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. ……
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…
I wrote a short-short for The Forge Literary Magazine. It’s called Sleep Disturbance: They say we’re primates, but you looked like a bear as you padded through the blue light of my neighbourhood, naked. More Here.
I wrote an essay for Literary Hub. It’s about the California wildfires, Climate Change, and the writing of Frankenstein. Excerpt: The campground in Oregon is foggy in the morning. The air is soft and clean. I walk out of my…
I’m so happy to have my first piece in The New York Times. I retraced Eugene O’Neill’s footsteps around San Francisco, where he raced to complete his best works before he lost his ability to write. It ran in the…
I wrote an essay for Ploughshares on Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel written by Betty Smith. It looks at the difficulty of paying for school, both now, and in Smith’s time. Things have changed, but…
I wrote an article for Longreads. Check out Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Writer. One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s…
I have a new Learn To Write From The Movies up at Barrelhouse. It’s about Kill Your Darlings, a movie about Allen Ginsberg starring Daniel Radcliffe. A sample: Lesson 4: Do Weird 1940s Drugs. Naturally, Burroughs suggests they do drugs.…
I wrote an essay for the Poetry Foundation on the poet George Sterling and the Carmel artist colony. It’s a crazy story about artistic utopia, California Bohemians, scandals, affairs, and a suicide pact. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and HL Mencken…
Check out Learn to Write from the Movies: Magic Beyond Words: The JK Rowling Story. Here’s a sample: Lesson 3: Don’t Bother To Write Until A Creepy Ghost Appears To You In A Dream. Good news. You don’t have to…
I forgot to post this on here! I wonder what else I’ve forgotten. Back in August, I was Interviewed By CNN about Donald Trump. They wanted my opinion because of my article on Vice about How Reality TV Made Donald…
It’s the next installment of my Barrelhouse column, Learn To Write From the Movies. This time it’s about the movie Genius. Genius is a 2016 movie about Thomas Wolfe, who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. The…