Writing

For Sweet, I wrote an essay about watching my daughter learn to love the world, even insects, and the awareness that what she’s learning to love, we may someday lose.

For my latest Catapult column, I wrote about trees and motherhood. In it, I reflect on the challenges of pandemic parenting, re-reading The Giving Tree, the fig tree I lost to extreme weather, and what I’m learning about mothering from old-growth trees. “Horrified that I had ever sent The Giving Tree to a new parent,…Read More

For Catapult, I wrote an essay about teaching my daughter to tell time, geologic timescales, parenting memes, temporary tattoos, and the Climate Clock. “Geologists may speak of epochs, yet parenting has so contracted the timescales by which I measure life that I speak of it in much smaller increments. It’s hard to hold in mind…Read More

I’m a regular reader of Electric Lit’s newsletter, The Commuter, so it was thrilling to see Monday’s issue arrive in my inbox with my flash fiction, “Heat Dome,” about a group of mom friends who weather a once-in-a-millennia heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. Read it here.

For Catapult, I wrote about parenting, object permanence, and mass extinction. My daughter understands object permanence—the idea that what vanishes continues to exist. As the planet warms, I worry I may have oversold the concept. Read: “How to Teach Your Child About a Disappearing World“

For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House and Makenna Goodman’s The Shame and how I am turning to fiction, in particular a spate of recently published novels that portray the challenges of the postpartum period and early motherhood, to make sense of my attempts to hold together the identities of writer and mother. “While…Read More