The other day, I was video chatting with my walking buddy, Jo, about viruses and plagues—what else?—and I explained (with no shortage of passion) how if humanity is to be ended by pandemic, this whole get-put-on-a-ventilator-for-weeks-until-life-slowly-drains-out-of-you gets a giant Boo Hiss from me. The human race warrants a more proficient viral assassin, I said. Like maybe a heartstopper. Something fast, but not too gross.

A show about planes aired on PBS last night. Images of early wood-and-canvas aircrafts flashed on the screen. A black-and-white still of a World War I general. The narrator’s deep voice captured the general’s sentiment without irony: These flimsy flying contraptions have no place in battle! One hundred years later,

Hello again, pretty blog people! The other day I met up with independent author Missy Anne Peterson at a local hotspot where they serve a mean tofu and egg English muffin sandwich and asked her questions about her debut novel, Jimmy James Blood, a dark story about a rough group of teenagers growing

“Waah! OooRaaaah!” A lost child was crying somewhere near our bus stop. 

My daughter’s head was swiveling. I wanted to keep walking. I didn’t want to get involved. These situations are never what they seem.

“There! In that tree!” She pointed to a thick branch about thirty feet overhead in a fir tree. A cat,

A man’s face appeared outside the window of my office two days ago. Dark-haired. Early thirties. Startled me out of my chair.

I had been sitting at the computer typing away on a story. He stepped onto my porch, silent. His body made a shadow on the floor. I turned. He stared

My mother-in-law loves Costco. For the record, I don’t want to love the two-pack cereal boxes or the vats of edamame hummus. I don’t want to indulge in so many free food samples that I skip lunch. I don’t want to pay a membership fee to a store at which I have

Three days ago I was getting my hair cut when my phone buzzed. The screen flashed “Blocked Caller.”

The day before this call came in, I’d run into a former colleague at the dentist. She offered her sympathies regarding my friend’s recent passing and shared that a man we both used

The first time I went to NYC and told people I was from Alaska, they asked if I lived in an igloo. Unfortunately, no. I didn’t grow up in a house made of ice. That would’ve been way more exciting than our unremarkable middle-class house on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.

Aside the from

I’ve been thinking about God lately.

I imagine a guy enamored with model trains, spending all his time in the basement painting tiny evergreen trees and rail cars carrying fake coal and those yellow and black striped crossing signs. The Big Engineer knows every detail of the goings on in Train Town. He

Someone I dearly loved died this week.

After I found out she had passed, I turned invisible. Creatures around me became their own planets, rotating in separate orbits. Someone turned down the earth’s volume knob and the little pilotman in charge of keeping our world spinning slowed everything down.

The squirrel outside my