Several lifetimes ago, when I was finishing my first novel, Swamplandia!, I had a kind of waking dream, something more vivid and mysterious than an idea—I still have no idea where it came from. A woman was seated in a bare room, holding up a green earhorn, an antique hearing aid. It looked like a …
In January of 2025, about a month before One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was set to be published in North America, I received an email from my editor. He said he was worried: we’d gotten no confirmed major media at that point. By this he meant national radio, morning TV, that …
I grew up in a house where creativity lived in the walls. Cartoons taped along cabinets, carved rocks on display, a small unicorn painting near the coffee cups, and a 4-foot plaster cast of illustrated ducks hung on our dining room wall. As a child, I didn’t realize how these surroundings shaped my memories. They …
I am an unrepentant regional chauvinist. I believe in my heart that those of us lucky enough to call the Pacific Northwest home live in one of the best places on the planet. Perhaps because I was raised in the region—at the base of the foothills of təqʷubəʔ (aka Mount Rainier)—I have always had a …
Like most writers and cartoonists I spend an excessive amount of time in my head. I’m sensitive and self-critical. I love people, but people also make me anxious. In conversation I have to choose my words very carefully, and therefore, I rarely feel like I have anything clever to say in the moment. My voice …
