The Carmel Public Library invited me to speak about Alice and Grace MacGowan, two popular novelists who lived in Carmel starting in 1908. It was a lovely experience talking about the sisters in the place where they lived, to a…
Completely blown away by my Costa Rica writing residency, courtesy of Atmosphere Press. I worked on the balcony as much as possible because, look at the view! Costa Rica is a wonderful place. I went on a boat. There were…
For Alta, I wrote about Langston Hughes’s time in Carmel, California in 1933. As a Communist and a black man, he became the target of Conservative aggression and violence. So he wrote his short story collection The Ways of White…
I had a great time at Sebastopol Litquake this past weekend. I got to read with some other excellent novelists and I debuted a chapter from my new novel, The Bath School Disaster.
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…
I’m honored to have won Atmosphere Press’s Playa Flamingo Writing Residency. I’m going to get to spend five days writing in Costa Rica! I’ve never been there before and am excited.
Over on Write or Die Magazine I chatted with Frances Badalamenti about her new novel Many Seasons. We discussed her approach to writing autofiction, women’s unpaid labor, healing from anxiety and trauma, and how her family feels about her fictionalizing…
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…
I’m honored to be an LAPC book critic finalist for their national A&E journalism awards alongside all these fantastic writers at Alta! It’s for my essay “Falling in and out of Love with Sierra On-Line.” More here.
My short story, The Bear, was included in The 30th Anniversary Issue of Chicago Quarterly Review. What a great thing to have my story about a nervous Californian worrying about bears in the North Carolina woods published along side so…