Oh hello. It has been awhile. Well, we’ve been busy. For one thing, we’ve been driving around the country in our camper van. Here are the places we went: Yosemite Bryce Canyon Dinosaur National Monument in Utah The Rocky Mountains…
I wrote an essay for Ploughshares on Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel written by Betty Smith. It looks at the difficulty of paying for school, both now, and in Smith’s time. Things have changed, but…
I wrote an article for Longreads. Check out Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Writer. One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s…
Kyle’s dream has come true. We bought a camper van. It’s a 1996 Roadtrek Popular 170. Here’s the inside:
I wrote an essay for The Washington Post! It’s about how becoming a mother has made me a better writer. A sample: Throughout my pregnancy, I weathered comments about how difficult writing would soon become, all while obsessing about how…
I have a new Learn To Write From The Movies up at Barrelhouse. It’s about Kill Your Darlings, a movie about Allen Ginsberg starring Daniel Radcliffe. A sample: Lesson 4: Do Weird 1940s Drugs. Naturally, Burroughs suggests they do drugs.…
A couple of weeks, friends invited us to spend the night in a cabin in Mt Tamalpais. Can you believe the view off the balcony? We had a great time: lots of hiking, board games, listening to people playing music,…
I wrote an essay for the Poetry Foundation on the poet George Sterling and the Carmel artist colony. It’s a crazy story about artistic utopia, California Bohemians, scandals, affairs, and a suicide pact. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and HL Mencken…
Here are some things we’ve been doing lately: Disneyland Even though I’ve lived in California all my life, I’ve never been to Disneyland. So we took Gideon down there, and had a great time. They do what they do well.…
Check out Learn to Write from the Movies: Magic Beyond Words: The JK Rowling Story. Here’s a sample: Lesson 3: Don’t Bother To Write Until A Creepy Ghost Appears To You In A Dream. Good news. You don’t have to…