Alta: Last West Play
I wrote about a new play, Last West, about the photographer Dorothea Lange. Read here!
Category Writing – Nonfiction
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…
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…
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…
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…
Article: DDP in The Guardian
For The Guardian, I wrote about the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization using investigative genetic genealogy to track down the identities of Jane and John Does. I was amazed by the number of cases they’ve solved–some of these people…
Article: Better Diversity Through Cloning
For Alta Journal, I wrote about San Diego’s Frozen Zoo, which is cloning endangered animals to revitalize their genetic diversity. I look into the cases of the last wild horses and the black-footed ferret and ask, can cloning save them?…
Poetry Foundation: Alice Duer Miller
While reading a newspaper from 1914 (as you do) I came upon this suffragist satirical poem by Alice Duer Miller. It was one of many she wrote under her column in the New York Tribune titled Are Women People? Miller…
New York Times: Tiny Love Story
I wrote a Tiny Love Story for The New York Times. It’s about how patient my husband is with dealing with my anxiety He’s great!
Alta: Falling In and Out of Love with Sierra On-Line
I have an essay in Alta Magazine about how much I loved Kings Quest and other Sierra computer games when I was a kid. For a while I wanted to be a video game designer, but relatives scared me away…
Article on John Steinbeck in Alta
Last year I had the opportunity to retrace John Steinbeck’s journey on his boat Western Flyer to Baja, Mexico. He and his best friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, collected specimens in one of the most biologically diverse oceans in the…
My First New Yorker Article
I’m thrilled to share my first piece for The New Yorker. It’s about the Beat poet Lenore Kandel, whose erotic poetry collection, The Love Book, led to San Francisco’s last and longest obscenity trial. Read more about this story of…