Category Nonfiction

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 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…

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…