(Go here for some background on Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree) What do you do with a stranger’s grief? What do you do with a stranger’s grief when that stranger doesn’t feel like a stranger at all? When they have not just …
After listening to Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree for the first time… Read more »
Tomorrow, July 25th, is my husband’s birthday, and the third anniversary of my accepting Tin House’s offer to publish The Revolution of Every Day, and the seventh anniversary of my first of three miscarriages. Three days after that first miscarriage …
Hey all. It’s been a while, huh? A few days ago, I hauled a dusty cardboard box up out of the basement. It had been down there since we moved to Portland in 2007, full of cassette tapes that I …
There was a period of time—a solid three-year stretch—when I baked all of the bread my family ate, made all of our yogurt, grew most of our vegetables, picked 30+ pounds of three types of berry every summer and canned …
On Monday evening, my husband and I got all dressed up and went to the Gerding Theater here in Portland for the Oregon Book Awards. At the beginning of January I’d been named one of five finalists for the Ken …
As Mitchell S. Jackson likes to say, lit life is life Read more »
In 2010, Gail Hochman, my first literary agent, passed on The Revolution of Every Day, firing me after five years together. It felt as big as any break up, nearly as devastating as the end of my first marriage, even …
I recently saw 20,000 Days on Earth, the Nick Cave documentary. I’m a longtime Cave fan. I met him in 1992, and wrote about it. I sit square in the middle of the target audience of this documentary, and I …
I’ve been thinking about emails lately. Jeff Jackson and I recently completed an epistolary review of I’m Very Into You, which is a collection of emails between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark from 1995. (The book and the review are …
(The blue walls are hard to see, but they’re there.) I used to have a blog. Technically, I still do, but now it’s just a place where I occasionally post interviews with and essays by writers with kids. But I used …
Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Every Kiss a War and editor of WhiskeyPaper Age of kids: 10 and 8 What was your writing schedule like before kids, and how has that changed? Before I had my daughter, I was writing obituaries …