I secretly always wanted to try home-schooling when my kids were very young. Now the current health situation has compelled me and my husband to keep our asthmatic kiddo with… Read more Working & learning from home at the epicenter of Covid-19 →
Book blogger and president and CEO of Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena and Book Soup in West Hollywood, Allison K. Hill, rounded up her 5 beach read picks (plus one surprise… Read more Best summer beach reads of 2018 →
It’s getting close. CALIFORNIA CALLING: A SELF-INTERROGATION launches this March. Here are a few events where I will be reading and/or talking about the book! Seattle book launch, March 5,… Read more Book launch and upcoming events →
Readers: My publisher is giving away 10 copies of CALIFORNIA CALLING on Goodreads! The giveaway goes through February 11. You can enter to win a copy here.
Readers are influenced by the books they love, and writers doubly so: not only do we think for months or years about our favorite books, we refer to them, consciously… Read more Under the influence →
After a few iterations, my final cover is heading for galley printing! I am blown away by how Hawthorne’s designer, Adam McIsaac, captured the themes and feel of my story… Read more My memoir book cover is here, and it’s so much →
From October 2015 through April 2016, I taught poetry with the Pongo Teen Writing Project, serving on a team of five mentors at the Child Study and Treatment Center… Read more Poems from the inside →
“I’m really into disruption.” I knew the moment Jessica Jobaris said these words to me in a big-windowed café in Fremont on a bright winter day, I could trust her.… Read more The information is in the flesh: an interview with Jessica Jobaris →
Thrilled to have this recognition for my memoir manuscript!
While I’m scrambling to feel sane in the wake of the what-the-fuck-just-happened election, I’m trying to plan my reactions and responses by looking at events through the lens of parenthood.… Read more In The Cut on the heartbreak of now →
I’ll be reading a new piece at Seattle’s Lit Crawl on Oct. 27. It’s about the things we cannot leave behind. I’ll be reading with other… Read more Reading at Seattle’s Lit Crawl →
My essay “There is But One Choice: Confession or Some Form of Extinction” has received an honorable mention in the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Project, a literary competition for the discovery and… Read more Honorable mention, AWP Intro Journals Project →
I am so overwhelmed to have this critical essay published in the incredible journal Literary Mama. It explores how reading poet Bernadette Mayer’s book-length epic poem, Midwinter Day, which she wrote in a single day… Read more Exploring the impact of ‘domestic’ writing on the mother artist →
The playwright, Emily Conbere. The dramatic changes motherhood imposes onto one’s life tend to get all the attention. But partnership and marriage can do a number on you, too. And… Read more On mother artists: an interview with playwright Emily Conbere →
Today was an overwhelming day, because I had the opportunity to be surrounded by some of the most inspiring people I have met. As part of my job as the… Read more Write Fear →
On the other side of the door, a treat — anomaly throwback to the Other Time Ocean air wall, briny cool blue-gray mist seaweed hit. Snow-cloud shot to my lungs Silver-sky… Read more The Paper →
It’s officially out, the poster that proves I won a writing award. So what if I look like a convict? I. Won. Something. And Alligator Juniper, one of the best… Read more Alligator Juniper National Writing Contest →
Breast-pump malfunction, sexual fumblings, the truth about my in-laws, insecure angst: All things I have written about, for familiars and perfect strangers alike to read. For every one of these… Read more Confessions of a Connection Addict →
OK, that might be a rather opinionated headline. But after 18 years as a nonnative transplant to the West, I am fine courting controversy and risking argument in order to state what I truly believe, that life in the West has a special timbre and tenue to it, a chromacity hard to explain to those who haven’t watched the sun draw down on the Pacific or seen the desert glow like glass being fired. I am not of this place, the West, but I occupy it now as fully as it occupies me.… Read more The West is Best →
It didn’t hit me until I was almost through the day. I woke up this morning, and for a little while I actually forgot. It was a Sunday after all, lazy and slow. I opened the newspapers just before the coffee boiled, and then I remembered. Oh yes, I thought to myself. It’s today. I skimmed the photos, read a bit about victims’ losses, the cost of war and the passage of time and our current divides, and I felt sad. But it was a detached sadness. A now-I’m-supposed-to-remember-and-have-a-moment sadness. Sad,… Read more Torn open by a sweater →