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 …

Mix Tape Read more »

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 …

Little Suzie Homemaker Read more »

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 …

Five years in the wilderness… Read more »

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 …

A confession… Read more »

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 …

I'm Very Into You Read more »

(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 …

Greetings from the Small Blue Room Read more »