Selected Publications

In 2017, my husband Nathan and I were fanatical in our search for real and complete darkness. In our apartment in downtown Salt Lake City, we shut the blinds tight against the streetlamps and headlights outside. We placed black electrical tape over the blinking lights of the wifi router, the smoke detectors.

It was a sweltering Texas afternoon when the court documents came in the mail. I’d been checking daily, walking to the mailbox with my young son. He was only fifteen months old, but he, too, was prone to restlessness in our small apartment, and so these daily trips to the mailbox had taken on a sort of adventurous quality. That sense of adventure was amplified by the fact that I was expecting something. I was pleased when I opened the box and found the plain manilla envelope.

The photo was taken in 1943, but I recognize the landscape I was raised in; I would recognize it anywhere and often think that I do: a single glimpse of sagebrush, or silos, or low, dusty mountains, and I’m home again. The place where I grew up is still mostly farmland, and the mountain on the horizon is, of course, still there.

For essayists writing today, Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay is not only influential, but inescapable. The anthology, published in 1994, has never gone out of print, and in the past twenty-eight years sold thousands of copies, becoming a staple in the classrooms and bookshelves of nonfiction lovers everywhere.

Surely, in his two and a half years of living he’s seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it’s the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I’m home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed. He presses his nose to the glass. The moon is a celebrity; he can’t help but gawk. I sit to soak up his wonder, plant a kiss on his cheek, and point out a few stars in the sky––dim glimmers in this dusky

I would love nothing more than to unpack, to move out of our in-laws’, to sleep on my own mattress instead of the one in the spare bedroom upstairs. It is a mattress that has lost its integrity on the edges; it slopes down towards the ground and I spend my nights gradually sliding off.

There are entirely too many pickup trucks and police in Wyoming. In this landscape, the horizon never gets any closer, it only changes shape. So I blew a sizable portion of my paycheck on a speeding ticket in Shoshoni. Officer Broadhead said I was going too fast; Officer Broadhead said he was like, whoa.

In 1962, my grandpa lost all his crops to a July hailstorm. It was Friday the 13 th . Acres of barley, beans, corn, and beets looked like they had never been planted. My grandmother wrote that hail stones the size of golf balls piled up on the lawn and ran down the lane. That fall, my mom, ten years old, went back to school and, at her parents’ bidding, asked her teacher if she and her sisters, Heather and Julie, might be excused for part of the afternoon to help in the cafet

I am, for the most part, a boring person. This is not a good thing to say at the outset, I know, but I think it needs to be established. I am happily married, which is boring. I am squarely and securely a member of the middle class, which is also boring. I have no pets, I do not dye my hair, I eat spaghetti at least once a week: all boring.

When I was a young girl and my parents left me home alone, my idea of a good time was to open up the dishwasher mid-cycle and put my face down in the steam. I imagined that this must be what it felt like to go to the spa. Now I’m older and I have been to a spa exactly one time, but I found that it paled in comparison to my old dishwasher-steam facial.