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Until I have time to tell you all the stories I want to tell you: A few of my favorite pictures from my recent road trip from Portland to Minneapolis and back again (for fun! yes, and) to meet my new niece, who is even more adorable than photographic evidence suggests.

Visual learning is fun. (Speaking of, there are a great deal more pictures here, from my outbound trek and my Mer-cuddling time in Minneapolis.)

Still to come: The epic return and oh, the endless stories I have, about the endless gorgeous I saw, and the endless mosquitos that oh so enthusiastically and perpetually bit me, and my car that in a moment of swoony weakness for the Grand Tetons momentarily bit the dust.

Hiking Into Green Valleys

I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.

I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...

Rivers And Roads

[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]

It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...

Story, The First: The Pug Who Moved To California

Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...

Found

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...