Recent Nonfiction

new
@ Los Angeles Review of Books

--Scatterings

recent
@ Los Angeles Review of Books

--The Longing of the Collector

@ Los Angeles Review of Books

--Restoration and Ritual

@ Narrative Magazine

--A Human History in the Wilderness

@ Vela

--The 99

@ Vela

--I write regularly for Women We Read This Week

@ Tinge Magazine

--The Edge Is What We Have

@ Paper Darts Art + Lit

-- Chiromancy

@ The Montreal Review

-- Hurt Talk

forthcoming
@ Broad Street

--Dale Flynn's Blood (nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

forthcoming
@ Silk Road Review

--She Opened a Space in the Wilderness

 

I'm a professor of literature and creative writing at Washington State University. I've spent a good deal of my life studying the poetry of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain.

 

 

My theory of wilderness backpacking is this: for every day on the trail, you get two days of post-wilderness high. Backpacking gives me an out-of-body experience, and I do it as often as I can.

 

 

I think teaching and learning are humans' two great gifts. The most exquisite forms of communication happen in that little petri dish called the classroom, whether the classroom is in a school, a field, a bedroom, a car, or a dream.

 

 

I live in Moscow, Idaho and in Chicago, where my husband works. Our daughter lives in Vancouver, B.C. We have a lot of free airline miles.

 

 

I hold a PhD from the University of Arizona in British literature and an MFA from Bennington College in creative nonfiction.

 

 

Whenever I can, I collaborate. I need to spend time a good deal of time alone, too.

 

 

Events

Wilderness: The Storied Past, the Troubled Future, Mansfield Center, University of Montana, Missoula, September 7-11, 2014

The Land Speaks I and II, Oral History Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, October 9-12, 2014

A Mosiac of Wilderness Stoires, National Wilderness Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 15-19, 2014

National Council on Public History, “Sustainable Public History,” Monterey, California, March 19-22, 2014.

“Voices of the Selway-Bitterroot,” Herrett Forum Speaker Series, Southern Idaho College, Twin Falls, Idaho, October 16, 2013.

“Rewilding the West,” Stanford University, Bill Lane Center for the American West, October 29, 2013.

“The Storied Wilderness,” Nez Perce-Clearwater Forest Supervisor’s Office, March 25, 2013.

NEH We the People Grant for Cultural History of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, 2010-2014.