For The Guardian, I wrote about a new ballet based on the painful history of immigrant detainees on Angel Island near San Francisco. Excerpt: One sunny March day on Angel Island, a hilly landmass in the middle of the San…
For Alta Magazine, I wrote an ode to the California condor: I don’t know when I started looking for California condors in the sky. It must have been when I was a child growing up in Humboldt County, before I…
For The Guardian, I wrote about the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization using investigative genetic genealogy to track down the identities of Jane and John Does. I was amazed by the number of cases they’ve solved–some of these people…
For Alta Journal, I wrote about San Diego’s Frozen Zoo, which is cloning endangered animals to revitalize their genetic diversity. I look into the cases of the last wild horses and the black-footed ferret and ask, can cloning save them?…
While reading a newspaper from 1914 (as you do) I came upon this suffragist satirical poem by Alice Duer Miller. It was one of many she wrote under her column in the New York Tribune titled Are Women People? Miller…
I wrote a Tiny Love Story for The New York Times. It’s about how patient my husband is with dealing with my anxiety He’s great!
I have an essay in Alta Magazine about how much I loved Kings Quest and other Sierra computer games when I was a kid. For a while I wanted to be a video game designer, but relatives scared me away…
Last year I had the opportunity to retrace John Steinbeck’s journey on his boat Western Flyer to Baja, Mexico. He and his best friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, collected specimens in one of the most biologically diverse oceans in the…
I’m thrilled to share my first piece for The New Yorker. It’s about the Beat poet Lenore Kandel, whose erotic poetry collection, The Love Book, led to San Francisco’s last and longest obscenity trial. Read more about this story of…
My article on Anais Nin for Alta Magazine is now online! For decades, Anaïs Nin was married to two different men on separate coasts of the United States. Neither man knew about the other. She called this complicated situation her…
Very happy to have an essay in the most recent issue Prairie Schooner. It’s about my experiences dealing with the California wild fires, including evacuations and the ongoing weirdness and tragedy of climate change.
Did you know that soil can become endangered and even go extinct? For Outrider, I wrote about how the complex ecosystems that make up “dirt” and the dangers of losing it to climate change. Read it here.