10 Things From 2025
This was a terrible year for the world. Personally, however, it wasn’t bad. Here are some things that happened to me this year, in no particular order: 4. Our friend Paul Peterson passed away. I’m going to miss him so…
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My Play: Mrs. Dickens’ Christmas Dinner
I wrote a play! Well, co-wrote it with Marcia Simmons. It’s a Christmas comedy about Charles Dickens and his wife Kate. Here’s a description from the Petaluma Argus-Courier. “Set on Christmas Eve 1841, the story drops us in on the…
Pushcart Special Mention
What a delightful surprise to learn my short story, The Bear, was a Special Mention in the 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology!
Alta: Last West Play
I wrote about a new play, Last West, about the photographer Dorothea Lange. Read here!
Reading At San Francisco LitCrawl
I read at Litcrawl San Francisco, hosted by Forge Literary Magazine! I read with five other authors on the theme, Forged in the Heart: Tales of Love and Heartache
Alta: The Story Behind Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of my favorite comic novels, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. For Alta, I wrote about Loos’s journey from child actor in San Diego to one of the first and funniest female…
The MacGowan Sisters In Carmel
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…
Costa Rica Writing Residency
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…
Alta: Vigilantes at the Door
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…
Sebastopol LitQuake
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.