"Into The Lake"
A talk given at the 2018 Festival of Women Writers in Berkeley, CA
Review of Hari Kunzru's White Tears in the New Orleans Review
Review of Richard Bausch's Living in the Weather of the World in Ploughshares.
Writing as Laborious Play
An essay in Brevity about the traits athletes and writers share in common.
Fruitful Territory
By Stories I Know You
Read my Mother's Day tribute "By Stories I Know You" on bookreporter.com
The Tourist, the Expat, and the Native: A Traveler’s Approach to Crafting Historical Fiction
How do we navigate, and then translate, the past’s lost and often foreign landscape in a way that engages readers and conveys a sense of immediacy and authenticity? As good travelers.
Fiction Writers Review; reprinted in the Historical Novel Society Review
Fiction Writers Review; reprinted in the Historical Novel Society Review
Sage Advice For Traveling Abroad With a Toddler
For anyone who has ever traveled a great distance with a little person (or is thinking about doing so).
Originally published on www.worldleap.co, fall 2016
Read it here...
Originally published on www.worldleap.co, fall 2016
Read it here...
A Short History of My Breasts
Mutha Magazine February 2015
Yep, it's an essay about breasts, breastfeeding, social mandates, female bodies, and the beautiful and unexpected interdependence of mother and child.
Excerpt:
They’re called tits, titties, boobs, breasts, hooters, hahas, bosoms, the focal of point of male fantasy, of fashion (high and low) admired, but, for all the wrong reasons. Call me envious of the well-endowed. Okay, I am a little. But for most of my youth I embraced a kind of athletic androgyny: strong, active, my breasts little more than perky mosquito bites stranded between ribs. Nothing to look twice at. So imagine my surprise, when two years ago, I became pregnant and my breasts grew to assert themselves.
Read the rest on: Mutha Magazine
Excerpt:
They’re called tits, titties, boobs, breasts, hooters, hahas, bosoms, the focal of point of male fantasy, of fashion (high and low) admired, but, for all the wrong reasons. Call me envious of the well-endowed. Okay, I am a little. But for most of my youth I embraced a kind of athletic androgyny: strong, active, my breasts little more than perky mosquito bites stranded between ribs. Nothing to look twice at. So imagine my surprise, when two years ago, I became pregnant and my breasts grew to assert themselves.
Read the rest on: Mutha Magazine
"We" Are Not Pregnant
Mutha Magazine July 2014
About the physical and emotional burden of pregnancy and the impossibility of sharing the experience.
Excerpt:
One day I suggested to my husband that “maybe it would be okay if we tried.” I could have been talking about sushi, or skydiving, or lunar travel. Something safe and final. But the man’s face lit up with unambiguous joy.
I use the word “we” lightly here, because let’s face it, my husband and I were not, and would never be, pregnant. I would be pregnant. I would be sick on the couch, eating saltines, staring at a cursor blinking on an unfinished scene of my unfinished novel. The flu, I told my students, hives, pneumonia—anything to keep my condition secret until it appeared the condition would stick. I was the one subject to the probing hands of doctors, to needle pricks, and bloodletting. I was the one banned from alcohol, coffee, cold cuts, hot tubs, and yes, sushi, skydiving and lunar travel...
Read the rest on: Mutha Magazine
About the physical and emotional burden of pregnancy and the impossibility of sharing the experience.
Excerpt:
One day I suggested to my husband that “maybe it would be okay if we tried.” I could have been talking about sushi, or skydiving, or lunar travel. Something safe and final. But the man’s face lit up with unambiguous joy.
I use the word “we” lightly here, because let’s face it, my husband and I were not, and would never be, pregnant. I would be pregnant. I would be sick on the couch, eating saltines, staring at a cursor blinking on an unfinished scene of my unfinished novel. The flu, I told my students, hives, pneumonia—anything to keep my condition secret until it appeared the condition would stick. I was the one subject to the probing hands of doctors, to needle pricks, and bloodletting. I was the one banned from alcohol, coffee, cold cuts, hot tubs, and yes, sushi, skydiving and lunar travel...
Read the rest on: Mutha Magazine
Mrs. Thomas
The Farallon Review Spring 2015
Excerpt:
The small, gabled Victorian had always belonged to Mrs. Thomas, but the hungry young woman lingering by the fence did not know this. She had followed a man to California from the mid-west three years ago, before the war, but when she lost the baby, she gave up looking and began to wander place-to-place. She liked the look of this place--two stories of gray wood in need of paint, a leaf-strewn porch, a garden gone to seed and a bed of thriving roses, three rows deep. She was admiring the roses when she noticed a gnarled old hand, palm up on the ground beyond the third row, where Mrs. Thomas had fallen dead.
Read a longer excerpt
The small, gabled Victorian had always belonged to Mrs. Thomas, but the hungry young woman lingering by the fence did not know this. She had followed a man to California from the mid-west three years ago, before the war, but when she lost the baby, she gave up looking and began to wander place-to-place. She liked the look of this place--two stories of gray wood in need of paint, a leaf-strewn porch, a garden gone to seed and a bed of thriving roses, three rows deep. She was admiring the roses when she noticed a gnarled old hand, palm up on the ground beyond the third row, where Mrs. Thomas had fallen dead.
Read a longer excerpt
Canyon
The Farallon Review Spring 2012
Excerpt:
I believed JJ when he said he could throw a rock across the canyon, just as I believed purple skies meant rain coming, and sparkly bits in the granite were fossilized fairy dust. I didn’t need him to prove it, but JJ seemed determined, so I went along.
Yellow dust caught in my nose and throat. We hid from the sun under Nana’s old parasol, and JJ carried a two-liter bottle of RC Cola under his arm like a football. I’d been living with Nana nearly three months and JJ for three weeks, since school started. But neither of us had been to the canyon, even though the canyon was everywhere: on t-shirts and coffee mugs down at the Exxon Mini-Station Store, on street signs with mile markers and arrows showing where to turn on the I-30. I told Nana I imagined the canyon like heaven, a place everyone wanted to get to. Only you could come back if you wanted and try to tell people in words what you saw. Nana seemed to think, no matter what I said, I was really talking about Daddy.
“Jip,” she said, “your daddy knew he was a bad one. Thought bad of himself, bad of others. Knew he’d do worse one day than he already done. What your mama did, what she did was no worse than putting down a rabid dog. A mercy to the dog, service to the community.”
Read a longer excerpt
I believed JJ when he said he could throw a rock across the canyon, just as I believed purple skies meant rain coming, and sparkly bits in the granite were fossilized fairy dust. I didn’t need him to prove it, but JJ seemed determined, so I went along.
Yellow dust caught in my nose and throat. We hid from the sun under Nana’s old parasol, and JJ carried a two-liter bottle of RC Cola under his arm like a football. I’d been living with Nana nearly three months and JJ for three weeks, since school started. But neither of us had been to the canyon, even though the canyon was everywhere: on t-shirts and coffee mugs down at the Exxon Mini-Station Store, on street signs with mile markers and arrows showing where to turn on the I-30. I told Nana I imagined the canyon like heaven, a place everyone wanted to get to. Only you could come back if you wanted and try to tell people in words what you saw. Nana seemed to think, no matter what I said, I was really talking about Daddy.
“Jip,” she said, “your daddy knew he was a bad one. Thought bad of himself, bad of others. Knew he’d do worse one day than he already done. What your mama did, what she did was no worse than putting down a rabid dog. A mercy to the dog, service to the community.”
Read a longer excerpt
Fashionably Late
This I Believe Series, 2009
How marrying a colorblind man made me more adventuresome in art and fashion.
Excerpt:
I have never been accused of being fashionable. That I was presentable at all in high school was a testament to my well-healed mother’s tireless prodding. In college a gaggle of roommates mothered me out of t-shirts and into blouses, only to find me backsliding daily into a pair of old sweats.
Probably, I thought myself above vanity, and consumerism. A woman, after all, is only so grand as her idea of herself, and sometimes much less. I see now my persistent stylelessness as a combination of genuine lazy indifference and a healthy squeeze of egotism. “I don’t care. I don’t care. Look at me, because I don’t care!”
For more...
Excerpt:
I have never been accused of being fashionable. That I was presentable at all in high school was a testament to my well-healed mother’s tireless prodding. In college a gaggle of roommates mothered me out of t-shirts and into blouses, only to find me backsliding daily into a pair of old sweats.
Probably, I thought myself above vanity, and consumerism. A woman, after all, is only so grand as her idea of herself, and sometimes much less. I see now my persistent stylelessness as a combination of genuine lazy indifference and a healthy squeeze of egotism. “I don’t care. I don’t care. Look at me, because I don’t care!”
For more...
Superfan
Women's Basketball Magazine Feature 2008
In which I describe the unique investment women’s basketball fans make in their teams, and the impact that investment on lucky players.
Excerpt:
Coaches, commentators and players alike speak of team chemistry as elusive and unquantifiable, (perhaps spiritual) gift of winning teams. They speak of senior leadership, of role players, of young talent, of seasoned coaches and inspired newbies. They rarely, if ever, consider external influences superfans have upon successful and growing programs. Now I don’t know for sure, but I propose that one rarely considered, but vital element of team chemistry comes not from within a program but from without, from superfans. Here’s my theory: Optimism, and its twin, Hope, are essential, bracing chemicals which supersfans, by their very presence, manufacture. It is, in part, this rarified injection of hope and optimism that lingers in silent gyms late at night, and bolsters the lungs of players through long, hot summer workouts, through the hellish purgatory of fall training, which greets each season anew in November, and remains through win and loss alike. It is this Hope and Optimism, which with a dozen other variables, will, for each team, breed success in its various forms: a shot at the West Coast Conference Championship, another trip to the Final Four? Secret ingredients, not so silent weapons, superfans.
Excerpt:
Coaches, commentators and players alike speak of team chemistry as elusive and unquantifiable, (perhaps spiritual) gift of winning teams. They speak of senior leadership, of role players, of young talent, of seasoned coaches and inspired newbies. They rarely, if ever, consider external influences superfans have upon successful and growing programs. Now I don’t know for sure, but I propose that one rarely considered, but vital element of team chemistry comes not from within a program but from without, from superfans. Here’s my theory: Optimism, and its twin, Hope, are essential, bracing chemicals which supersfans, by their very presence, manufacture. It is, in part, this rarified injection of hope and optimism that lingers in silent gyms late at night, and bolsters the lungs of players through long, hot summer workouts, through the hellish purgatory of fall training, which greets each season anew in November, and remains through win and loss alike. It is this Hope and Optimism, which with a dozen other variables, will, for each team, breed success in its various forms: a shot at the West Coast Conference Championship, another trip to the Final Four? Secret ingredients, not so silent weapons, superfans.
Nana's Library
Open To All (2007) ed. Molly Fisk--an anthology benefiting Nevada County Libraries
I wrote about my nana’s library for an anthology benefitting the Nevada County Libraries. You would have loved my nana, whose name was Dorothy Allen, a ranch foreman’s wife who, with only six of us to feed, still made enough food each night for twenty ranch hands. A great story teller, tough when she needed to be. I’d like to think she would have enjoyed my novels.
Excerpt:
Nana's library--the books she chose, the books that held her life--filled a higher purpose. They were her comfort, a balm for old age, an escape from the basement chill of our converted craft room, from the rasp of Granddad’s breath in the twin bed next to her. Page after page, long into the night, while the dog snored and Granddad wheezed, she’d read to find her youth again, her strength again, the rush of sex again. She smoked strong cigarettes, and loved strong men with years ahead of them before the stroke made them--made him--an angry wizened infant. The stroke that made them both dependent on their headstrong daughter and her loving mandates. Aerobics?! More fiber?! Less grease?!
For more...
Excerpt:
Nana's library--the books she chose, the books that held her life--filled a higher purpose. They were her comfort, a balm for old age, an escape from the basement chill of our converted craft room, from the rasp of Granddad’s breath in the twin bed next to her. Page after page, long into the night, while the dog snored and Granddad wheezed, she’d read to find her youth again, her strength again, the rush of sex again. She smoked strong cigarettes, and loved strong men with years ahead of them before the stroke made them--made him--an angry wizened infant. The stroke that made them both dependent on their headstrong daughter and her loving mandates. Aerobics?! More fiber?! Less grease?!
For more...