Essays & Other Writing
Mask Making
First published on this website on 5/6/2020
This morning, after a good cry, I dig my sewing machine out of the closet and unpack it onto the dining room table. It’s been 20 years since I’ve done anything other than knit or sewn by hand. Nonetheless, I recently had the machine tuned because I want to give it to Ryann, who learned to sew in my friend Ann’s summertime sewing camps.
Sheltered in Place
First published on this website on 4/12/2020
That coronavirus. Madi has expressed exactly how I feel – the coronavirus is too familiar, too expectant. That creates some distance, puts us, and it, on guard. That coronavirus wakes me in the night to worry -- not about myself or my husband, who are sheltered in Montana with food in the freezer and all the space we need -- rather for Ryann, who is now a family medicine doctor in her second year of residency.
Essays and Articles
Watching Ryann, Mothering Magazine, July/August 2000
Bear Dreaming, Frontiers, 2010, Vol. 31, No. 2
More to come …
North
Fall 1996
We live in the gloom of the hollow, wet and unhappy. Each day I ask to move, but the answer is always the same. Tomorrow. Tomorrow—the children ask if it passed by while we slept. I say no, it is slow to come, like the night is slow to end.
Losing Ty
Download the High Plains Quarterly (43:4, University of Nebraska Press, 2024)
When an illness is potentially caused by or in conflict with community practices, the barriers to speaking up can be too strong. Farmers know they’re putting themselves and their community at risk of carcinogenic exposure by using harmful pesticides, but they rarely talk about it. They report that they use only the minimum amount of chemical; nevertheless, they’re not thinking of becoming organic. How much do we sacrifice to the practice of chemical farming? Whom do we sacrifice?