Category Archives: Creative Writing

November news & events

Hi friends, it’s been a BUSY pub month. Thank you to everyone who has bought my book, attended one of my events, read with me, shared one of my posts, or otherwise supported me through this crazy time. Here are some updates from the last month, upcoming events, and recordings of past events ICYMI.

Features, reviews, & interviews

  • For Literary Hub, I wrote “How to Write an Obituary For Your Mother,” an essay meditating on language and grief.
  • For the Poetry Foundation/Harriet Books, Ryo Yamaguchi wrote a lovely micro-review of Focal Point.
  • Interviews in ZYZZYZVA, Sine Theta, and The Racket about science, grief, a sense of place, and more.
  • For Full Stop, my longtime friend Kelly Swope wrote an expansive and thoughtful review that made me feel so seen: “Focal Point, like the Greek epics it frequently references, is… an inner odyssey through illness and loss that imparts the difficult lesson that to live is to grieve.”
  • From Vitni Review: “If contemporary grief writing can be characterized as an ongoing conversation concerning tradition, memory, and death, then Focal Point is among the strongest examples of poets writing on those topics today, and one of the most intriguing poetic debuts in recent years.”
  • Focal Point was featured in this roundup in the Washington Independent Review of Books

Events (learn more here)

  • 11/15 7pm PT: Odd Mondays Reading Series (VIRTUAL)
  • 11/22 6pm PT: Book Jewel in Los Angeles (IN-PERSON)
  • 11/30 6pm PT: Nomadic Press (VIRTUAL)
  • 12/15: Bellevue Literary Review panel (recorded)

Because we are in a Zoom world these days, a lot of my past events have been recorded, so you can watch if you missed them in real time:

The Poetry of Science with Jane Hirshfield, Kimiko Hahn, and Sarah Sala, moderated by Elizabeth Coleman and hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Watch below.

You can also find my reading with Teresa K. Miller at Green Apple Books, my reading and conversation with LJ Moore-McClelland for the UCSF Alumni Author Series, & my Rattlecast episode.

Newsletter

I started a Mailchimp newsletter last month and will use that to send (very occasional) event updates directly to your inbox. Here’s the first one with an option to subscribe if you’re interested. I’ll probably send out another email in January to announce my spring 2022 events. If you follow this blog, you can also get these monthly-ish updates in your inbox.

Until next time.

Focal Point cover reveal & pre-order info

Friends! I’m so excited to finally share my book cover, designed by my brilliant friend Hilary Steinberg. I also have a book page here, and pre-order is available through Steel Toe Books and elsewhere (all links are available on the book page).

Some backstory on this cover: I took the photo in Mammoth Lakes, CA last summer, before I found out that my book would be published. What makes this cover extra meaningful for me is that Hilary is one of my oldest friends and one of so few people remaining in my life who remembers my mother. It’s so special to me that I was able to work with her on this.

Day 215

Though I have continued to not update this blog, I have been tracking every day since COVID-induced shelter-in-place started in San Francisco. Today is Day 215. It’s the third day of another heatwave, temperatures up to 95 degrees. I don’t remember it ever being this hot in San Francisco for this many days in a year. Granted, this is in part because I used to live in the Sunset, closer to the cooling ocean breeze, but it is without a doubt also due to climate change. When I moved here a decade ago, I yearned for summer days like this, but now they fill me with a deep sorrow.

Here are some updates and things I’ve been up to this year, in part for whomever follows this blog and in part for me to mark the passage of time in a year when time feels so altered:

  • At the beginning of this year, I started a new remote job. It has been a tough year and a steep learning curve, but I’m getting used to it and like the people. I still struggle with my science and writer identities.
  • Right after starting aforementioned new job and before the pandemic, I participated in Tin House’s Winter Workshop. It felt like a dream then. It feels even more like a dream now.
  • At the beginning of the pandemic, I worried it would be terrible, but did not anticipate how terrible it would actually become. The first few months, I was burned out – from work, from grad school (STILL), even from writing – and aside from the terror of the circumstances, I was okay with slowing down. I read a lot of books, including a lot of not-very-literary, probably problematic, purely escapist fiction, and I saw no one, did no readings, and became so isolated I didn’t know how to become a part of society again.
  • This summer, I was sort of forced out of my cocoon by fellowships and workshops, and it has been challenging and necessary and ultimately quite rewarding. I started my stint as a Grotto Fellow, completed IWL and wrote about the weirdness of my reemergence into society for KSW, started doing readings again in August. (You can watch one of them here.)
  • On day 90, I moved to a new apartment, and in this larger apartment I finally have a little separate writing nook, from which I am typing this update.
  • The wildfires in California and all of the West have been the worst in history. On day 177, the sky was orange.
  • My poetry manuscript has been a finalist for two book prizes this year, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and another that I’m not sure I’m allowed to disclose yet.
  • Today, day 215, I taught/facilitated my first-ever poetry workshop for Rooted and Written. Zoom is weird, and teaching is weird, but I think it went well. So wild that this time last year, I was a participant. Wilder still that this time three years ago I had just finished my PhD, had not yet started my first real-person job, and I was just starting to be more involved in the literary world and knew absolutely nothing.
  • My grandmother is dying of kidney failure. She’s 95, and she never really accepted the limitations of old age. I think on some level she has been ready to let go for some time. I’m not really ready to say more than that.

There is so much to grieve, so much to be grateful for, this year and in this life. So difficult to hold them side by side. This is all I have in me for now. Be well, friends.

Love and light at the end of the tunnel

My essay is out in The New York Times, and in the process, I got to talk to Daniel Jones on the phone, after years of reading his words and edits. Since then, I have been on the receiving end of so much love from friends, acquaintances, and kind strangers. That has filled at least a few dreary days in lab with light.Continue reading “Love and light at the end of the tunnel”