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 …
Before I was an author I was, briefly, a bookseller. The summer between finishing graduate school and getting my first teaching job, I worked a Spokane’s gorgeous downtown bookstore, Auntie’s. The story I want to tell is about something that happened on my first day. I had just been trained on how to answer the …
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 …
I can say this without spoiling anything, but the epilogue to Becoming Little Shell begins with reflections from “a little green house high on a hillside that overlooks Butte, Montana.” It is mid-November of 2021 and, as I wrote, I was in that house enjoying a residency where I largely completed the first draft of …
The first time I saw the ocean, I was 19, at a distant family member’s wedding on the California coast. The first time I saw the Atlantic, I was 30. The friend who picked me up at the Boston airport at midnight exited the freeway and pulled up to an empty beach so I could …
How do most folk end up in the jobs they’ve got? A bit like religion, parents have a lot to do with it: there’s an identity there, a self-making in the day to day ofwork. Familiarity, too, seems to matter: the idea of a life and what it could look like. It’s not just about …
The first time I saw a collection that took my breath away, it was on a small island in the San Juans, on the mantel of a fireplace at a friend’s mom’s house. It was an assortment of rocks that had been gathered and gifted over many years. There were different sizes, colors, and textures …
I’d been reading picture books to my kids for years before writing my own. I’d always taken pleasure in them but never really considered what a deep art form the genre is. It took creating Libba to figure that out.First, let’s take the words. Like in a song or poem, I wanted to get them just right. …
