The Writing Life
Saying Goodbye to Oxford’s Norham Gardens
After a long plane flight from California, I reached the house in Norham Gardens on a cold January day, dragging two suitcases containing enough clothing for my five-month stay as an academic visitor at Oxford University. The Victorian Gothic house was forbidding and strange – with closed doors between all the rooms. It had sat…
Read MorePOLAR X: True Stories About Women at the Poles
It was sweltering in Paris over the weekend of Polar X, an inaugural workshop and symposium at the Université Paris Cité which brought together scholars, artists, and writers from around the world to examine a new framework for thinking about polar narratives in the Arctic and Antarctic. On the first day, June 13th, Paris hit…
Read MoreEat, Pray, Write: Reflections on an Oxford Writing Retreat in Italy
Was it the scent of wood smoke drifting through the ground floor of the castle from the open fireplace in the massive country kitchen? Or the vases of olive branches and wildflowers we’d picked from the surrounding hills. Or perhaps the workshops held in a grand library, all of us seated around a long wooden…
Read MoreLearning from an Adaptive Athlete: Rowing with Claire Parker
Claire Parker has faced some tough challenges in her life. At 28, she lost a leg to cancer. At 55, she ended a long marriage. But on this spring morning in mid-April, the retired British oncologist removes her artificial leg, kneels on a yoga mat, and uses her arms to swing her body off the…
Read MoreIntrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
Read MoreRowing the Thames
One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years…
Read MoreHow a Sentence Reverberated
We’re all connected. I was reminded of that when a neighbor mentioned he’d read my story for Alta Journal about traveling to the Arctic Circle last fall. One sentence leapt out at him: “Nothing seemed fixed: water, stars, sky, or people. It was all changing and rotating and moving in a dance governed by randomness.”…
Read MoreArctic Adventures
Last fall, I took part in an unusual residency program in the Arctic Circle. I spent two and a half weeks aboard Antigua, a three-masted sailing ship with 29 artists and writers on an expedition to explore the Svalbard archipelago. It was quite a trip. I wrote a story about my experience for the current…
Read MoreRemembering a Hawaiian Queen
A few weeks ago, I was asked by a producer at Wondery if I’d be interested in being interviewed for the podcast American History Tellers about Hawaii’s last queen. I hesitated at first because my book on Hawaii had been published more than a decade ago. Agreeing to the interview would mean that I’d have…
Read MoreThe Safe Place That Became Unsafe
Early on in the research for The White Devil’s Daughters, I learned about a horrific aftermath to the story I was writing. My focus was on a group of women residents and staffers of a historic safe house who fought sex slavery at the turn of the 20th century. One day, while sifting through case…
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