"Conventional wildernesses of the overland trek may indeed be gone. Most of Earth's largest species--mammals, birds, and trees--have been seen and documented. But microwildernesses exist in a handful of soil or aqueous silt collected almost anywhere in the world. They, at least, are close to a pristine state and still unvisited. Minute creatures swarm around us, an animate matrix that binds Earth's surface. Ten billion of them live in a gram of ordinary soil. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. They are objects of potentially endless study and admiration....if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm's length away, we can spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree." - E.O. Wilson, Naturalist (the graphic novel!)↗
Q. Do humans run the world? A: "No. We certainly might ruin the world, but we do not run it, not by a long shot. If you would like to test my hypothesis simply answer the following two questions: Can the world function without humans? Can humans function without the world? The answers are so obvious that I will not bore you with their explanations." - from Insects and Gardens by Eric Grissell
The web site The Punctuation Guide is not only very pretty but also super fun to read. Go grammar! ↗
A new issue of The Rupture includes a short lyric essay of mine inspired by all the time I have spent waiting in waiting rooms these past two years. ↗
A new essay of mine, about my experiences with hereditary cancer and having the BRCA1 mutation, is out now in the June 2021 issue of The Sun. ↗
Reading Naomi Novak's A Deadly Education to my 6th grade daughter has been one of my favorite recent reading experiences. (I am also hoping that I will never have to give up reading to my daughter.) ↗
A short video of me reading from my story "You," part of an Alaska Quarterly Review benefit reading series ↗
In the Anchorage Daily News, there is a lovely write-up of the entire current issue of AQR, including a review of my memoir play "Dialogue Box" -- "Despite the dark nature of this 'memoir as drama,' the totality is a weirdly satisfying mix of comedy and tragedy as the writer, director, and reviewer act out and contemplate the large and small, real and imagined, fair and biased dramas of our lives." ↗
"The books and films that I keep mentioning, the essays you probably read, they all have an ending. The whole point of beginning is to lead to a climax and conclusion. The Butcher Baker Murders wraps up like you would expect a film about a serial killer to wrap up. Everything wraps up. That’s how stories work. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same resolution for this essay, if there is any resolution at all." - from "The Man and the Adaptations," an excellent, excellent essay about trauma and the shortcomings of the essay form, among other things. Published on Terrain.org↗
I have a play which is also a memoir which is also experimental in the latest issue of The Alaska Quarterly Review!↗
All of Anna Ridler's work looks fascinating, but in particular I was intrigued by this description of a work in progress - "Commission for Salford University Art Collection exploring non human ways of telling time"!!!↗
“Who are we, when no one is looking? Who are we, without what once both held us back and held us up? Whom do we wish to be?” - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, from her essay “Defining Gender When No One Is Looking” ↗
Congrats to GPT-3, OpenAI's Language AI, for being named one of MIT's 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2021!↗
"We found that for a subset of women, 'going flat' is a desired and intentional option, which should be supported by the treatment team and should not imply that women who forgo reconstruction are not concerned with their post-operative appearance." - Dr. Deanna Attai, assistant clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and senior author of a new study about going flat after a mastectomy↗
New England Review's new issue is out - I have a story in there!↗
"The night invaded them once more; they were wet and numbed and maundering on towards a furious autumnal midnight, among cracking mountains, lost in a world of black water; they were sitting crazily behind two lamps that showed nothing but a streaming track, the flashing of the rain, and the gulf beyond." - Benighted, J.B. Priestley. How I do love the old dark house stories! ↗