For Mental Floss, I wrote about a juicy 1930s Hollywood scandal involving Mary Astor’s Purple Diaries. It’s one of the first Hollywood sex scandals–plus it inspired part of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, which starts in 1930s…
Late last year, I went on a quest to see the critically endangered California Condor in the wild. I wrote about the experience for Alta. I’ve always wanted to see a California condor in the wild. It’s on a list…
My neighbors cut down their tree and banished all the birds from our yard. I wrote an essay about it for Entropy. The morning after the neighbors cut down the tree, my yard was quiet. The crows that for the…
For Alta Magazine, I wrote the essay Searching for Mary Austin: Life for the author of The Land of Little Rain was as hard as the inhospitable region she wrote about. Excerpt: Right before the coronavirus quarantine, I went to…
I have a new article on LitHub, On the 19th-Century Food Writer Who Embraced Gluttony As a Virtue. It’s about how I read The Diary of a Greedy Woman by Elizabeth Robins Pennell, which I loved… until I didn’t.
Hey! I have a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2020. Read The First and Last Lives of Jack London.
I have a new article in Alta on Mary Austin, the author of The Land of Little Rain, published in 1903. I went to the Owen’s Valley to trace Austin’s route through the area and found out some juicy things–a…
For Alta, I wrote about growing up in Humboldt County, and the changing nature of the marijuana industry. Excerpt: In 2019, my hometown, Arcata, in Humboldt County, California, removed the statue of President William McKinley that had stood in the…
Check out my Alta article about the town of Monticello in Napa, which was turned into a lake and reservoir in the 1950s. Dorothea Lange documented the human and environmental toll that went into creating Lake Berryessa. Excerpt: Goat Island…
For Curbed, I wrote about my childhood for the first time. My earliest sense memories are of construction: the smell of freshly sawed wood, the sound of hammering. I remember being in an airy, half-built room, picking up bent nails…
I was delighted to discover that my essay, Bohemian Tragedy: The rise, fall, and afterlife of George Sterling’s California arts colony was a Notable in The Best American Essays 2019. The essay originally appeared in the Poetry Foundation. You can…
Last week, the Kincade Fire tore through Sonoma County, where I live, and 200,000 people were evacuated. My town of Petaluma became the first stop for evacuees. I interviewed some of the evacuees for The Washington Post. Hearing their stories…