“The Valedictions of Elwyn Brooks” The American Scholar
Winter 2026
“When my son Evan was five years old, he would not let me read him Charlotte’s Web. He’d seen both movie versions of the book, beginning with the lousy Hanna-Barbera animation that came out in the 1970s, while E. B. White was still alive and couldn’t even roll over in his grave. (White wrote in a letter, “After listening to Wilbur sing ‘I Can Talk, I Can Talk’ … I can take anything. I wanted to run on my sword but couldn’t find it.”)”
“The Mercy of Strangers” North American Review
Summer 2024
“Like every mother everywhere and across all time, she depended on strangers to do her children no harm. This dependence ached, throbbed, dull and low and insistent amidst the rhythms of her days. What she felt was feral vigilance ever at odds with the longing to give her sons the world, independent, strong, unfettered by fear, by the innumerable limitations that had been placed on her growing up, that was placed on all girls, then and now, on their bodies and minds. She had the irrational belief that strangers in her children’s world would be kind, decent, would demonstrate the larger truth that people are generally good. In order to not go insane, she had to believe this. But the young man with the red hat on backwards had not followed the script. What he’d done wasn’t predatory, but it was weird. And confusing. And he had enjoyed it.”
“Accident” The Missouri Review
Fall 2023
“The logging foreman driving behind me saw my truck fishtail back and forth before starting to spin a complete 360 across the two solid white lines into oncoming traffic and back, and he saw me go over the fifty-foot embankment tailgate first, ass over teakettle, headlights doing back handsprings down through the dark evergreens, through the blackness and the fog.”
“Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” Image
Summer 2018
“Christine is a quiet, kind listener to whom people often tell their life stories. But David couldn’t tell her his story. He only had a few words. From another neighbor, Christine learned that David had suffered his stroke more than twenty years ago, sometime in his forties. He’d been married, but his wife had left him. There hadn’t been any children.”
“The Last Dying Cat” The Morning News
Fall 2015
“Christine maintains that Tess has always been bad. This is part of her more comprehensive belief that all cats are worthless, especially compared to dogs. Christine asks: “Can a cat bark at a burglar, the way Rocky barks at the mailman?”
“The Golden Years” Los Angeles Review of Books
review of Don Waters’s novel Sunland
Summer 2014
“When Jason Collins and My Father Coming Out Will No Longer Matter” The Seattle Times
May 2013
“That night, at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library, a middle-aged woman told me her husband had come out to her several years before; then she turned and introduced me to him. The elderly man next in line came out to his daughters when he was 70. They still weren’t talking to him. He had tears in his eyes. He’d sent them my book, hoping it might start the conversation.”
“Brittany’s Choice” Witness
Spring 2012
“It had been more than a year since Brittany’s last major surgery. A good happy year. Brittany had gone to school in the mornings and stayed out of the hospital. They had all just returned from a camping trip over the Fourth of July weekend, and so the last thing Dee Dee and Kevin could have imagined was that they would soon choose to defend their daughter’s right to die.”
“The Great Bewilderment” The Sun
Spring 2011
“Oliver Cooney-Martin’s “Captin JJC The Feirce” was composed in a single sitting of approximately an hour on a Sunday morning in December 2008. The 14-page, 587-word story was written with a No. 2 pencil in the kitchen of his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The story is reprinted here in its entirety.”
“Two True Stories about Breathing” The Kenyon Review
Summer 2010
“In the first story, it’s past midnight and we’re driving way too fast through the winding residential streets of Ravenna. Rain falling, the road glistening black, down the hill and then up ahead the bright lights of Seattle Children’s Hospital. I don’t remember Oliver, himself, his tiny eleven-day-old body. I remember the echocardiogram monitor’s pulsing, surreal images of his heart. I remember pulmonologists and cardiologists and neurologists, but I don’t remember anything anyone said, except that everyone was concerned but no one could explain why Oliver was breathing so fast. I don’t remember holding Christine’s hand or the fear that must have swamped her sleep-deprived face. I don’t remember the slow drive home.”
“A Memoir is a Reckoning The Writer
Craft Essay
Summer 2010
“The Family Plot” The Sun
Fall 2008
“The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find. All I knew was that here, if anywhere, was an object lesson in impermanence: hundreds of graves bordered by a six-lane thruway, a storage warehouse, and two used-car lots packed with SUVs. There was no entrance, just an opening where the drooping chain-link fence fell apart completely.”
“Revising Your Work: A Checklist for Character & Conflict” The Writer
Craft Essay
Summer 2007
“The Treadmill Journal” The Writer
Craft Essay
Spring 2007
“Breaking the Conventions of Memoir” The Writer
Craft Essay
Summer 2006
“Review: Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden” Orion
Winter 2002
“Cutting the Snow” Creative Nonfiction
Spring 2000
“There is something poetic about Graham’s speech. He has neither a child’s nor an adult’s inflections. The emphasis he places on particular words is, to me, surprising and wonderful. He loves the engagement of conversation. When he talks, he rubs his hands together excitedly. But he’s often silent unless you first ask him a question. If you told Graham to re-shelve a can of peaches, he might look up, his brown eyes no longer a vacant field of clay, and he might take and re-shelve the can. Or he might stare out the window. But if you say, “Graham, do you know where this goes? Will you show me?” he will take you to the spot, to the middle of the third aisle, on the bottom shelf.”
“Macular Degeneration” North Dakota Quartlerly
Fall 1999
“Just after dawn one day in April, I woke startled to the report of a gun. The crack was loud and close. Out my window, I saw Gramps walking slowly back to the shed, his rifle in his hands.”
Gregory Martin 