Short Story In 2019 Best Small Fictions
I’m excited that my short story “Sleep Disturbance” will be included in the 2019 Best Small Fictions Anthology. “Sleep Disturbance” was published last year in The Forge Literary Magazine. You can read it here.
Category Joy’s Work
Article: The First and Last Lives of Jack London
For the fabulous new magazine The Journal of Alta California, I wrote about the mysterious fire that took down Jack London’s mansion in California wine country. Here’s an excerpt of the article: In 1898, Jack London was trapped in an…
Essay In Slate: Spotting Liars in YouTube Clips
For Slate, I wrote an essay about how I waste time by spotting liars in clips on YouTube. It all started with a click on a YouTube talk by former CIA Officer Susan Carnicero. As I watched, riveted, Carnicero went…
Article: Ethnic Cleansing in America’s West
For Longreads, I uncovered a shocking part of America’s history. In the 1880s, thousands of Chinese-Americans were driven from towns up and down the West Coast. Their neighborhoods were destroyed, their belongings stolen, and their lives threatened. The first incident…
Article: Stephen Bishop Made Mammoth Cave the Must-See Destination It Is Today
I have a new article up at the Smithsonian. It’s about Stephen Bishop, a slave who was also one of America’s first cave explorers. He discovered much of Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest cave system in the world. ……
Essay: The Talking Walls of Angel Island
I wrote an essay for La Review of Books. It’s about the Chinese poems on the walls of Angel Island Detention Center. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station processed 175,000 Chinese immigrants. It was called the “Ellis…
Short Story: Sleep Disturbance
I wrote a short-short for The Forge Literary Magazine. It’s called Sleep Disturbance: They say we’re primates, but you looked like a bear as you padded through the blue light of my neighbourhood, naked. More Here.
LitHub: My Year of Smoke
I wrote an essay for Literary Hub. It’s about the California wildfires, Climate Change, and the writing of Frankenstein. Excerpt: The campground in Oregon is foggy in the morning. The air is soft and clean. I walk out of my…
Article In The New York Times
I’m so happy to have my first piece in The New York Times. I retraced Eugene O’Neill’s footsteps around San Francisco, where he raced to complete his best works before he lost his ability to write. It ran in the…
Essay in Ploughshares: Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I wrote an essay for Ploughshares on Student Debt and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel written by Betty Smith. It looks at the difficulty of paying for school, both now, and in Smith’s time. Things have changed, but…
Article in Longreads: Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Writer
I wrote an article for Longreads. Check out Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Writer. One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s…
Learn To Write From The Movies: Kill Your Darlings
I have a new Learn To Write From The Movies up at Barrelhouse. It’s about Kill Your Darlings, a movie about Allen Ginsberg starring Daniel Radcliffe. A sample: Lesson 4: Do Weird 1940s Drugs. Naturally, Burroughs suggests they do drugs.…