I grew up in the shadow of mountains, along the mucky edges of the Nisqually River Delta on the outskirts of Olympia. On a rare clear day, you could see the Olympics to the West. Mount Rainier towered to the East. Our rambler abutted a tract of undeveloped forest land near Luhr Beach. Expansive, wild, …
I moved to Washington State more than 25 years ago. And over the years, I’ve enjoyed getting to know this place through hiking, camping, and road tripping in almost every region of the state. Of all the places I’ve visited, Olympic National Park is my favorite. Its tidepool populated coastline, its moody, mossy trails, and …
An old woman was standing in the kitchen doorway and I couldn’t figure out how to write her across the room to the sink. It was a kitchen I knew well. A sink I had stood at many times. A short distance with an impossible number of details in my way. How to account for …
I grew up reading Judy Blume and the Sweet Valley High series. Book after book, I never saw anyone on the page who resembled me or had similar family experiences. What’s worse—I didn’t notice. Then, in my early twenties, I attended a Native College where I was assigned to read novels by Indigenous authors. Wow, …
This fall, I taught an online writing course meant to help poets put together and prepare their first poetry collections for publication. Though I’d designed the course to be about the practicalities of structuring, formatting, and submitting their manuscripts, by the third class meeting, our conversations had diverged to the role of surprise in poetry. …
My mother sat in the very last row of chairs in the author event space at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, the day my memoir, Ma and Me, was officially released. She smiled with pride as her gaze skipped across the room, surely taking in the improbability of the moment: her daughter, a …
Tupac Shakur’s poetry collection, The Rose that Grew from Concrete, and the safety of a diary were my entries into becoming a writer. For the entirety of middle school and the first half of high school, I was the kid who came into class late while cracking jokes or quips and sat in the back …
Iron Widow is a book born from female rage. I often pitch it as “Pacific Rim” meets The Handmaid’s Tale because those are two properties familiar to Western audiences, but in truth, I was more inspired by Japanese mecha anime and Chinese harem dramas. The gilded palaces of Imperial China, where thousands of women must …
By the time he was twenty-nine, Charles Darwin had puzzled his way toward two-thirds of his theory of natural selection. He understood that plants and animals passed traits (hair color, say, or beak shape, or flower scent) down to their offspring. And he understood that those traits were not passed down perfectly. We resemble our …
Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity is a memoir in essays about identity, hierarchy, and the illusion of being right. It is a book about a hard fall from a high horse, the trouble with attempting to hear yourself in an echo chamber, and the pursuit of honesty over agreement. It is a book intended to …
