On October 11, comics luminaries N.C. Christopher Couch, Denis Kitchen, and Holly Black came to the Forbes Library in a event I curated as writer in residence, to talk about comics and graphic novels – the act of creation, the importance of the medium, and each of their working styles. I found their comments illuminating, …
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Exciting news! I’ve been selected as the new Writer in Residence for the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. I’ll serve as the WriR for the next 2 years, 2015-2017. I’m delighted! Press Release The Forbes has been a literary home for me in Northampton and I’m so pleased to have this chance to give back …
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Just in time for the New Year: the Straw Dogs Writer’s Guild has posted an interview with me as part of a series on their volunteers. I volunteer as the emcee of the Straw Dogs’ monthly reading series & writers’ gathering, Writer’s Night Out. Interview It’s a fun start to the turn of the year …
For the last couple mornings, with a feeling of complicated sadness, I’ve passed a downed young black birch tree sprawled halfway across the gravel drive to my apartment. It’s a beaver tree: the flakes of evidence lie scattered around the conical incision that took down the trunk as surely as an axe. It’s an old …
The Pacific Northwest seems to recur in my life. This summer, for instance, I spent a week in southeast Alaska for a field project on Prince of Wales Island. I’ve been asked to repost this blog entry from 2004, which recalls the first time I set foot in the region, and the impression its vastnesses …
I have an unusual name, and most people can’t pronounce it. So much so, in fact, that I usually tell baristas at cafes and sandwich shops to write down “Nyla” so I don’t get called up as Neila or Nayla. Sometimes people say Nalia, or – inexplicably – Naomi or Nadia. That may explain my …
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