Category Writing – Nonfiction

LitHub Essay: All in the Timing

For Literary Hub, I wrote an essay called All in the Timing: On Publishing a Novel Nine Years After Giving Up on It. It’s the publishing story of my novel, Right Back Where We Started From, which I finished way…

Article: Flight of the Condors

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…

Essay: Elegy For A Tree

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…

Alta Essay: Searching for Mary Austin

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…

Article: Greedy Women In LitHub

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.

Article: Searching for Mary Austin in Alta

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…

Article: Humboldt Grown

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…

Article: Lost Beneath Lake Berryessa

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…

Essay: The Houses My Father Built

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…

Notable Essay In The Best American Essays 2019

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…