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 in Lake Berryessa pokes up from the water like the crown of a hat. Beyond it, the hills are unusually triangular, coming to soft peaks instead of rolling mounds. Standing on the shore, I tried to imagine the island as it had been 62 years ago: not an island at all but the top of a hill. The lake is man-made, the result of a dam built across Putah Creek. The 1.6 million acre-feet of water cover a fertile valley and a town named Monticello.

The idea that there’s a town under a lake in Napa County, an hour-and-a-half drive from my house, was intriguing. Add to that the fact that Dorothea Lange, whose photographs humanized the Great Depression, shot a series on the flooding of the valley and the town, and I knew I had to see Lake Berryessa.

Read the rest here.

Hello 2020! For the first day of the new year, I took a falconry lesson on a cliff in La Jolla, California. A lanner falcon swooped through the air and landed on my arm while the ocean crashed below and paragliders took off overhead. Not a bad way to start the year.

2019 was a strange, dramatic year, but a lot of great things happened. I sold my first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, which is coming out in 2021. I published a lot, including pieces in Longreads, Alta, and Poetry Foundation. I contributed to an article on the Kincade Fire that was on the front page of The Washington Post. I was awarded a Discovered Awards for Emerging Literary Artists and a residency with Hypatia-in-the-Woods. My essay on George Sterling was a notable in The Best American Essays 2019 and my short story Drought was included in 2019 Best Small Fictions. On top of that, I traveled all around the United States, including New York, California, Michigan, Utah, South Dakota, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, and Hawaii. Whew!

It’s nice to finish off the decade strong. Here’s to an even more exciting and prosperous 2020.

I can FINALLY announce that my first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing in 2021. Ahhhhhhh!

The cool thing about owning a camper van is that ordinary trips can turn into epic road trips. So when I found myself needing to go to Michigan for work last summer, we decided to take a month-long road trip across country.

Some of the things we saw included Hemingway’s birthplace, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house, the biggest candy story in Minnesota, and Maud Hart Lovelace’s house, as well as:

The Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah

The Grand Tetons in Wyoming

Chicago

A glass bottom shipwreck tour of Lake Michigan

And lots of campsite, sometimes accompanied by weird Michigan sunsets.

It was an educational trip. Michigan is beautiful. Lightning bugs, snapping turtles, and cardinals are magical creatures. And I really tried with Wisconsin cheese, but it’s just not that good, y’all.

I still haven’t been to every US state. Still too see: Maine and Alaska.

I’m beyond honored to announce that I’m a recipient of the 2019 Discovered Awards for Emerging Literary and Visual Artists, produced by Creative Sonoma and funded by grants from Community Foundation Sonoma County and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Along with nine other writers and artists, my work will be featured in an exhibit at the Museum of Sonoma County, which is opening tonight, November 22, and runs through February 22. An excerpt of my current novel will be featured as part of the exhibit. (Read more about it here.) If you’re in town, I hope you’ll check it out.

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 and putting them in a bucket. A photograph shows me, a toddler in pigtails, by the cement foundation of our house. My dad is beside me, in a white T-shirt and jeans. He looks young and healthy—there’s no outward sign that he’s disabled. It wasn’t the first house he would build for his family, nor the last. My childhood is shaped by a pattern of my father building us a home, selling it, and building another.

Read the rest here.

In October, we went to Hawaii! I’d never been before. We went to the Big Island and stayed for a week at a lovely resort. I couldn’t get over the sunsets.

Nature there doesn’t disappoint. For one thing, there are black sand beaches:

For another, there are so many animals. We went kayaking and a pod of dolphins were swimming around us. A baby dolphin flipped on its back and showed us his belly, then they all swam under our boat. We also saw manta rays as big as coffee tables, mongooses, tons of birds, and sea turtles:

Kona coffee is a thing there. It’s overpriced, but tasty. We went for a tour of a coffee plantation and it was interesting to learn how they harvest and process the beans. I’d never seen a coffee tree up close before.

In general, the food was delicious, especially the fruit. I tried rambutan, passion fruit, dragon fruit, apple bananas, honey cream pineapples, and many others. I’m going to make Hawaiian sweet bread for Thanksgiving.

The Big Island has five volcanoes, three of them active. We took a helicopter ride over some of the volcanoes, which was very exciting. I’d never been in a helicopter before.

They took us over the volcanoes so that we could look down into them.

Of course, last year an enormous volcanic eruption wiped out a large neighborhood on the island. They flew us over the damage and showed us pictures of what the area looked like only two years ago. It was shocking to see.

Before:

After:

So add us to the long list of people who love Hawaii. Someday we’ll go again and visit one of the other islands.

You can see more Hawaii pictures on my Instagram.

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 read it here.

Way back in February, we took our RV to Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. It’s one of the most surreal places I’ve ever been, like walking inside a Roadrunner cartoon.

At one point we were walking down a canyon and pieces of white fluff started sweeping around us. It took a moment to understand it was snow because the sun was out and the sky above was blue. In the morning, a light dusting of snow covered all the cacti.

Pictures:

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 was a moving experience, and I’m still in shocked that this keeps happening to my beloved home.

Then the story was on the front page of The Washington Post! Wow! I didn’t expect that at all. Heather Kelly and Scott Wilson also worked on the story.

Here’s the article in full. Give it a read!