I’m the author of City in the River, City in the Forest (Hag’s Head Press, 2010), and my short stories have appeared in Best New American Voices 2006, Mid-American Review, Rozrazil, Third Coast, Torpedo, and other magazines, and online at austinchronicle.com/books/. I hold an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts and have been awarded writer’s residencies by Jentel, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Artcroft. I appeared as a reader and panelist at the 2011 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia. Right now I’m working on a second novella (which may be a novel) and an interminable collection of short stories. I was born in Iowa, spent five years in San Francisco, and have lived in Austin, Texas since 2006.
How I feel in West Texas. And: Always wear sunscreen!
In the summer of 1999, I studied abroad in Dublin, Ireland; it was my first time out of the country and the first time I understood that I could travel by myself with minimal cash, a backpack, and a hunger for adventure, uncertainty, and making it new. Travel informs my fiction as deeply as it does my life; for me, place is character. I finally have a lovely job that affords me ample time to see the world (during the legislative interim), and I’m lucky enough to travel abroad every year. Some of my favorite places I’ve been are Redwood National Forest in Northern California; climbing with my brother at South Tahoe and Yosemite; my month at Jentel in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in Northern Wyoming; climbing and walking in Texas’ Enchanted Rock and Hueco Tanks State Parks; Paris, Lyon, and Cauterets, France; Weimar, Germany; Bursa, Turkey; the Peruvian and Argentine Andes; and Luang Prabang, Laos. Making this map of places I’ve been reminded me of how much I’ve yet to see.
At the Maison des Canuts in Lyon. Which I have visited twice.
Another thing that influences my writing is textiles, particularly knitting and weaving. I’ve been a knitter since 2002 and have grown progressively more obsessed with it over the past few years, though I still just knit from other people’s patterns and have little interest in learning to draft my own. I learned how to weave on a four-shaft loom in graduate school, and though I don’t practice it anymore, I’ve pursued the silk weavers of Lyon and Luang Prabang, and eventually I’ll write a novel about Lyon’s historic canuts. I probably spend too much time looking at fashion magazines and I often dream about clothes and shoes. I write about the labor history of textile production as well as about labor in general. I write about wool and silk and the animals they come from. Most everything I write circles back to the world of animals.
Anna took this picture of me in Chinchero. It’s one of my favorites.
This blog is an amalgam of all these things. Here you’ll find my travel journals and reflections on place, attempts to write critically about knitting patterns that dissolve into adoration, pictures of clothing, writing announcements, and more. Enjoy!
My novella, City in the River, City in the Forest, available from Hag's Head Press
Incident at Love Canal, with Christine Shea!
