There’s a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don’t lead a story. You follow it.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the...

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is...

…There’s forty-two thousand jobs, near ten thousand of ’em got by people like us. Everyone’s gotta eat. Industry feeds ’em. They figure Little Bear here’s gonna clean it up.” He squeezed his baby, a dimpled...

The windshield wipers are pushed up so they won’t freeze to the glass and a robin just landed on the tip of one, staring beady-eyed at what we both hope is the great giving-up. The...

Jack Kerouac died after throwing up blood. The malt liquor. Then that other guy who shot his wife in the head. Burroughs somebody. And I wonder about literary figures. They’re all drunk and staggering and...

Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We’re sorry, but no… and then more beautiful things. It’s a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda.I read it out loud to the kids. I stick...

When you’ve got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I’d write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the...

It’s easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow...