Essays

I don't know what normal people read over their holiday break, but I dove into a book about the Donner Party-- the infamous wagon train that got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846 and resorted to cannibalism.  I'm weird like that. I needed an audiobook to help pass the 15-hour drive to visit my family over Christmas. And the story seemed strangely fitting as we rolled across Montana in the middle of a blinding

“What’s wrong with us?”  My friends and I looked at each other and laughed, but the question lingered in the air. No one had an adequate response.  It was 10:22 p.m. on a Friday night in July.  It was the kind of summer evening when people are at the lake, or camping, or sitting on the front porch listening to the crickets. But not us. Instead, we sat shoulder to shoulder around a round plastic table in our

So I wrote another book. Or I’m in the process of writing it, I guess. I recently turned in the first draft of the manuscript, but it's far from done.  There will be structure edits, copy edits, line edits. Then proofs. Then cover discussions. Then the pre-launch. And then the actual launch. Needless to say, it’ll be a while before I get to hold it in my hands. But for now? I’m celebrating 85,000 mostly

Twelve years. That's how long my current blog has been running. Of course, there have been a few hiatuses during that time. Like the months when morning sickness was so severe I couldn't write. Or seasons when all my energies went into writing books or buying soda fountains... But my blog has remained a constant in my life since the October day in 2010 when I sat at my tiny kitchen island while my baby slept and opened an account on