I have been grief nesting. Anger cleaning and sorrow cheese-making. Despair canning. Trying to enter the circle of passing on gifts, heartbreak jam, because the stories coming out of Portland about three men and the young women they were compelled to protect from hatred have shaken me at my core. Here’s the thing about stories. You […]
In just a few weeks I will celebrate the world holiday I created, World Tessellation Day. Actually, that’s wrong. I had the crazy idea to start a world holiday around interlocking tiled mosaic patterns, but it was a couple hundred people, many of them fantastically creative math play advocates, who made it happen and who […]
You’ve been to Bend, yadda yadda, you’ve done the things. Well, sort of. Maybe you keep going back to Lava Lands every year (I know I do), or your annual pilgrimage to Todd Lake feels like a homecoming you’ve been there so much. That’s all fine and good, but you haven’t tapped out of the […]
I need to tell you about the Garden of Gentle Breeze. A couple years ago, I got it in my head that I wanted to stay overnight in a garden. Surely there was some kind of Airbnb or garden property I could rent for the night for a couple’s getaway. Creative googling gets me very […]
I’ve lived in the capital of Oregon wine country, McMinnville, Ore., for five years and have been a travel writer all that time, but I’ve never experienced something as life-shifting as being up in the Red Hills on a horse. It is, without a doubt, the best way to go wine tasting.
Unless you’re afraid of horses. If that’s the case, don’t do it 🙂
If you’re anything like me, you see an ad for a funeral parlor estate sale and say: SCORE! But there is so much wrong with taking dead weight home with you, in furniture or otherwise. So bear with me while I explain how one little orange chair became the bane of my existence and started […]
So here’s a bit of travel wisdom every couple should keep in mind. If you have decided that a place is YOUR place, you’ve said ad nauseum that you’ll never take your kids there, then maybe perhaps probably don’t take your kids there to write a travel story. I did just that the other week […]
I’ve been giving talks around the Pacific Northwest for the past year about how to structure a memoir. It’s a beast every writer attempting the form must grapple with. Where do I even start? How do I take the dramatic moments where everything changed for me and place them within a structure that’s compelling for […]
