-place at the coloring contest at the fair. He beat his dad at checkers and joined chess club at school. He’s always making something cool out of cardboard tubes.

* We bought a camper van. We went to Bryce Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, Dinosaur National Monument, Las Vegas, the Oregon coast (twice), Yosemite, Mendocino, Humboldt, my parent’s house, Big Sur, Half Moon Bay, and Fort Brag.

* We also went to Greece!

* And we checked out Disneyland for the first time.

* Beyond that, I saw Othello in Oregon; hiked; fled from the California wildfire smoke; baked (including the above star-shaped bread); read more Shakespeare; painted about a dozen paintings in an attempt to improve my art skillllz; saw Neko Case, the Punch Brothers, and En Vougue perform at different points; threw a fondue party; saw a parade; went wine tasting; ate a Dickens-themed dinner; grew a giant garden; and generally lived life. Much of this is up on Instagram and Twitter.

So, pretty good year. Goodnight 2018.

I wrote an essay for La Review of Books. It’s about the Chinese poems on the walls of Angel Island Detention Center.

From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station processed 175,000 Chinese immigrants. It was called the “Ellis Island of the West,” but its aims were different. When Ellis Island was operating, only two percent of applicants were turned away. Angel Island was created as part of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and as such, 18 percent of applications were rejected and five percent were deported outright. All were detained on the island for weeks, months, and even years. The longest detention was 756 days.

This spring, when the Trump administration began separating families on the US-Mexico border, Angel Island popped into my mind. The apparent racial bias underlying this policy made me think of this older, racially motivated detainment of immigrants. As in the current crisis, the Chinese immigrants had no control over their situation. Separated by gender and race, they slept in bunkers on thin canvas mats. They were imprisoned for no other reason than they wanted to come to the United States.

While at Angel Island, the Chinese wrote poems on the walls of the detainment center about their situation. I’d been hearing about them for years. There are 200 poems, each a unique documentation of life at the center. In August, I took my six-year-old son on the ferry to see the poems myself.

Read The Talking Walls of Angel Island.