Category Writing – Nonfiction

Article: Flight of the Condors

Late last year, I went on a quest to see the critically endangered California Condor in the wild. I wrote about the experience for Alta. I’ve always wanted to see a California condor in the wild. It’s on a list…

Essay: Elegy For A Tree

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…

Alta Essay: Searching for Mary Austin

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…

Article: Greedy Women In LitHub

I have a new article on LitHub, On the 19th-Century Food Writer Who Embraced Gluttony As a Virtue. It’s about how I read The Diary of a Greedy Woman by Elizabeth Robins Pennell, which I loved… until I didn’t.

Article: Searching for Mary Austin in Alta

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…

Article: Humboldt Grown

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…

Article: Lost Beneath Lake Berryessa

Check out my Alta article about the town of Monticello in Napa, which was turned into a lake and reservoir in the 1950s. Dorothea Lange documented the human and environmental toll that went into creating Lake Berryessa. Excerpt: Goat Island…

Essay: The Houses My Father Built

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…

Notable Essay In The Best American Essays 2019

I was delighted to discover that my essay, Bohemian Tragedy: The rise, fall, and afterlife of George Sterling’s California arts colony was a Notable in The Best American Essays 2019. The essay originally appeared in the Poetry Foundation. You can…

Story On Front Page Of The Washington Post!

Last week, the Kincade Fire tore through Sonoma County, where I live, and 200,000 people were evacuated. My town of Petaluma became the first stop for evacuees. I interviewed some of the evacuees for The Washington Post. Hearing their stories…

I Was On A Podcast About Jack London

Speaking of Alta, I was also on their podcast talking about my article on Jack London. Listen here! (The above picture makes me laugh.)