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.
The Guardian: Detained Chinese Immigrants Inspired A Ballet
For The Guardian, I wrote about a new ballet based on the painful history of immigrant detainees on Angel Island near San Francisco. Excerpt: One sunny March day on Angel Island, a hilly landmass in the middle of the San…
Residency In Costa Rica
I’m honored to have won Atmosphere Press’s Playa Flamingo Writing Residency. I’m going to get to spend five days writing in Costa Rica! I’ve never been there before and am excited.
Over on Write or Die Magazine I chatted with Frances Badalamenti about her new novel Many Seasons. We discussed her approach to writing autofiction, women’s unpaid labor, healing from anxiety and trauma, and how her family feels about her fictionalizing…
Alta Article: Condors Lords of the Fly
For Alta Magazine, I wrote an ode to the California condor: I don’t know when I started looking for California condors in the sky. It must have been when I was a child growing up in Humboldt County, before I…