Reading Highlights

As I always do in August, I completed the Sealey Challenge, which was a joy even as I seemed to have a few more duds in my stack than usual. I was either really busy or really sick for most of the month, so I didn’t read a ton outside of that.

Here’s a list of everything I read in August.

In September, I actually had a pretty strong fiction month, which hasn’t happened in a while (even though I also read my least favorite Louise Erdrich novel), and read a few titles that wound up on the National Book Award longlists.

Here’s a list of everything I read in September.

Favorite books I read in August and September

I read “Plant Parenthood,” the first poem in Emily Skaja’s Black Lake (2026), gasped, read it again, and then put the book down to take a break. Black Lake is primarily concerned with repeated pregnancy loss. Miscarriages, doctor’s appointments, wombs, blood, fertility apps are all recurring images. The poems probe the depths of a depression that seems not necessarily caused, but intensified by struggles with infertility. Skaja manages to write the simultaneity of dissociation with raw, throbbing emotional wounds. “Black Lake” is the title of many of the poems as well as of the collection, and it’s astonishing what all Skaja can mine from what could be a one-note, but still is imposing and bottomless, image. There’s hope in the dark, but the hope itself is dark, too. Pregnancy loss takes on another dimension as the poet observes the rolling back of reproductive rights in the 2020s U.S.

In her blurb, Diane Seuss compares Skaja’s poems to Sylvia Plath, which I think is apt. Skaja directly quotes Plath a couple of times, but a lot of her images come from a similar family. The types of surprise in her turn of phrase recalled Plath for me. Yet there’s also a more intense humor to Skaja’s work, even when it’s dark, a millennial sarcasm that I loved. I laughed out loud a few times while reading. For example, “I’m driving on a bridge when I remember I’m God / & forgot to save my draft of the Mississippi River.” Many of the poems, especially the ones titles “It’s the stage of grief where,” live in a surreal space. The poet becomes a literal transparent eyeball, a Self outside herself, mother to a baby who is actually a loaf of bread. Yet even the “real” is surreal, as in “Never Parrots,” which recalls a parrot at a childhood birthday party. Wanting to be a mother and not arriving there is surreal, an ever-shifting ground.

Authors named Emily were really doing it for me in August, because I can’t stop thinking about Emily Poole’s Cascade of Life (2026). I have been a fan of Poole’s since I bought a Less AI/More Sockeye bag from her at the Eugene Mushroom Festival. I’ve since added the same sticker to my car (you can buy one here). This book, her first as both writer and illustrator, is a celebration of Pacific Northwest environments. It’s divided into sections for four ecosystems: the Coast, the Lowlands, the Mountains, and the Drylands. Each of these sections is in turn divided into four seasons. Poole spotlights a few of the many beings—animals, plants, fungi—that catch her eye in a given season. The seasons each begin with a double-page spread. The true care Poole has for the natural world is apparent in all of the details, the degree of expression she gives to every being.

I already knew I loved Poole’s art, but I also enjoyed her writing, which was both reverent and funny. I loved, for example, that she called the Coast “a silly place, chaotic and colorful, a child’s messy room made of organic matter.” It is, really, both silly and violent. She goes in a lot of different directions with her species entries—pure description, identification advice, fun facts, naming trivia, foraging uses, and more. I learned a lot about species I already know and love, like the osprey, Oregon white oak, paintbrush, and pronghorn, and now I’ll keep an eye out for those I never noticed, like the Lewis’s moon snail, bird’s nest fungus, glacier lily, and kangaroo rat. Each section also includes a little how-to—a recipe with foraged ingredients, an art tip, conservation guidelines, or information about identifying similar species. I already have consulted it multiple times to think more deeply about the ecosystems I’m visiting, especially as summer turns to fall.

I reread Diane Wilson’s novel The Seed Keeper (2021) to help with my book revisions, and it was just as beautiful the second time. It’s a meditation on agriculture and Indigenous resilience, and has some of my favorite writing ever about corn (which is a huge deal for me to say, since I think about corn all the time).

As a teenager in Minnesota in 1979, having lost both of her parents, Rosalie Iron Wing is stuck with a cruel foster mother, bearing the legacies of the U.S.’s many wars on Native families (some of which she doesn’t yet know about). Her father, once a science teacher, taught her how to respect the land and to be proud of her Dakhóta heritage. To try to afford her own place, Rosalie seeks a job detasseling corn, and spends the summer working for the scrappiest of the farmers—John Meister, a single man in his late twenties. Towards the summer’s end, he asks Rosalie to marry him, promising to give her a place to stay. They marry, and though they at first live more as roommates, eventually, they have a son.

Like many who inherited family farms in this era, John struggles to stay afloat amidst increasing environmental and economic pressures. Most families in the area continue to feel pride in the 1862 Dakota War, and while John doesn’t, he’s inherited a settler responsibility to farming. Rosalie learns to care for apple trees, starts gardening with John’s late mother’s seeds. The two have a complex relationship, always with some affection and respect, but often at odds in their worldviews, which particularly come to a head in how they raise their son. Each wants him to inherit their own legacy—the farm, Dakhóta teachings. Via an old friend, Rosalie begins to worry about agricultural water pollution, and then grows even more concerned when ag conglomerate “Mangenta” (a name I find hilarious) begins promoting GMO seeds. John is convinced that he needs to go big to stay solvent, which may be true—but Rosalie wonders, at what cost? I love Rosalie’s measured narration, the long view of history that seeds itself in her (short chapters take ancestors’ perspectives). Seeds, Wilson shows, carry stories, and by the end of the novel, Rosalie uncovers a little more of her own.

I’d heard a lot of buss about T Kira Madden’s novel Whidbey (2026) but was worried it might be too heavy—huge content warnings for child sexual abuse. I proceeded with caution because I liked Madden’s nonfiction, and I ended up appreciating this even more. The novel opens with Birdie Chang taking a ferry to Whidbey Island, where she’s gone to unplug from continued attempts at contact from her childhood abuser, Calvin, and a media firestorm (thanks to a bestselling memo by fellow Calvin survivor Linzie King). On the ferry, she speaks to a strange man who offers to kill him for her. In the next chapter, Mary-Beth Boyer, Calvin’s mother, learns that her son has been murdered.

The first part of the novel moves between Birdie’s perspective before the murder, as she processes things on Whidbey; Mary-Beth’s after, as she grieves her (in her mind persecuted by the system) son in South Florida; and Linzie’s both before and after, as she keeps trying to break free of various men’s exploitation on her book tour. This section is full of strong character work that interrogates what people demand of survivors, how trauma can reverberate, the kinds of excuses people make for abusers. Each inhabits a full world with supporting characters who shape who they are (though some of Linzie’s felt a bit flat to me). Through these perspectives, Madden shows compassion for Birdie and Linzie, but manages to make Calvin seem human without inviting any empathy for him. The second part of the novel moves between a number of different perspectives, some of which feel surprising, to explore who killed Calvin. Madden directly addresses readers, telling us we get to know what happened but none of the central characters will, demanding that we confront the commodification of crime and survival narratives. The shift felt jarring at first, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like an inspired choice. On a craft level, this novel is incredibly impressive, and I really appreciate how Madden handled this tough story with care.

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Teaching Reflections

Reading across a wide historical spread

I am not teaching this fall—I have a research fellowship so I can mostly focus on finishing my book revisions. However, I am still thinking about teaching! A colleague and I are beginning to co-develop an online course. It is the core writing class for the English major, and we’re centering this edition around two texts, a medieval narrative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a 1990s novel set in New Mexico, So Far From God. I’ve never really taken and certainly haven’t taught a class that covers such a wide temporal span. Each of us has little background even reading in each other’s area, so I’m excited to learn so much through developing this course! We’ve already identified a lot of thematic resonances between the disparate texts. Figuring out how to disincentivize AI use in an asynchronous course is a perpetual struggle, but the substance of the course will be a lot of fun.

Pacific Northwest Magic

I marked my anniversary of volunteering at the wildlife refuge by running into a bobcat, which was a bit of a surprise! I stayed a safe distance, and it was apparently so unthreatened by me that it took a minute to lie down in the middle of the trail.

When it was smoky here in the Valley, I headed to Newport with my visiting friend Jeremy, where the sea lions were back from their visit to California in July (Each year, they go South to mate, leaving July the only quiet month at the harbor).

The smoke cleared up in time for me to visit my 36th and final Oregon county! Sauvie Island is a massive island in the Columbia River split between Columbia and Multnomah Counties. We walked a trail that was on an island within the island, through oak savanna. Here’s a view of a cloud that looks kind of like a salmon.

From a trail along one of Sauvie’s many beaches, we could see Mount St. Helens over the river. And of course we listened to “Islands in the Stream” while on an island in a stream.

I love this map of the PNW and its broadly defined ecosystems from Cascade of Life.

For the rest of August, I stayed in bed or was in Eugene, possibly the least magical place in the PNW, though it was made more magical by being there with my friends from all over. September was a lot more scenic. My parents visited and we took a trip to Washington’s Cascades. Deception Falls was a lovely first stop along WA-2.

Lake Wenatchee was extremely windy (complete with a couple of windsurfers) but gorgeous.

We stopped for the night in Leavenworth, a town designed to look like a Bavarian village—it was cute and had a great bookstore!

Turning towards North Cascades National Park, we followed the course of the Columbia for a bit, and it never fails to stun me, ocean of rivers. One day, I want to take a trip along it from British Columbia to Astoria. For now, here’s a view of it from Wenatchee.

We fairly randomly decided to pull over at Daroga Lake State Park for another view of the river, and it turned out to be one of my favorite stops of the trip, because it looked like this.

And like this. What beats a massive river (this is before it receives most of its major tributaries, too) winding its way through a dry landscape?

We arrived in Winthrop, an Old-West-style town, and took a hike up in the hills.

Winthrop also had an extremely beautiful library, with a reclaimed tree trunk inside and a tank featuring visitors from the local fish hatchery (that day, a lamprey!).

The next day, we turned towards North Cascades National Park. So much of the Cascades’ magic lies in how steep they are, something I needed to get up close to truly realize.

And I was absolutely delighted to see boards with two William Stafford poems, “A Valley Like This” and “Silver Star,” posted at the U.S. Forest Service-managed Washington Pass Overlook! Stafford was (and remains, even decades after his death) one of Oregon’s most iconic writers.

Our hike to Rainy Lake, which reflected the beginnings of fall colors, was lovely.

After that, we ran into some smoke, and although the AQI wasn’t too dangerous, it really put a cloud over things. Here’s a smoky view of Diablo Lake, a dam-created reservoir. There’s a ton of hydropower infrastructure in the North Cascades, which are more of a patchwork agreement between different agencies than a pure national park.

I didn’t get many pictures of it, but we traveled a fair bit along the Skagit River, which I thought was beautiful.

It rained overnight, the smoke cleared, and we turned back towards Seattle (on our way to Mount Rainier) on a classic PNW morning. But then, the clouds suddenly parted, and we got a view of Whitehorse Peak that made us yell. This photo, like the others, is completely unedited.

And a few minutes later, I once again asked why no one ever talks about all the rainbows you see in the PNW.

We hit torrential rain on I-5 through the Seattle area (not classic PNW rain), and our first attempt at visiting Mount Rainier National Park was a bit of a mess. It was snowing at the Paradise area, and genuinely unpleasant—wet snow with high winds, so it pelted our faces on the walk from the car to the visitors’ center, and then the visitors’ center had lost power! Shoutout to the ranger who still gave a talk (which, very sadly, was his last of the season).

The next day was gorgeous, though, with melting snow and clear skies (and we got there just before the parking situation got outrageous). This is an extremely photogenic mountain.

I mean, look at it, covered with both glaciers and snow.

I really appreciated the opportunity to think about glaciers and the rivers they feed.

On the trail, this deer posed for the camera like no wild animal I’ve seen before.

Also, we saw this super cute Cascade ground-squirrel scratching itself. I learned from Cascade of Life that it’s endemic to those mountains!

By noon, the line for the women’s restroom at the visitors’ center was truly astounding—look at it, with the mountain still photogenic in the background. I am so glad we did not visit over the summer.

Endlessly photogenic. We also had a conversation with a woman who was celebrating her 84th birthday by visiting the national park, where she’d worked for a summer when she was 18!

On the way home, I confirmed that the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River, while it is quite impressive and includes a state line, has no name more interesting than “Interstate Bridge.”

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• Dolly Parton died on August 25 and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so sad about a celebrity death. I’ve been celebrating her life by singing along to her almost nonstop, and I also made these pairings of books with her songs.

• I’ve joined the faculty editorial board of Oregon State University Press. It’s a small university press that punches way above its weight, with great work about Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, the environment, and Indigenous studies, among other things. Check out their great work!

Have a lovely October, everyone!

For those of you reading from the East, county sizes are very different out West. Oregon has 36 counties. The smallest is Multnomah, at 435 square miles, and the largest is Harney, at 10,135 square miles (larger than 6 U.S. states). So this was a goal I knew I could achieve, not a distant pipe dream.

It was also fun to work on this goal while I worked on the Guide to Oregon Literature with my students—getting to know Oregon in multiple ways.

Here are some photos and memories from my tour of Oregon’s counties, sorted by region. Every corner of this state is so incredibly beautiful, and I can’t wait to visit all these counties again.

Benton County

is where I live, so I’m visiting it all the time, and perpetually in awe of it. Cities include Corvallis, Philomath, and Monroe. And of course, this is the home of Oregon State University, the westernmost research university in the contiguous U.S.

We’ve got lovely walks by the Willamette River (right in my backyard) …

my beloved William L. Finley Wildlife Refuge …

… brilliant views from Marys Peak, the highest summit in the Oregon Coast Range …

I’m so grateful this is my home.

Other Willamette Valley Counties

The Willamette Valley is the region between Portland and Eugene, between the Coast Range and the Cascades and along the Willamette River. These are the other non-Portland counties in the Valley.

Lane

Lane County is the home of Eugene, and as a Corvallis resident, it is my civic duty to hate on EW-gene and the University of Oregon. Apart from the massive footprint of Nike founder Phil Knight on the university, Lane has some cool stuff and some good friends of mine. I’ll also revisit it further down in this newsletter since Lane reaches to the coast.

Here’s the Willamette in Eugene.

I went to the Eugene Mushroom Festival at the lovely Mount Pisgah Arboretum last fall.

I really liked visiting UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History, which had this important reminder displayed.

Linn

This is the next county over from Benton. Cities include Albany, Lebanon, and Sweet Home. Honestly, my most frequently visited location in Linn County is Costco in Albany … but it’s actually a beautiful, expansive county that goes right up to the Cascades, and agriculturally, calls itself “The Grass Seed Capital of the World.”

One Linn spot I love is the Snag Boat Bend, a quiet, non-contiguous unit of the Finley NWR right on the Willamette:

The town of Brownsville is super cute. It has a good history museum and was the filming location for Stand By Me.

Marion

This is the home of Salem, Oregon’s capital. Salem’s got some really nice natural areas.

The Willamette is wider at this point …

I went on an accidentally nine-mile walk with a friend at Minto-Brown Island Park because it was so gorgeous.

And elsewhere in the county, there’s Ankeny Hill NWR …

and the iconic Silver Falls State Park, which somehow has the highest concentration of people of color I’ve seen anywhere in Oregon (and everyone I ask reports the same thing!).

Polk

A highlight is that I saw my friends get married by a river in Polk County! I have photos of that but will keep them private. Otherwise, it’s mostly been driving through, stopping at a nice bookstore in Independence. Other cities are Dallas and Monmouth. The Grand Ronde Reservation is in Polk and Yamhill Counties.

The super-rural drives through Polk have really lovely scenery, and one farm there had for a while a large, handmade “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES” sign. Here’s a picture of a barn in Polk County.

Yamhill

I don’t have any photos of Yamhill County because I’ve been driving when I’ve visited. Cities include McMinnville, Lafayette, and Newberg. It’s a lovely Valley county with views of vineyards and mountains. I drove through here with students I took to see a play and kept going “LOOK at this!” at every view. The city of Yamhill is also Beverly Cleary’s hometown, so when we drove through there, we thought of her.

Metro Portland

These counties are geographically still in the Willamette Valley, but cover Portland and its suburbs, which feel like a distinct region, especially since around half of Oregon’s population lives in the Portland area.

Multnomah

This county consists mostly of Portland proper, with a few suburbs and a beautiful slice of the Columbia River Gorge. Even when I go to the big city, I’m usually outside, as is the Oregon way. Some highlights:

Portland’s famous International Rose Test Garden.

Kelley Point Park, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, with Mt. Hood in the distance:

Portland is a city of bridges.

East of Portland, Multnomah Falls, a very popular tourist site …

and nearby, a view of the Gorge from the Vista House at Crown Point.

Washington

The most populous of the suburban Portland counties, with cities like Hillsboro and Beaverton. Major companies like Nike and Intel are based here. Most of my time in this county has been spent either driving on the interstate to/from Portland or grocery shopping in Beaverton (an Asian suburb).

I took some of my students to see a performance of Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni at the Vault Theater in Hillsboro, so apparently the only photo I have taken in Washington County is of a small accompanying exhibit they had in the theater lobby.

Clackamas

This county has a lot of Portland’s major suburbs: Lake Oswego, Tualatin, West Linn. I’ve stopped in Oregon City to see Willamette Falls, the largest waterfall in the Northwest by volume, and site of a closed-down paper mill, which will eventually be remodeled into “tumwata village” by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

Here are a couple of different views of Willamette Falls.

And this isn’t a great photo, but one of my favorite crossings of the Willamette is on I-5 through Wilsonville, where the view of the river really opens up on both sides.

Columbia

Columbia was the last county on my list! Perhaps a surprising one, but on the banks of the Columbia, with cities including St. Helens and Scappoose, it just didn’t show up in any of my other trips. I chose to celebrate my county journey by visiting Sauvie Island, a massive river island in the Columbia split between Multnomah and Columbia Counties. It has river beaches, hiking trails, and farms.

Here’s me having walked into Columbia County, on an island, on an island, in a river:

Great views of Mt. St. Helens across the Columbia, the ocean of rivers.

The Oregon Coast

The Coast is all drama. All beaches in Oregon are public, and each one is different from the next. Sand dunes, cliffs, rocks, with weather-beaten trees adding to it all. I’m blessed to live so near my first love, the Pacific Ocean, which always inspires immense wonder in me. I’m moving north to south in this list.

Clatsop

Clatsop County sits at the Columbia River’s massive mouth and contains some of the Oregon Coast’s most iconic spots, like Cannon Beach’s Haystack Rock:

Further up the coast, you can see the Wreck of the Peter Iredale, a long-rusting shipwreck.

Here’s sunset on the Columbia in Astoria, which you may not know was the founding site of the Ghadar Party, which agitated for Indian independence.

Tillamook

This county is, of course, best known for its cheese, but also has some incredible stretches of coast. Here’s the Tillamook factory:

The beach at Neskowin …

And at Manzanita.

Lincoln

This is the coastal county I’m in the most, due west of my home. I spend a lot of my coast time in Newport, which is both tourist beach town and working-class fishing town. Newport is fish guts being shredded across the street from a Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

And also just incredible coast, like South Beach …

It’s got sea lions in Yaquina Bay.

Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area has a lovely lighthouse, excellent tidepooling, and in the spring, baby seals.

Here are some churning waves at Depoe Bay, a whale-watching hotspot that calls itself the “World’s Smallest Harbor.”

Maybe my favorite spot on the entire coast is Cape Perpetua, just south of Yachats. It has stunning views from high up …

tidepools down low …

and massive, gorgeous Sitka spruce.

The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians are based in Lincoln County.

Douglas & Lane

These two are not primarily coastal counties like the others are (Lane appeared in my Valley section), but do have a little cut of the coast. Douglas, I mostly drove through. Highway 101 lifts into the mountains there, offering sweeping views of logging forests and the ocean beyond. The Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians is headquartered there.

In Lane County, I’ve stopped in Florence, infamous for the exploding whale incident of 1970 (If you don’t know about that, look it up now). There are good views of the Siuslaw River at a park commemorating the incident.

Darlingtonia State Natural Area is a weird, cool grove of carnivorous plants.

Coos

Coos Bay, population 15,000, is the largest city on the Oregon Coast, but has a small-town feel—locals were chatting with me and each other on a Saturday morning, and I loved that. The Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians are headquartered here, as is the Coquille Nation.

Its beaches were these lovely coves …

and I really enjoyed my inland hike at South Slough, where I had a trail chat with a local who walked there every day.

In neighboring North Bend, there’s a bookstore with this hilarious whale mural.

Curry

While I was visiting Coos County, I took a quick detour down to the northern stretches of Curry County. I didn’t make it to the cities of Port Orford, Gold Beach, or Brookings, but I saw some really incredible coastal spots (on a sunny, warm day in November!).

Floras Lake is a freshwater lake right next to the ocean.

The beach next to it is one of my favorites I’ve been to, with dark sand.

And I made it out to Cape Blanco, Oregon’s westernmost point.

Southwestern Oregon

This region is kind of cheating, because I mainly visited these counties back in 2017, long before I moved to Oregon. But I’ve still been to them, and I’d like to go again!

Klamath

The Klamath Tribes are headquartered in this county named for them, whose major city is Klamath Falls. I briefly crossed back through Klamath County on my southeastern Oregon trip this summer, but my main visit was to see Crater Lake in 2017. What an introduction to Oregon this was. Thick snow in June, the water the deepest, clearest blue.

Josephine & Jackson

Drove through these two counties on the trip to Crater Lake. We spent a couple of nights in Medford (Jackson) and ate at a very good Grateful Dead-vibes pizza place. I thought Oregon was gorgeous on that first visit, with massive trees in the Umpqua National Forest, rushing rivers.

Here are some of those trees in Jackson County. No photos in Josephine, unfortunately.

Central Oregon

What one of my students referred to as the “middle child” of our class project, in that we forgot about it amidst the attention-grabbing regions around it. It’s defined by high desert landscapes, the peaks of the Cascades, ponderosa pine.

Deschutes

Deschutes County’s major city is Bend, which has boomed in population over the last couple of decades. You can tell when you’re there—all the buildings look new and shiny. Here’s the Deschutes River in Bend:

On the way to and from my Southeastern Oregon adventure, I stopped in the goofy Old West-style town of Sisters …

and in scenic La Pine.

Jefferson & Crook

Also two counties I mainly drove through (no photos), on my way to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. High desert, with country highways through dry landscapes that look more interesting the harder you look at them. Also, some great forest. The Warm Springs Reservation is primarily in Jefferson and Wasco Counties.

Columbia River Gorge

The Gorge is where the Columbia River cuts its way through the Cascades, leading to absolutely incredible scenery. I’m lumping all of these Columbia Valley counties east of Multnomah together because I’ve primarily traveled them going west on I-84—maybe the most beautiful stretch in the whole interstate system. I’ve done it twice, and I want to do it many more times, with more stops.

Morrow, Gilliam, Sherman, Wasco, & Hood River

Years before I moved to Oregon, my first major project as a full-time employee was planning a field course about the Columbia River, and I then planned it a second time just before I applied to my job, so I knew a lot about the Columbia, but hadn’t really seen it. My first sight of it in Morrow County amazed me, and felt like meeting an old friend.

The beginning of the true Gorge in Gilliam County.

Mount Hood starts to emerge around Sherman County.

And looks even better near The Dalles, in Wasco County.

In Hood River County, the Gorge continues, but starts to get more forested.

Northeastern Oregon

Northeastern Oregon is full of mountain ranges, rangeland, wheat fields, unusual geologies. It tends to be a lot drier than Western Oregon, but wetter than the true desert in the Southeast.

Wheeler

Wheeler County is Oregon’s least populous. Its seat is Fossil, a name that nods to its geologic riches. Oregon’s famed Painted Hills, part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, are located here.

They’re really quite beautiful, intensely pigmented.

Grant

East of Wheeler County, Grant County contains the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which I (unpopular opinion?) thought was even better than the Painted Hills.

I mean … the blue hues and massive formations were so cool.

This was the view from our super-rural Airbnb near Kimberly.

In the city of John Day, we visited the Kam Wah Chung Museum, which preserves an early twentieth-century business run by two Chinese American men. I have never seen another museum quite like it—nearly unchanged, packed with artifacts, attesting to rural Asian American history.

Further east, the county includes some of the Blue Mountains.

Union

Union, home of La Grande and Eastern Oregon University, is another one I’ve mostly driven through. It’s mountainous and beautiful, fun to pass through either on interstate or state highway.

Baker

Baker County is on the border with Idaho, also defined by mountains. It’s anchored by Baker City, which has a cute downtown:

And some nice stretches of interstate. There were some even better views I got the second time I went through Baker County on I-84, with clearer skies, but I was driving.

Wallowa

Wallowa County is a magical, sacred place. Its primary towns are Enterprise and Joseph. The Wallowa Mountains are known as the Alps of Oregon, and it’s easy to see why. I mean, look at them towering over this meadow.

And Wallowa Lake, situated in the mountains—photos aren’t enough.

The Wallowas were also beautiful with rain and fog in the morning…

And a good reminder in downtown Joseph.

Umatilla

With around 80,000 people, Umatilla County is the most populous in Eastern Oregon, with Hermiston and Pendleton its largest cities. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation are located here.

I am always blown away by the expanse of wheat fields on the Columbia Plateau …

and it’s known for Pendleton textiles.

Southeastern Oregon

This is a sparsely populated, otherworldly, deeply underrated region of Oregon. It’s mostly desert, and by some definitions, parts of it don’t even belong to the Pacific Northwest—they’re in the Great Basin rather than the Cascadia watershed. That means endorheic basins centered on salt lakes, miles and miles of sagebrush, lots of rangeland, volcanic formations. This is one of the strangest and most beautiful places I’ve been. The three counties in this region are massive.

Malheur

When I moved to Oregon two years ago, this was the first county I crossed into from Idaho. Some of it is part of the greater Boise area, and the whole county observes Mountain Time.

When I crossed into Oregon, I was greeted by a pretty (though slightly smoke-tinged) sunrise.

Here’s the Snake River bending along the border.

I technically revisited Malheur County last month, but a) it was for under 10 minutes and b) I didn’t notice until I saw the sign welcoming us back to Harney County, so I’m not sure that counts.

Lake

I learned from Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston’s Walking the High Desert that Lake County (cities Paisley and Lakeview) has the most roadless area of any county in the contiguous U.S. I only saw it from roads, but everything I saw was beautiful. All the lakes below are alkaline, unique environments.

The volcanic formation of Fort Rock juts out from a sea of brush and irrigated alfalfa.

I saw tons of gorgeous shorebirds on Lake Abert’s glassy waters …

And marveled over the chain of Warner Lakes from Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.

Couldn’t get enough of clouds over the sagebrush.

Harney

Harney County is Oregon’s largest, and the tenth-largest in the United States. The county seat is Burns, and the Burns Paiute tribe is based here. There’s a lot of federal land, and some of the most beautiful, otherworldly landscapes—at times, I could hardly believe I was in Oregon.

Here’s the playa of the Alvord Desert, with rain clouds over it.

Steens Mountain, seen from the Alvord Desert side. It looks like a range, but as a fault-block, is technically one mountain.

Pete French’s historic round barn.

Volcanic craters …

Me birding at an overlook at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge …

The absolutely stunning Kiger Gorge on Steens Mountain.

And a view from around 9500 feet, near the summit of Steens.

My journey through Oregon’s counties has given me nothing but more love for the state I live in. It’s astounding how many Western Oregonians never make it east of the Cascades, or even really know what’s there—they’re missing out! I want to be sure to keep traveling locally—we really do have enough here to last a lifetime. I hope this inspires you to get to know Oregon, or get to know where you live a bit better.

Reading Highlights

June was a really weird reading month for me as I finished up the school year and transitioned to the summer. I DNF’ed so much more than I ever do. Not sure what was in the air. I read one of my favorite and one of my least favorite Erdrich novels, cleared out some Oregon stuff on my TBR, and had a few standouts.

Here’s a list of everything I read in June.

July was a lot better! I started slow, and did encounter some disappointments, but wound up with some great reads—new titles from favorite authors, some new-to-me authors, and really excellent rereads.

Here’s a list of everything I read in July.

Favorite books I read in June and July

Tales of Burning Love (1996) was my 27th book by Louise Erdrich and easily one of my favorites—I think it’s now my favorite book published the year I was born. Tales of Burning Love is organized around the ex-wives of Jack Mauser. His first wife froze to death in a blizzard. The others made it out alive, but with bitter regrets and plenty of ill feelings towards the man who charmed them all. The four women—Eleanor, Candice, Marlis, and Dot—are, of course, different, singular personalities. Their tales are nonlinear, but eventually, we hear the ins and outs of each woman’s story, both before and after Jack. And they form their own unique relationships with each other, as well. There’s a funeral scene that brings all the wives together and extends for the ages, through another North Dakota blizzard.

This novel exists in the same universe as the rest of Erdrich’s Love Medicine books, so I recognized a lot of characters and referenced incidents from my other reading over the last few years. And I recognized her rich portrayal of North Dakota. Because there are so many major characters in this novel, a lot of the communities Erdrich writes about clash in it. The characters have various ties to Ojibwe communities and Catholicism, and they move between rural, urban, and reservation spaces. Once again, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Erdrich is such an infrastructure writer. Roads and rivers are everywhere. They link the story’s madcap directions, its various timelines and characters, but also have material implications—especially with all the weather in this novel. It’s deeply funny and to me, feels like her most expansive novel. I am definitely going to revisit it.

Remica Bingham-Risher’s Room Swept Home (2024) completely blew me away. Bingham-Risher mines the archives of her own family history to draw a lyric narrative of 150 years of African American history. She does brilliant things with form throughout the book, adds in photographs, interrogates bureaucratic documents.
Much of the collection is set in Virginia, particularly Petersburg, where Bingham-Risher’s paternal great-great-great-grandmother and maternal grandmother both had pivotal experiences. The first section, “Minnie Lee Fowlkes (1859-1945),” traces the titular woman’s life from childhood enslaved on a plantation, to motherhood while contending with slavery’s scars, to urban life and rioting, to the Great Depression. The second, “Mary Etta Knight (1922-2007),” has at its heart Mary’s time in Petersburg’s Central Lunatic Asylum, cleaning white people’s homes, and many experiences of motherhood. Cycles of birth, modes of care, are prominent throughout. The final two sections run from the roots to the treetop, locating history in Bingham-Risher. Formally, Bingham-Risher works with duplex, contrapuntal, ghazal, erasure, and so much more. Her language has so much music to it, but that never diminishes the gravity of the history that is, like as were maps to escape slavery for her ancestors, braided into her hair.

In A Catalog of Future Mercies (2026), Serena Chopra probes the deepest wounds of her personal and family histories, covering many kinds and generations of abuse. The poems are often long and ranging, twenty pages or more, chronicles of exhaustion. I had to keep putting it down and read it over several days, but it was so worth it. “I shelter what survives survival,” Chopra writes.

This is in many ways a tribute to her paternal grandmother, Dayawati—which means, full of mercy. She imagines Dayawati’s life through archives, conversations with her father. How many different ways can Chopra read mercy into a figure who was married off a 14, who endured cycles of abuse, who contemplated suicide? Infinitely many, such that mercy is an incantation into her granddaughter’s life, even as Chopra, too, is rejected and harmed, including by family members she loves. Chopra’s approach to limning these histories is somatic. She stays close to bodily sensations—sometimes, when she wrote, “I cannot breathe / these stories,” I felt like I couldn’t breathe with her. That’s not to say everything somatic is pain, though. In the notes, she credits Audre Lorde’s ideas about the erotic as informing her approach. These pages are full of more kinds of love than abuse. The poems are also deeply environmental, sinking into rivers in India and prairies in Colorado.

In June and July, I got really into William Kittredge, starting with Owning It All (1987). Kittredge grew up on a ranch in Lake County, Oregon, and tried his hand at ranching after studying at Oregon State. Later, he got his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught at the University of Montana. This book is equal parts Oregon and Montana, with some exploration of Wyoming, British Columbia, and the West more broadly as well. Kittredge swiftly paints a portrait of ranching culture, how it was built on possibility and senses of entitlement, yet quickly became unsustainable. He writes of the kinds of dreams he had, myths he bought into, as a child. The title essay is probably my favorite. I love how he writes about the particular mindset of ownership and improvement that for him defines agricultural life, and how it’s built on settler colonial violence. If one thing looms over the entire collection, it’s balancing love for the land (a sort of “emotional ownership,” as he puts it once) with settler identity.

A few essays profile western places aside from Kittredge’s homes—the oil town of Evanston, Wyoming; winter in Yellowstone; Indigenous artists in British Columbia. In these, and in his essays about Montana and Oregon, he asks how contemporary western lives move with and against mythologies. His mode is often personal essay that looks outwards, but a couple of the essays are cultural criticism. I haven’t stopped thinking about this book, especially since I visited his home region shortly after reading it (see below) and saw some of the places he mentions. Look out for me to be reading more Kittredge this year.

Layli Long Soldier’s We, releasing on October 6, comes nine years after her first collection and thus was easily my most anticipated release of 2026. The collection is close to 200 pages, but has only 12 entries in the table of contents (not including notes and acknowledgments). These are long poems. They take up space on the page, employ visual elements. Photos of visual art projects Long Soldier has worked on appear with the poems. The cover shows a wing dress she made with her daughter, plus some help from her aunt and her niece. “Obligations” and “Mosquitoes” appeared on star quilts, and on the page, each section appears a bit like a flow chart that widens and tapers. “Mosquitoes” borrows words from Zitkála-Šá, an important figure in this book.

Long Soldier’s daughter, Ohitika, is a big presence in this collection. “Tumbleweeds” thinks about how Ohitika helped her understand how she expresses emotion, and includes photos of them wearing tumbleweed crowns in various locations. “Now, You Will Listen” recounts Ohitika’s experiences with racist schooling and situates them within a long legacy of anti-Indigenous schooling—it ends with them making the dress on the cover. I love how Long Soldier’s role as parent is front and center in this collection. I really appreciate how Long Soldier confronts the harm of language. “184 X’s” interrogates the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which was signed with X’s by 184 leaders who could not read it. Long Soldier asks after the possibilities of translation, offers a hundred meanings for X. “X marks our language as the most generous relative. This is also why, in its absence, I ache.” Mark your calendars for this one!

I never have enough words for how much I love Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018)—or maybe it’s that my words pale against the incredible precision of Castillo’s. (Castillo knows how obsessed I am with her, by the way.) I always learn so much from the ways she observes the world, the precision she grants every emotion . This novel’s sheer force is unmatched, and each time I read it, I unpack some more layers and love it some more.

The prologue is told in the second person, a choice that always sucks me right in at high speed. We follow Paz, from growing up poor in the Philippines to becoming a nurse to immigrating to the U.S., marrying and having a child. The prologue ends, “Everything else is a story that isn’t about you,” and then the remainder of the novel (save a different second-person return that takes my breath away later on) is told in the close third person, following Paz’s niece.Hero acquires her new nickname when she arrives in California from her young cousin, Roni—both share the name Geronima, after their late grandmother. Hero once studied to be a doctor, but spent ten years with the New People’s Army, until she stumbled back into her family’s lives, thumbs broken from torture. Her wealthy parents refuse to speak to her; she goes to stay with her favorite uncle Pol and his wife Paz in Milpitas. There, she helps care for Roni and slowly softens, especially as she makes some friends.

Rosalyn is a Milpitas girl, helping at her grandparents’ restaurant and doing professional makeup in the same strip mall, reveling in suburban life. It was also interesting to me to revisit this now that the Bay Area chapter of my life feels firmly closed. Rosalyn and Hero hit it off immediately, and their slow-burn love story is one of the greatest I’ve ever read, so threaded through with every emotion and sensation. There are scenes between them that make me cry every time. There’s just so much here. How Castillo shows the diversity of the Filipino American community, how she weaves in politics, class, sense of place. The food and music. The way she’ll stick a period in the middle of dialogue and you choke along with the characters. I sobbed my way through the last twenty pages. I’m never going to get tired of this novel’s intense, earnest, overflowing heart.

30 by 30

I completed my 30 by 30 in June, just before I turned 30! I had a great time reading through this list, which was mostly recommended to me by friends. A year meditating on various themes and friendships through my reading was a great way to lead up to a new decade. In June, I read one of my favorite titles of the whole lineup, Remica Bingham Risher’s Room Swept Home, and closed out by meditating on LGBTQ+ health.

Here’s the full list, with links to my reviews. It’s tough to decide, but I think my top five were Room Swept Home; Troy, Michigan; Maud Martha; The Lathe of Heaven; and Where Rivers Part.

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - read with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

Guide to Oregon literature

My students’ work from the spring is finally available online! Visit oregonliterature.oregonstate.edu to take a look at what we’ve put together. You’ll find an introduction from me, and then links to entries on individual texts, as well as a guide to using libraries to access them. The students got to determine the form of the entries and the texts we represented. I’m really excited to see how people react to this, so please tell me what you think and feel free to share it widely!

Pacific Northwest Magic

These gorgeous trees are next to where I park for work.

In June, flowers were still in bloom.

On a walk in the neighborhood, this deer and I stopped and looked at each other.

In June, I mostly stayed close to home, but July was extremely exciting. My friend Patrick visited and we spent my thirtieth birthday at the wildlife refuge.

The next day, we went out to the Oregon desert. So many people in Western Oregon don’t even think about this vast, stunning region of the state. It might be the most underrated place I’ve ever been. We got great views of the Cascades on the way …

Our first desert stop was Fort Rock State Park. A lot of this region is defined by volcanic legacies, and this formation is just one example.

Next, we headed to Lake Abert, which I had read about in Caroline Tracey’s Salt Lakes. We drove around the rim, watching the clouds reflect on the filmy water, taking in the scents.

It was a little tough to photograph the birds, but just know that there were tons of them—gulls, black-necked stilts, American avocets, geese … as they flew, they were perfectly reflected in the water.

From there, we drove through Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge. We didn’t see any antelope, or as they are more accurately called, pronghorn, but we did get some great views of more lakes, as well as cool birds.

I could not believe how varied and different the clouds were in the deser.

We stopped on a cattle grate to get a photo of me with this strangely placed “Rural Road” sign (the road looked equally rural for many miles before and after this sign), which bridges my two book projects.

Sagebrush country, with a thunderstorm in the distance.

We drove around the east side of Steens Mountain, which looks like a range but is technically a single fault-block mountain, and saw the white playa of the Alvord Desert.

We spent a couple of nights in Burns, which had this gay cowboy.

Visited the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which is infamous for the 2016 right-wing takeover but famous for being an incredible birding spot. Look at this white-faced ibis!

Saw Pete French’s Round Barn, which was mentioned in Owning It All.

So many great views and great clouds.

We drove to the summit of Steens Mountain, which, if you’re considering doing it, is not at all a stressful road to drive and so incredibly worth it. Kiger Gorge Overlook felt like Hawai’i in the Oregon Desert.

From the summit, ~9500 feet, we got incredible views of this strange mountain and the Alvord Desert below.

And there was a desert thunderstorm behind us.

It’s kind of hard to see in this picture, but on the way back from the mountain, I was driving and shouted “Wait! Is that pronghorn?” and pulled over suddenly and there they were, two pronghorn!

On the way back to Corvallis, we stopped and walked along the Deschutes River in Bend.

Within two weeks after our trip, nearly every place we visited was affected by fire. This is a brutal, dry, smoky year east of the Cascades in Oregon. Later, we went to the coast. Darlingtonia State Natural Area is this weird, wonderful little grove of carnivorous plants.

Cape Perpetua is never disappointing.

I love the Sitka spruce.

I love walking to the tidepools on a trail that goes under Highway 101.

The blue whale skeleton at OSU’s Hatfield Center is completely up!

And it’s impossible to get tired of looking at the ocean (and cute sandpipers) at Newport’s South Beach.

It’s hay season here, so there have been lots of fun stacks of bales.

By the end of July, I’d observed 102 different bird species across Oregon!

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• I’ve started to work more seriously on my second book, which is about interstate highways in literature and culture. Feel free to start sending me any interstate content you notice.

• The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, in Central Oregon, are dealing with wildfires right now. You can donate to their relief here.

Have a lovely August, everyone!

It is a little annoying that America’s 250th is my 30th, a coincidence that occurred to me decades ago—but in thinking about that, I realized that when it first occurred to me, I didn’t really think I would make it to 30. There have been so many times that reaching this age was unimaginable to me. I am here. I am so glad I’m here. I am living a life of defiant aliveness—in spite of everything, I am still here, and that makes my life extra meaningful.

To make this list, I looked through all of the more than 2000 books I read for the first time between my 20th birthday and now. At 20, I was still in college. I had just embarked on my honors thesis project. (A few iconic books—Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, Rebecca Solnit’s As Eve Said to the Serpent, Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things—just missed the cut because I read them in the weeks before my 20th birthday.) Over the next ten years, I worked as university staff, did my PhD, and started working as a professor. I lived in three states, sort of lived in two more via my family, and traveled to twenty-seven others. I made more friends than I ever thought possible. I lived through a pandemic (ongoing). This is all to say that it was a vast project. How do you contend with a decade?

I am happy about this list, which I think represents a lot of what I’ve gone through intellectually and personally over the last ten years. For the backgrounds of the graphics, I looked through all of my saved photos and selected one image from each year of a place that was important to me. I’ll say more about the individual images in their respective years, but I find it interesting that a) I spent two years of my twenties in California, six in Michigan, and two in Oregon, but each of the states has three out of the ten images (Colorado gets the tenth), and b) the images include a river, a lake, an ocean, a reservoir, and a fountain.

I don’t know if anyone will read this entire thing, honestly, but making it was mostly for me—a way to honor everything I’ve learned.

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20

When I turned 20, my parents were in the process of moving from Indiana to North Carolina. My first month of my twenties was my last month in my home state. I worked on my honors thesis of both poems and literary criticism on agriculture and race, and from there, I can draw a straight line to what will be my first scholarly book and, well, my entire career. I graduated from college and afterwards, drove through Northern California and Southern Oregon with my parents. The background image is Crater Lake. At the time, driving on the freshly opened rim road and staring into the deep, clear lake represented my sense of accomplishment at finishing college. Now, it’s also meaningful because that was my first visit to Oregon.

Solmaz Sharif, Look (2016)

• Solmaz was one of my mentors on that honors thesis, and I hold so much about her teaching and work with me on a daily basis. I think about Look whenever I read the news.

Black Nature, ed. Camille T. Dungy (2009)

• This anthology is easily one of the most important things I’ve ever read—it covers four hundred years of African American nature poetry, and its thematic organization has shaped so much of my own orientation to environmental literature. I didn’t even think of myself as an environmental humanist when I first read it.

Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (2017)

• Solmaz introduced me to the work of Layli Long Soldier. I think about “38” regularly, ten years after I first read it, and Long Soldier’s environmental work with settler colonialism echoes through so much of what I’ve read since.

David Baker, Scavenger Loop (2015)

• As I finished my poetic thesis, Solmaz also introduced me to this book and especially its title poem, which explores agribusiness in the Midwest through fragmentation and “scavenging.”

Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994)

• My introduction to Joy Harjo’s beautifully earthbound artistry.

Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (1992)

• My family left Indiana, but Indiana never leaves me, and corn, from fields to the rank smell of syrup processing, has always been its controlling image. This hilarious and rigorous book gives corn the treatment it deserves.

21

This was the year I worked in person at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford. I couldn’t have asked for a better first job, with great colleagues and work that never got dull (so many characters), and I loved it so much I kept working remotely through grad school. I also applied to graduate school. I didn’t read a lot this year compared to every other year since I had a full-time job that only occasionally involved reading books. However, I loved reading outside during my lunch breaks. The background image is of the Pacific Ocean at Pacific Grove. It was an oceanic year.

Jane Smiley, Moo (1995)

• I first read this when I was 21, but understood it a lot more during graduate school as both my universities descended into scandal-ridden chaos that quickly made what happes in this novel look mild. One day, I may write my University of Michigan-themed version, BLOO.

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (2015)

• One of my colleagues at the Lane Center gave this to me, and I read it as I was trying to make graduate school decisions. Macfarlane’s collection of place-based vocabularies helped me lean harder into my own love for such terms.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oceanic (2018)

• I’ve loved the Pacific Ocean since I was a baby, but I was so, so in love with it this year, and these ocean poems (and the rest of Nezhukumatathil’s work) encapsulate that exuberant mood.

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968)

• The contrasts between this novel’s urban and rural spaces have found their way into a lot of my scholarly work. Without it, I’m not sure I would have started writing about rural time.

22

I packed up and moved back to the Midwest to start graduate school at the University of Michigan. That first year was mostly coursework (with a side of polar vortex), and a good amount of what shows up on this list was related to classes. The year was lonely sometimes, but I was excited to be back in the Midwest. Still, the background image is of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, taken before I left California—I never stopped thinking about water in the West, and I went back to work at the Lane Center the next summer.

Marwa Helal, Invasive Species (2019)

• This was actually my first ARC (I requested it to write about it in a seminar paper), and Helal’s acerbic takes on immigration to the U.S. feel more relevant each day.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1975)

• I read this for a class and the discussion managed to not touch on rurality at all, which was bizarre. This book, rooted in British literature, has been such a great precursor and model for my work on American rurality.

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016)

• This monumental work defines a lot more than just my decade. It has reshaped a generation of thinkers, and I taught an entire grad seminar centered around the rich lineage it falls into. Both Sharpe’s ideas and her methods of thinking are deeply inspiring for me.

Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (2017)

• Pico’s irreverent approach to the idea of a nature poem has really shaped my thinking about the environment, even as I remain a largely reverent person in that respect.

Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats (1998)

• The first time I read this in a grad seminar, it felt like targeted content, and it’s now one of the books I read the most times in my twenties. It’s the subject of my first published article, and I use it to teach our English major’s core writing class, so I’ve now had tons of great conversations with students about it.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

• Reading this reversed a depressive episode during my first winter back in the Midwest. I want to lean into abundance and reciprocity.

Tommy Orange, There There (2018)

• I read this deeply Bay Area novel just before I left for what would be the last extended period of time I spent in the Bay Area. I think Orange captures the mid-to-late 2010s there so well, and of course, does incredible work with urbanity and indigeneity. Also, my students LOVED it.

Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)

• Just a perfect novel that I’ve taught and write about. Viramontes’s details of agricultural labor, and the harrowing scene of a teen being sprayed with pesticides, always stick with me.

David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach (1995)

• The seasonal organization of this farm memoir has helped me think a lot about rural time. Years later, I was Masumoto’s conversation partner for a keynote address.

23

I started this year back in California, for the last serious time—in a way, I got my birthplace, somewhere I’d always wanted to live again, out of my system. I returned to a lush late summer Michigan. I completed my first Sealey Challenge, reading a book of poems every day in August (I skipped 2020, but have done it every other year since). That fall, I taught for the first time (could not have asked for a better first group of students). My next term of teaching got a twist when the COVID pandemic began and we all had to pivot online. I spent some time with my parents in North Carolina and started studying for my doctoral prelims exams there. Peak pandemic prelims introduced me to a lot of important texts, and kicked me into reading the staggering amount that I still do. The background image is elk on the baseball field of the YMCA of the Rockies in Colorado, which was the site of my first Western Literature Association Conference, a community I’ve been really grateful for.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

• This has the honor of being the only New England text I write much about in my scholarly work, and I love how Vuong has his protagonist traverse rural and urban spaces on his bike—but also, Vuong’s language, generally.

Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018)

• A flaming sonnet collection for these times in the United States, which have felt like they’re at a fever pitch and yet also a perfect continuation of what came before.

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

• I love how insistently Ross Gay is a scholar of joy. I love that he reframed Indiana for me. I love that he makes me notice delights and name them as such.

Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (1989)

• One of my favorite novels of all time, which always knocks me out—Kenan writes so powerfully of a rural queer Black boy’s alienation from everything but place itself, with a structure that’s singular and haunting.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

• Technically, I first read part of this in high school, but I only finished it at 23. That we were only assigned to read chapters “that advanced the plot,” and that I didn’t have time to fill in the gaps because I had surgery in the middle of the unit, have become part of my personal mythos. I loved getting to finally read through the weird gay whale book, and I’ve especially loved getting to discuss it with so many friends.

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020)

• I’m thinking often about Diaz’s approach to water, to closeness, to desire, to all the pulses that run through people and places.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (1992)

• I use the term “Playing in the Dark-sized book” to denote something that does a lot in few words (something I am not really skilled at). As always, I’m asking—how did Morrison do this?

June Jordan, Haruko / love poems (1994)

• The great June Jordan is someone I want to continue learning from, but these love poems, which teem with a force of aliveness, are easily my favorites of hers.

Mira Jacob, Good Talk (2019)

• One of the books I’ve read the most over the last decade, first alone and terrified as the pandemic began, later with friends, family, students. I love sharing this book, even as the fears of the first Trump administration now seem a little quaint.

Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart (2018)

• First read this at the beginning of studying for my prelims exams and quietly sobbed. If I started saying what I love about it, I’d go on and on, so just know I am an absolute bonkers superfan for Elaine Castillo, and now Castillo knows that about me, too.

Zitkála-Šá, American Indian Stories (1921)

• This is a classic that way more people should read, and one that’s helped me think about rural schools, a centerpiece of my research—and oppressive schools in Indiana.

Sarah Smarsh, Heartland (2018)

• I write about rural American literature, but this is actually one of the only texts I write about that itself uses “rural” as a key word. I love how unabashedly progressive Smarsh’s vision of white rurality is.

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)

• My favorite Morrison novel I first read during my twenties (and that includes all save Beloved). How does she cover so much ground here? Morrison’s Michigan feels semi-mythical, yet all too real.

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

• It felt kind of wrong to actually put Laura Ingalls Wilder in this list, but she has loomed large over my work this decade, so instead I included this epic biography of her.

24

I continued studying for my prelims and went back to Michigan at the end of the summer. Quarantine year, remote teaching (which included what might still be the best class I’ve ever taught). Everything felt stressful and terrifying. Thank god for the people I did see, and for Lake Erie—and then, for vaccines. The background image is the view of the barn I had from my room in Michigan, here covered in a light snow.

Linda Sue Park, Prairie Lotus (2020)

• I’ve written about and taught this one, which has made me think a lot about Asian Americans as settlers and how rural children’s texts define what it means to be “American.”

Ana Castillo, So Far From God (1993)

• This novel keeps becoming more important to me—it wasn’t necessarily my favorite read during my prelims, but it shows up in my rural book, and the blurb on the cover inspired my interstate highways project. I appreciate its characters and places more the more I think about it.

Percival Everett, Watershed (1996)

• Still my favorite Percival Everett novel, and one that helps me think a lot about the interrelatedness of different rural spaces. It’s in my book.

Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (1988)

• I keep returning to these short stories for research, teaching, and just for fun—they’re so varied, so singular. Everyone should be reading Yamamoto.

Ross Gay, Be Holding (2020)

• Black flight, Black life, Black death, basketball, breathing, holding, being beholden—and the greatest acknowledgments section of all time.

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2017)

• One of my favorite people shared this book with me and it became one of my favorite books to teach.

Sumita Chakraborty, Arrow (2020)

• The density of Sumita’s lines here, and the intensity with which she approaches grief, struck me when I first read this collection, but ended up preparing me for some dense, intense times ahead.

Victoria Chang, Obit (2020)

• So many different ways I learned to confront grief during this decade. This was my introduction to Victoria Chang, who immediately became one of my favorite poets, and somehow interrogates the expansiveness of death with an obituary column as its form.

Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians (2013)

• I left California behind for good in my twenties, but the state will always be a part of me, and I love this scorching, wildly creative memoir that takes on its anti-Indigenous history.

Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020)

• Grad school was a rough time for me, and it feels rougher the further I get from it. This novel captures the discomforts of being a grad student, particularly a grad student of color, more than anything I’ve ever read.

Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008)

• I loved reading this compendium of Bechdel’s now classic comic strip and keep meaning to reread. I’ll regularly think of one or another joke that her bunch of queer women made and laugh.

25

This was another difficult year, maybe the most difficult, for plenty of reasons that I don’t need to get into as part of what is, ultimately, a celebration. I am celebrating that I made it through. The background image is a barn with a statue of young Lena Meijer riding a pig at the Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids (I love to use this scene as a background image when I give talks). One notable development: at the very end of my 25th year, I joined Bookstagram!

Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish (2020)

• Read this in some very dark moments, and it held me. Astounding in its artistry, a book I’ve taught in two entirely different classes.

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties (2021)

• I went to college with Anthony and was devastated when he passed away. These posthumous, humorous short stories are ones I think about all the time and loved teaching. They show how absurd everyday moments can be.

C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2021)

• Another novel I loved to teach (it was divisive in class) and have discussed at length. Zhang’s reimaginings of the nineteenth-century West are intense and thought-provoking.

Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021)

• I couldn’t believe that a novel about a teenager exploring her queer identity in 1950s San Francisco Chinatown won the National Book Award, because I explored my queer identity in 2010s San Francisco Chinatown! Lo’s research here amazed me.

Jennifer Huang, Return Flight (2022)

• I love this collection by my friend Jennifer, who I’ve been lucky to live near in disparate places, just as this collection explores disparate places.

Solmaz Sharif, Customs (2022)

• Look, it’s Solmaz again, and I think about this book, especially the poem “The Master’s House,” all the time as well. She redefines grammars and with them, the infrastructure of the world.

Neema Avashia, Another Appalachia (2022)

• Such a perfect encapsulation of what it’s like to grow up Indian in an “unexpected” place, and how complicated it can be to claim a region with a temporary positionality.

Jung Yun, O Beautiful (2021)

• This also informs some of my scholarly work and has, like some other things on this list, helped me think about Asian American settler colonial perspectives.

Nina McConigley, Cowboys and East Indians (2013)

• Reading this story collection, very Tamil and very American West, made me feel seen, and more importantly, led to a great friendship with Nina, because me reading her made also her feel seen.

Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (1999)

• I’ve read a lot of Louise Erdrich in the last 10 years, but I keep returning to her children’s work. This is a favorite text of mine to teach.

Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (2019)

• I loved this when I first read it and it made my list of 2022 favorites, but teaching it in my Oregon lit class is what really landed it here. Piatote helps me understand the Indigenous histories and presents of the Pacific Northwest.

26

This was my first full year on Bookstagram, and I can see that influence in my reading. I was so excited to talk about books with so many people! I discovered new titles! I started reading ARCs! I wasn’t surprised to see that this year has more titles on this list than any others. I also actually wrote most of my dissertation this year, having kicked back into gear intellectually. The background image is of Ann Arbor’s Traverwood Library, which was one of my favorite spots in town.

Home Ground, eds. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (2006)

• This encyclopedia of American place terms, by renowned American writers, is pretty much exactly my thing. I’ve taken it out into the field, too—whenever I go on a road trip now, I pop it in the car.

Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now (2022)

• This book reminds me why I find so much purpose in what I do for a living, which is critically read and teach people how to critically read. I’m always buzzing with excitement when I read it. We read the “Author’s Note, or a Virgo Explains Things” on my first day back in the classroom after a hiatus.

Miriam Toews, Women Talking (2018)

• I read this while I was traveling to a funeral. Miriam Toews is one of the greatest writers about suicide and suicidal ideation, and this book has a dark premise, but is all about affirming life, about not having to earn your life.

Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976)

• Kind of can’t believe I never read this as a child. It’s helped me think about rural schools in literature, but also about the importance of being a teacher in a time of political repression.

Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021)

• A book that helped me think about Michigan, but also young adulthood, grief, traditional ecological knowledge, the limits of what a story owes its readers. Later, I taught it in a YA class.

Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (2023)

• In my twenties, I learned how to want to be alive. I love how Charif Shanahan writes about suicidal ideation, about difficult, defiant aliveness.

Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues (2023)

• I love teaching this because so many of my students seem amazed that queerness and religion can not only coexist, but shape each other. Lamya’s reading of Maryam as a lesbian, which then helps her think through her own suicidal ideation? Perfect.

Cynthia Dewi Oka, A Tinderbox in Three Acts (2022)

• This collection blew my mind, and reminds me that sometimes, difficult writing is necessary to contend with the most difficult of topics.

Camille Dungy, Soil (2023)

• I loved getting to take a poetry workshop with Camille Dungy when I was 22, and I think about this memoir often as I look out into my own yard, or, really, consider the human dimensions of any “natural” space.

Paisley Rekdal, West (2023)

• The West across time, transportation infrastructure, forms of translation, failures of translation … a poetic expansiveness that confronts the violences of western expansion.

Kai Cheng Thom, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017)

• I fell in love with picture books in a big way in my twenties, and this one has now become a go-to gift for friends and their kids. It’s a story that’s very queer, very trans, and also universal: “you can only be who you are.”

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (2023)

• The form, the content, the ambition of this text. A life, a universe. What isn’t this book about? I am especially taken by how Sharpe writes about her own childhood and its enduring wounds.

SJ Sindu, Shakti (2023)

• I love this Navarathri-themed graphic novel, and, while I generally want to go beyond “representation matters,” seeing the protagonist’s queer Tamil mom practice Hinduism made me feel like representation matters.

Putsata Reang, Ma and Me (2022)

• I cannot even get into everything this book means to me, but one notable thing: it was my introduction to Corvallis, before I had any clue I’d move here. I talked about it in my job interview and have loved teaching it here, where it’s set. I have read it five times in three years, not once without crying.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night (2023)

• The ethics of this novel are so steadfast, yet tailored to the complexity of its situation. I have often been frustrated by people who want a “good side” and “bad side” in every conflict. Sometimes all the sides are bad, and regular people, like this protagonist, are caught in between.

Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)

• This collection of essays explores so many different aspects of being a writer, and understanding life through writing. So much of what Chee says here challenges and sticks with me. On the day after Trump was elected for the second time, I gave Chee’s essay “On Becoming an American Writer” to my students as a gift.

27

This was my last year of graduate school. I finished writing my dissertation and defended it. I went on the job market, which turned out to be the most fun part of grad school, and had my chaotic ice storm campus visit to Oregon State, which was of course a success. I prepared to leave a part of my life behind. It was also my last year working at the Bill Lane Center at Stanford, which sustained me for so long. On that note, this background photo is a bit of a cheat—I did take it when I was 27, but it was actually my lunch spot at Stanford when I worked full-time at 21.

Jake Maia Arlow, The Year My Life Went Down the Toilet (2023)

• I read this book as I finally started medication that worked for my ulcerative colitis, after over a decade with the disease. I’ve healed a lot of my medical trauma in my twenties (shoutout to my doctors at Michigan Medicine), but I think it would have happened faster if I’d had this book as a kid.

Oliver de la Paz, The Diaspora Sonnets (2023)

• I love this book more every time I read it. It helps me think about Eastern Oregon, about the literary forms of interstate highways, and more generally, about immigration, rurality, and the sonnet.

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (2023)

• I learned a lot about love and grief, and how they are intertwined, in my twenties. This book is about both and made me cry on basically every page.

Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003)

• My favorite book by Erdrich. Her love for books is matched only by her love for reading landscapes like they are books. Sound like anyone else you know?

Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022)

• I still don’t really have good words for this collection, much less for the atrocities Abu Toha documents in Gaza, but his words and images echo through me.

Cascadia Field Guide, eds. Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield (2023)

• It was really special to read, then reread, this poetic field guide as I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. I live it every day.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! (2024)

• Finishing this for the first time on the plane to my job interview in Oregon and trying not to cry as I was so overwhelmingly grateful to be alive was a completely life-changing moment. It inaugurated the Martyr! season of my life. This book, set in a fictionalized version of my hometown, so steeped in defiant aliveness, which reminds me that life is impossible, a series of coincidences, and thus, so beautiful. It represents the most important lessons I learned in my twenties.

Sasha La Pointe, Thunder Song (2024)

• This fierce collection of essays has oriented how I approach the Pacific Northwest as a settler.

Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year (2024)

• My first Abdurraqib book, which ruined me for all others, and is a peak Midwest of color text. Abdurraqib’s love for the region is full-throated and vast. The book creates its own time zone.

Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts (2024)

• Best graphic narrative I’ve ever read, one that thinks about intergenerational trauma as much more than a buzzword and forced me to read slowly. Hulls says she will never write another book, and that, too, is a lesson.

28

I left the Midwest in the rearview mirror and drove to Oregon, visiting parts of the country I’d never seen, stopping at national parks along the way—perhaps the best trip I’ve ever taken, one that transformed me. Oregon was beyond my wildest dreams, and Corvallis felt immediately like a place I really belonged. I returned to teaching and loved my job. I started writing poetry again after years. The background image is of my beloved Willamette River, a spot on my daily walk that I photograph all the time.

Melissa Kwasny, Pictograph (2015)

• I read this collection as part of my Road Trip edition of the Sealey Challenge, largely on location while traveling through Montana, and Kwasny’s approach to observing the land, I realize now, helped unlock the poet in me again.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019)

• This was another standout from my road trip Sealey, and a good read as I cast off my grad school self. Belcourt is very humanities grad school, but for once, I mean that in a good way.

Danez Smith, Bluff (2024)

• I read this just after completing my cross-country road trip, on which I visited the Twin Cities for the first time. I can’t stop thinking (and writing) about how Smith depicts them in this quite literally expansive book.

Richard Van Camp, What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses? (1998)

• A haunting, poetic, wintry picture book rooted in the magic of asking big questions that are unanswerable and yet have infinitely many answers

Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed (2021)

• Clint Smith’s tour of sites related to slavery helped me unearth some very uncomfortable childhood memories (playing a Confederate soldier for months on end in elementary school), and I think about how he approaches public space and memory all the time.

Diane Wilson, The Seed Keeper (2021)

• This novel has some of my all-time favorite writing about corn, and came into my life as Corvallis somehow made me feel closer to Indiana than I had in years. Everything about its approach to the environment and Indigenous history woke up dormant parts of my brain.

Carl Phillips, Then the War (2022)

• It feels like Carl Phillips’s syntax remaps my bloodstream. I think about his poem “And If I Fall” almost every day. I loved slow reading this new and selected with my friend Laura. And having seen Phillips read a couple of times only heightens my love of his work.

Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half (2025)

• This exploded what I thought a memoir could do and made me ask new questions about home, family, bodies, and translation.

Lynda Mapes, The Trees Are Speaking (2025)

• God, I love PNW forests. I am constantly thinking about Mapes pointing out that trees sustain more life when they are technically dead.

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (1993)

• Tar Beach is simply stunning, high-concept and yet so human. A picture book I read to my graduate students, and at which we all held our breath.

Karen Hao, Empire of AI (2025)

• I hate that AI has become such a major theme of this decade, but since it has, I’m glad that I have this book exposing its evils, which I think about every single day.

Oliver Baez Bendorf, Consider the Rooster (2024)

• The Midwest and the PNW, forest and field. Explosive ideas, and refusing to be contained.

29

I continued to love Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. I began the process of moving my own book towards publication. I continued to love my job. I felt lonely sometimes. I continued writing poems. I started volunteering at the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge and fell in love with birds. The background image is a photo my father took of me at Finley—I am, of course, looking up at birds.

Emily St. James, Woodworking (2025)

• Reading this novel feels like a form of loving my high school self. I’m obsessed with how St. James works with setting and character—which, of course, can’t be separated.

Bruce Snider, Paradise, Indiana (2012)

• “And God said let there be corn, and there was Indiana.” One of the overarching narratives of my twenties was healing my relationship with the Midwest—which necessarily involves acknowledging, again and again, how messed up Indiana was.

Testament: A Rural Anthology (2025)

• I had the honor of writing the foreword to this beautiful anthology. The first time my name appeared on the cover of a book.

Sonora Jha, Intemperance (2025)

• This PNW-based tale about an older South Asian professor trying to find love, with help from some creative Hindu goddesses, continually surprised me and reminded me to open my heart.

Patrycja Humienik, We Contain Landscapes (2025)

• I want to be a student of so many kinds of devotion, to understand how porous I am in this world of water. This collection changed the way I moved through the world, and I could not stop writing after Humienik.

Linda LeGarde Grover, A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids (2023)

• This book changed the way I look at robins. I can’t get over its brilliant structure, how it manages to be an epic in 150 pages, how it troubles the lines between living and dead.

Caroline Tracey, Salt Lakes (2026)

• I let this be the last book on my list because though I read it recently, it addresses so many central themes of my last decade—the American West, climate change, queer ecologies. Inspired by it, I am ringing in 30 by visiting a salt lake.

Statistics and miscellaneous facts

Some assorted stats and thoughts!

Genre breakdown (some books count in multiple categories):

• Poetry: 30

• Memoir: 17

• Other nonfiction: 14

• Novel: 31

• Short story collection: 4

• Graphic narrative: 6

• Middle-grade: 5

• Young adult: 3

• Picture book: 3

Decades of publication:

• 2020s: 48

• 2010s: 27

• 2000s: 4

• 1990s: 13

• 1980s: 2

• 1970s: 3

• 1960s: 1

• 1920s: 1

• 1850s: 1

States books are set (Notes on this—I allowed up to two states per book, did not track non-U.S. state settings):

• Arizona: 1

• California: 15

• Colorado: 1

• Connecticut: 1

• Indiana: 4

• Iowa: 1

• Kansas: 1

• Kentucky: 1

• Maine: 2

• Maryland: 1

• Massachusetts: 2

• Michigan: 4

• Minnesota: 6

• Mississippi: 2

• Missouri: 1

• Montana: 1

• Nevada: 1

• New Mexico: 4

• New York: 7

• North Carolina: 1

• North Dakota: 1

• Ohio: 1

• Oregon: 5

• Pennsylvania: 2

• South Dakota: 4

• Texas: 1

• Utah: 2

• Virginia: 2

• Washington: 6

• West Virginia: 1

• Wisconsin: 2

• Wyoming: 1

Books …

• published by a small indie press: 31

• published by a university press: 9

• I read for class: 7

• I’ve assigned in a class: 38

• I’ve written about in my scholarly work: 20

• with authors I know or have met: 31

• I’ve only read once: 24

• I’ve read 4 or more times: 14

• I haven’t read since starting my Bookstagram: 11

If you made it this far, wow, thanks for reading, and tell me, so I can be impressed! That would be a great birthday (month) present!

Reading Highlights

I read thirty books in May, but eleven of them were picture books. There are a few reasons for this high proportion of picture books: 1) I was teaching children’s lit, so I read a lot to my students; 2) my mom visited, and we still like reading picture books together; and 3) after I had some health excitement (I am completely fine now), I just wanted to read picture books in bed. I read far fewer total pages in May than any other month this year, and yet, it was also my favorite reading month so far! I’d been feeling like I was having a bit of a dud year, but I read a lot I loved in May.

Here’s a list of everything I read in May.

Favorite books I read in May

I really enjoyed Kelli Russell Agodon’s new collection Accidental Devotions, which lives at the intersection of spirituality and distracting technology. The poems feel like they live in several eras at once—that is, if that even matters. Agodon writes in one poem, “This is modern life and the Victorian era / happening at once.” And that poem was one of many I took a picture of and immediately dispatched to friends, different friends each time, which also felt like an appropriate way to experience a collection so rooted in both digital platforms and human connection.

The poems average about a page long and are swiftly-moving lyrics packed with both humor and contemplation. Alexa queries, search histories, tweets, and typos form the fabric of a lot of poems. They share space with Emily Dickinson (who comes up a few times), the Virgin Mary, angels, butterflies. There’s a very queer humor to the collection, like when Agodon uses the tweet “If you had a mermaid phase as a kid you’re probably bisexual now” as an epigraph,” or a Dickinson-themed love poem set in a graveyard. The loss of a friend also runs through the collection, though, and ways of confronting or attempting to avoid grief show up, cutting.

As online as the collection is, there’s also a more straightforwardly ecopoetic bent to it, with poems about climate, birds, spiders, nature using they/them pronouns. These things feel at home amidst “accidental” devotions—the collection’s ethos that devotion is something you can practice without even realizing it, a focus you can cultivate amidst and through distraction. Many poems include “Accidental Devotion” in the title. One is called “Devotion in Which All of This Is Poetry.” And the last is called “Necessary Prayer,” and ends with a directive to share the poem, which, like “Every poem,” “is a devotion.” After I finished, I lent the collection to a friend.

In April, I taught Beth Piatote’s short story collection The Beadworkers (2019), which I love so much (you can see some reflections on that in my April newsletter). In May, I got to read, and loved, her new poetry collection Distant Water. Piatote, who is Nez Perce, is deeply passionate about Indigenous language revitalization. That showed up quite a bit in The Beadworkers, but is the main concern of this poetry collection. Each poem contains some Nez Perce, from a few words to the entire poem, often with some English translation.

Translation, importantly, is never seamless. Piatote does not want us, as readers, to simply skip the Nez Perce for the English. She wants us to engage deeply with the language and its grammars. Most of the poems comment on the structure and thus the soul of the language. In “kú’nu,” she writes, “to say I don’t know / which in English is an entire sentence but in my language / just one word.” In “I Cause My Heart to Pour Out is how to say remember,“ footnotes show the different grammatical constructions that can go with the base verb pin’í, to come out/to pour out.

Language revitalization is necessary, of course, due to colonial violence, which shows up in these poems. One poem intersperses the Berkeley anthropology museum’s mission statement with an entreaty for repatriation from the Klamath Tribe. Another, “Entr(eat)ies,” contains, among other things, excerpts from a disturbing Nez Perce to Latin grammar guide. Another poem, “Nine Places Where You Can Still See Wheel Tracks from the Oregon Trail,” gives a harrowing first-person accounting of the tracks on a body. There’s a grief that runs through the collection, both colonial and personal—“distant water” sits grammatically parallel to “deceased father.”

Maybe my favorite title was “Because our roots are in rivers, not Latin.” I really relished the opportunity to sit with a language that was unfamiliar to me and consider the modes of thinking it might engender, to think about the region I live in through the barest bit of a Nez Perce lens. I’ve been thinking a lot about translation lately—as I see “AI translations” more and more accepted, as I think about which parts of me don’t make sense in English—and we would all do well to appreciate the nuances of translation some more, and to fight against lingustic erasure where we can.

I loved Jake Skeets’s previous collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Blood (2019), and his new Horses is even better. I meant to buddy read it with my friend Laura, but accidentally tore through it in a little more than one sitting because I was completely captivated by Skeets’s language. The title, as Skeets notes in his acknowledgments, pays tribute to and sits within a long tradition of iconic books by Indigenous poets like Joy Harjo (She Had Some Horses), Luci Tapahonso (Blue Horses Rush In), and Nia Francisco (Blue Horses for Navajo Women). The collection also pays tribute to a specific set of 191 horses who were found dead in a muddy stock pond on the Navajo Nation in 2018. Climate change and drought turned this pond from water to mud, have turned so much else on the Navajo Nation to wind and sand. Skeets’s poems are elemental and elegiac, animated by a fierce, defensive love. The book’s dedication is “for the land.”

The first section, “Horses,” is a long poem that mourns those horses and the conditions that led to their death, but also offers a ranging theory of horizons, time, sentences. The second section, “Hootso,” consists of poems that each start their title with “If.” Most are fairly short, but “If Senses” sprawls across pages. All the poems in that section are deeply sensory, trying to make sense of senses. The entire book is a work of queer ecology, but the poems in “Entanglements I” especially deal with queer sexuality alongside environmental questions. The final section, “And Still Deer Soften,” most directly confronts the Anthropocene, with poem titles like “Anthropocenic,” “America,” “Again Apocalypse.” It ends with “Field Song,” a beautiful sestina.

I love how Skeets writes about light and time and, always, fields. After reading this book, I moved through space differently. In the notes, Skeets writes, “The cornfield where I grew up is nothing but sand.” I, too, grew up in a cornfield. What other colonized land is being turned to sand? Skeets also includes words in Diné Bizaad and builds the collection around culturally important numbers: two, four, six, and twelve.

Very little is end-stopped in this collection, so there’s a feeling of endlessness even as Skeets writes towards potential ends. Everything feels monumental. This collection made me think so much about ideas of sacredness. I can’t do justice to the poems here—you should experience them directly.

Finally, I was blown away by Sean Hill’s The Negroes Send Their Love (2026). It’s a wildly ambitious book that completely works because all of its ambitions are rooted in a deep earnestness. “I’m trying to puzzle through our curious and bewildering existence,” Hill writes. In a mix of poetry and prose, he moves from before the Civil War to the present day, from Georgia to Alaska to Montana, situating personal narrative within history and environment.

Hill grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, which before and during the Civil War, was the state capital. He draws the book’s title from an archival find, an 1858 letter from the then-governor’s wife, which included “The negroes send love to their friends” among other good wishes at the letter’s end. This, to Hill, revealed a strange intimacy, but in no way negated “those folks’ legal status as property.” Hill devotes a number of poems to imagining the lives of the Black people who lived and worked in the Governor’s Mansion. He also includes erasures of Confederate documents, confronting the legacies of Confederate nostalgia (which hit close to home though I didn’t even grow up in the South). Contemporary Milledgeville, home to Hill’s family, is a beloved home even as it holds these histories.

As the book continues, Hill moves into writing a bit more about the natural world as he narrates his moves to Alaska and Montana. Central to these sections are his wife and son, and how love and parenthood shape his orientation towards the world. He writes about having a mixed-race son as he elegizes victims of police violence. This heaviness, alongside birds, endless daylight, reflections on northernness. At the end are some sci-fi-style pieces about Blackness in future centuries, and then with two pieces called “The Negroes Send Their Love” that made me cry.

This is a broad sketch of the book’s concerns, which I think already give a sense of the book’s scope. But it’s impressive on every scale. Most pieces contained at least one turn of phrase or insight that stopped me in my tracks. It sits within so many different conversations and forges a path of its own.

It was really hard to decide on these favorites, which turned out to be mostly poetry, but I also read some great fiction and nonfiction this month. Some honorable mentions: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Backtalker (2026), lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), Sasha Bonét’s The Waterbearers (2025).

30 by 30

I have a month left until my thirtieth birthday and only two titles to go on this list. It’s been really lovely to pace this across the year and read recommendations from so many beloved friends. The highlight of my 30x30 reading in May was lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, a contemporary classic I’d somehow missed until now. I found it to be lyrical and moving, and could definitely see teaching it. I also read Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, a tour de force of a short story collection, and Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, a novel that didn’t entirely work for me, but whose ambitions I admired. As for my last two, I’ve started Room Swept Home and have The Care We Dream Of out from the library. Getting ready to say goodbye to my twenties!

Here’s the full list, with titles I’ve read in bold (and links to reviews):

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - read with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

Guide to Oregon literature

I’m really proud of where this is ending up. As I write this, my students are finishing up their entries for our collaborative guide, which will go up as a website this summer. A month ago, we still didn’t know how this was going to look, but I asked them to trust me and each other, and it paid off. We had plenty of heated, but friendly discussions. We somewhat chaotically put post-it flags on a map of Oregon. We ILL’ed so many books. Together, my students are writing about 50 different Oregon books. Although I did a lot of research before I taught this class, I’ve only read 4 of the 50, and there are so many texts they picked that I’d never even heard of—which is why this was such a perfect project to do with students in the first place. We pushed the boundaries of what I thought might count as “Oregon literature.” “Oregon literature” was a category that very few students had ever thought with before, as was place-based literature in general. As a category, it’s remained slippery but generative. We should do more ambitious projects with our students. I can’t wait to share our work.

Hearing my students reflect on this process on the last day of class was a good way to go out of the classroom for a while. I’ll be on research fellowship in the fall to work on revisions of my book and start on a new one. I’ll miss teaching, but it will be waiting for me on the other side.

Pacific Northwest Magic

Wildflower season is going strong. Saw some irises by the side of a trail.

I will probably always be fascinated by camas.

On the edge of the wildlife refuge, I saw lupine in full bloom—and on top of a shed, a raven having a conversation with a blackbird.

I visited Portland’s massive rose garden with my mother and got these stunning views.

I was invited to help lead a trip (open to the community) to see the Western Flyer, the restored boat John Steinbeck traveled on with Ed Ricketts, a journey they memorialized in The Sea of Cortez.

I loved getting to walk through this corner of literary history!

I also used it as an excuse for a day at the coast, which always stuns.

My father gave me his old camera, so I’m experimenting with taking some zoomed-in photos—like of these baby seals at the coast!

I watched this parent and baby slowly, laboriously climb onto this rock.

Also, pelicans!

Starfish in a tidepool!

At OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, they were putting up the skeleton of a blue whale.

Back home, I got another eagle photo from inside my house.

More flowers …

And backyard berry season begun!

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• I’m hosting a readalong of Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018), one of my favorite novels of all time, over four weeks in July, starting on the 4th (my birthday). It will be asynchronous over Discord, and all are welcome to join! If you’re interested, just let me know and I can share an invite to the Discord.

  

Have a lovely June, everyone!

Reading Highlights

I read an amount that I can’t really believe in April. This was mostly because I read a ton for work—I’m teaching two literature classes and I have been prepping a separate online class, so I basically reread a book every work day. The good news is that most of these were books I really love, or at least find very fascinating (looking at you, Little House on the Prairie). In general, I read more I loved in April than I have so far this year. The online class prep is mostly behind me, so I think I’ll be back to normal levels in May. I also want to read a couple of things that are longer and slower.

Here’s a list of everything I read in April.

Favorite books I read in April

Louise Erdrich’s new short story collection, Python’s Kiss, was the 26th book I’d read by her and ranks among my favorites—so that’s saying a lot! I buddy read with my friend Audra (our seventh Erdrich buddy read together, and our first of two buddy reads in April) and we were both floored by Erdrich’s inventive, funny short stories. This is her first true short story collection—The Red Convertible collects previously published short stories, most of which wound up being starts to novels. Python’s Kiss, on the other hand, was meant to be stories.

Things I recognized from Erdrich’s other work: her sense of humor that feels like the flip side of a sense of wonder; a facility with narrators of different ages; familiar North Dakota and Minnesota settings; a wry compassion for sometimes confounding characters. The stories in this collection all involve animals in some way. Snakes, as you might expect, are particularly prominent, but also dogs, birds, others. I am shocked that Erdrich got me to enjoy a cat story so detailed it made me sneeze. The stories move through some different settings and range from slightly surreal to outright speculative—we get the bottom of a frozen lake, Italy, a corporate-managed afterlife.

It’s hard to pick favorite stories because this worked so well as a collection, so I’ll instead share a few standout moments. The titular python’s kiss, which happens during a school assembly. A belt of beaded swallows. A child singing to a bus driver amid a blizzard. A character’s slow preparation to lose their corporeal form. Poetry copied onto bathroom tiles. “A stone is a thought that the earth develops over inhuman time.” Each story had a perfect, astonishing ending. They were also accompanied by illustrations, usually graphic novel-style, by Erdrich’s daughter Aza Erdrich Abe.

I feel like I’ve seen mostly negative reviews of this one from fellow readers and I don’t get why. I thought it was completely stunning, and I think I would have felt that way had it been my sixth rather than twenty-sixth Erdrich title. I hope to read the six Erdrich titles I haven’t yet read by the end of 2026. I’ve already started Tales of Burning Love, and have tentative buddy read plans with Audra for a couple more.

Caroline Tracey’s Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (2026) was another April highlight. When I picked it up, I expected sparkling nature writing about an often ignored and maligned ecosystem, which I got. But I didn’t realize that this would be primarily a book about the American West as well as a work of queer memoir. Tracey’s personal interest in salt lakes, the jewels of endorheic basins, drives the narrative arc of this story of environmental grief and quotidian love.

Tracey starts the book by diving into the Great Salt Lake. By complete coincidence, I reread Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991) while reading this, and what a perfect pairing it was (Tracey even borrows her subtitle from Williams). She traces her interest in salt lakes, though, to visiting the Salton Sea with an old boyfriend. Salt lakes “kept finding me,” she says, “We were witnessing one another.”

Chapters braid scientific and policy perspectives on specific salt lakes with Tracey’s own perceptions and related issues. For example, Tracey interrogates tropes of western stories by reflecting on her time as a ranch hand alongside Zuni Pueblo’s fight to regain sovereignty over their sacred lake. Personal perspective allows Tracey to bring in a lot of western environmental issues without it ever feeling like she got too far away from her main narrative. Lakes in the West are her focus, but Tracey also recounts visits to those on other continents, like the Aral Sea, for comparison.

In Mexico City for an exchange in grad school, Tracey realizes late that Lake Texcoco is salt, just as she finally allows herself to lean into her queer identity. She meets her wife, Mariana, and shows a quiet, beautiful love story, steeped in the “queer quotidian.” From this point on, the personal and the ecological reached a new level of integration. The bureaucracy around Owens Lake parallels the bureaucracy around their marriage. By the end, Tracey persuasively argues for salt lakes as sites of queer ecology. “Queerness and biodiversity: both forms of difference that enrich the world.” Her thoughts on birds, ephemerality, and everyday attention made me cry. I can’t wait to think about it as I visit the Oregon portion of the Great Basin this summer. Also, Tracey did an author talk at Oregon State and I got to meet her, which was lovely!

I’d been slow reading Larry Levis’s posthumous collected poems, Swirl & Vortex (2026), since February, a few poems a day, but finished it in April. Levis died in 1996, so this volume was a long time coming. It includes the five collections he published in his lifetime as well as posthumously published and unpublished poems.

There’s a wistful ache to so many of Levis’s poems that got me every time. Most of these are, in some way, love poems—many romantic, also poems of compassion for workers, places, birds. Unexpected images and turns of phrase characterize his love as one of incredulous wonder, incredulous not only at the love but at the quality of the wonder itself. If the love isn’t already lost to nostalgia, there’s anticipation that it might soon be. Each description feels like a prayer.

The Fresno of Levis’s childhood, and its agriculture (with labor never abstract or invisible) show up a lot. The poems roam far beyond that, though. He’s often drawing nonlinear maps. His work has so many different rivers. Sometimes, the energy catapulting down a stanza feels like a rushing river. “I would like to stroll beside / The river the way the river strolls” sticks with me, though these aren’t even complete lines, nested towards the beginning of a sprawling poem.

I didn’t love every poem, but reading this as a collected was so powerful that this didn’t matter. Even long poems I didn’t care for became worth it with a single line that blew me away. Understanding the consistencies and evolutions of his work was incredible. The poems (and their lines) tended to get longer as the years went on, and I wondered why, as some of the shortest early poems were stunning. Some long poems, like the sequence “Linnets,” also stunned me. All the way to the end, the poems surprised me, stopped my world, and I expect to open this book for inspiration frequently.

I got to do a lot of incredible, incredible rereads this month, but I challenged myself to choose just one to highlight as a favorite read of the month. It’s Beth Piatote’s short story collection The Beadworkers (2019), which I read back in 2022 and reread to discuss with my Oregon lit students. It made my list of 2022 favorites, so I loved it immediately, but I also felt like I got a totally different experience now that I live in Oregon. A lot of these stories touch various parts of Oregon, and all of them are concerned with Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. More characters are Nez Perce than aren’t. Piatote is also a language revitalization expert, and the Nez Perce language appears throughout the collection, from the section headings to dialogue in a play. However, characters represent and interact with people from a variety of PNW tribes, bringing up questions of Native identity across the region.

The first section consists of “Feast,” parts I, II, and III. The first two pieces are defined by a poetic grammar, the third a more conventional story, but all are concerned with food, language, dreaming. The next section is called “Indian Wars,” and Piatote is frequently concerned with federal policy and its violences. One story sees a young man getting telegrams with news of devastating war back home. Another deals with the “Fish Wars” in Washington state from the perspective of a child.

“Beading Lesson” is the clearest expression of a motif that appears across the collection, showing a character who teaches beadwork to children and the incarcerated. “wIndin!” might be my favorite, if I had to choose—the narrator is creating an artwork that rewrites Monopoly through Indigenous history, while navigating a warm but complicated friendship. In a lot of these stories, relationships are complicated and remain unresolved—friendships get cut off and reemerge, affairs begin, grief haunts characters. Piatote’s small, cryptic moments feel so realistic.

The final story “Antíkoni,” is a play script retelling Antigone through the lens of NAGPRA. Piatote draws heavily on traditional Nez Perce stories, blending classical literary traditions, and footnotes ask readers to consider the nuances of the Nez Perce language. My students and I spent a lot of time discussing the roles of federal law, regional identity, and place on many scales, as well as all the ways Piatote bends form. This collection is blindingly creative and surprises me at every turn.

Buddy read series

I wanted to take a minute to shout out how absolutely wonderful it’s been to not only do one-off buddy reads, but have a series of reads with a few friends. I already sang the praises of my ongoing Erdrich buddy reads with my friend Audra. I definitely have a far deeper understanding of the work because I’m constantly sharing details with/bouncing ideas off her, and all of the jokes are way funnier when we laugh at them together. Here’s a post Audra made about reading Erdrich’s oeuvre at the end of last year.

In April, I also wrapped up a different author project/serial buddy read with my friend Kristin. Starting on January 1, we read through all of Craig Santos Perez’s poetry collections. We’d each read a couple of them before, but we reread roughly in order (with some adjustments for library availability) and got such a rich understanding of the evolution of his work. I also got so much out of hearing Kristin’s personal connections to some of the experiences Perez described. Here’s something we wrote together on this series.

I highly recommend this practice, and if you have some things you might want to read with me, let me know!

30 by 30

It’s hard to believe there are only two more months until my birthday, so I’m in the home stretch on this reading project. In April, my friend Vanessa and I finally finished our accidentally-way-too-long buddy read of We Are the Ocean, a worthwhile and rich collection. I also read Empire of Wild (unfortunately didn’t do a lot for me) and Minor Detail (so devastating I barely wanted to write about it). I ended up unfreezing my library holds on everything left on the list, since the end is near!

Here’s the full list, with titles I’ve read in bold (and links to reviews):

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - read with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

Guide to Oregon literature

I think I’m stressing my students out a bit because, at the time I’m writing this, we’re still in the throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall stage of our class project. It’s pretty unusual for them to feel so unmoored in a class. But I’ve been promising that everything will make sense soon, and we’re about to get to the point where we make some decisions. Until then, we’ve read several shared texts the students generally seemed to enjoy (I polled the class for their favorites and there wasn’t a clear winner) and started to build a foundation for what we’re considering “Oregon literature.” It has been fun for me to be in such a definitional space with students, and they’ve definitely surprised me at times and made me rethink some of my own assumptions. I’m so looking forward to seeing where they land!

Pacific Northwest Magic

Spring! Everything is in bloom.

A friend and I went for a walk in Beazell Memorial Forest just outside of town, and it was a stunner.

Oregon—the light through the trees—

I also really like this barn photo I took at the entrance.

I was in a bad mood one morning, so I decided to take Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge to read in the park. As I walked towards the bench I planned to read on, a flock of white pelicans flew overhead, the first time I’d seen them since the fall. When I sat down, the next chapter of Refuge was “White Pelicans.” The world is so magical sometimes—or, really, all the time, if you’re looking.

Tulips bloomed in my yard.

I am amazed whenever I can see the white tips of the Cascade volcanoes clear in the distance.

It didn’t show up great in this picture, but this path is camas all the way down. Camas, if you don’t know, is a purple wildflower, and its roots are an important Indigenous food source.

This winter was far too dry, and the river already looks as low as it did last August.

Caught a photo of this great blue heron right by the side of the road.

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• Not a ton for this section this month. The many, many things in the news are weighing on me, but nothing I would say about that feels particularly useful. Hang in there.

Have a lovely May, everyone!

Reading Highlights

I am almost surprised to see how much I read in March—the month was such a whirlwind that it kind of felt like it didn’t happen. What was March? Still, in a change from recent times, I read a lot of fiction I enjoyed, as well as a solid mix of new-to-me and rereads for the #TransRightsReadathon.

Here’s a list of everything I read in March.

Favorite books I read in March

I got a lot out of Camonghne Felix’s new essay collection Let the Poets Govern (2026), which felt like a few different books in one, but was a powerful meditation on her evolving relationship to poetics and politics. Felix starts the acknowledgments by saying “This book has changed my life,” and I could see that within the book itself.

Some of the chapters consider political readings of existing poems, from lullabies to June Jordan. Poetry, for Felix, is a heightened attention to language, so she refuses to separate poems from readings of bureaucratic (violent) language (She ends most chapters with some kind of erasure poem). Other essays think about her early political and poetic education as a student and organizer amid the first BLM wave, or how her family’s roots in Grenada have shaped her.

For many years, Felix worked in political communications, most famously for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. I really appreciated her examinations of how she shifted attention away from electoral politics and to something that imagines beyond systems. She says, “the book I wanted to write was not about how politicians could use poetry to write better speeches, it was about how political rhetoric borrows from poetry’s nature in order to distract us from the fight and convince us that power can only be owned by those who conquer.” Felix doesn’t claim that electoral politics are entirely useless, but discovers that they are absolutely not enough. It made me rethink, not necessarily how I am attached to things, but how I talk about them.

“My job is to ask questions,” Felix writes near the end. “The poet organizes their world by tilling the soil.” I found this book to be both humble and visionary, searching and resolute. Have you read it? I’d love to talk more about it!

My friend Kristin has been singing the praises of Maxine Clair’s novel-in-stories Rattlebone (1994) for a while, and she added it to my 30 by 30 list. It deserves to be known much better than it is—it’s the kind of book I’m shocked I hadn’t already read. Irene, a young Black girl growing up in the “Rattlebone” neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas in the 1950s. The book has the energy of Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street in its lyrical, episodic approach to coming-of-age, and goes from Irene’s early childhood to high school years. It also echoed some of my favorite notes in children’s literature.

Irene isn’t a particularly spunky or dynamic character like a lot of young literary heroines are. She’s more subdued, special in Clair’s hands as the steady focus of this book. Part of Irene’s quiet main character status comes from the fact that she doesn’t narrate all the stories. A lot of the action is domestic, or on the community level. Tensions between Irene’s family, the arrival of a new parent. Gossip about a new teacher at school. As in much of the best fiction, a lot of these small-scale tensions point at larger societal issues. There’s a lot about the kind of space school is, and rumblings of desegregation coming (Brown v. Board, after all, was a Kansas-based case). The Black families of Rattlebone have competing values, which often relate to the nuances of their origins or class status.

Irene’s friendship with neighbor Wanda is complex and shifting (a bit like how people talk about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which, side note, no, I do not relate to that friendship at all, and this one makes a lot more sense to me). Wanda’s the kind of firebrand we might expect from a protagonist, yet also carries a lot of weight. She has a disabled brother, Puddin’, who is eventually taken to a state asylum. This narrative strand is handled with a lot of care.

Clair draws the textures of this time and place so beautifully, mentioning the names of songs Irene listened to (I listened along). I loved how much the Missouri and Kaw rivers played into these stories, winding their way through the neighborhood, natural and infrastructural forces. Clair’s writing about these bodies of water showed up in unexpected places at times, and was always beautiful. I heard there’s a semi-sequel as well, which I’ll need to read.

Another thing about my friend Kristin, who recommended Rattlebone—she wrote a book and it’s out April 7! My preorder shipped early, so I tore into it. Kristin T. Lee’s We Mend With Gold (2026) isn’t a book I would have picked up if I hadn’t been friends with the author—it’s a treatise on Asian American Christianity. I certainly would not have believed fifteen years ago that I’d one day show up in the acknowledgments of any book on Christianity. Growing up in Indiana, I had what I now know to be a deeply distorted view of Christianity. Especially in the wake of 9/11, people mainly wielded it against me as a weapon (language that Kristin uses to describe similar interpretations of the religion)—to tell me that I did not and would not belong, to threaten that I was going to hell, etc. When I grew up and met other Christians—who told me what Jesus’s principles actually are—I was honestly shocked. I am so grateful to know people like Kristin who root their Christianity in love and inclusion.

Kristin and I actually grew up in similar environments, the only children of Asian immigrants in Midwestern college towns. The beginnings of this book describe the Chinese American church environment she knew growing up, and I was fascinated to see that, though one of us was Christian and the other was not, we had some parallel baggage with Christianity. She calls out the many ways that hat capitalism, patriarchy, and insularity, with Asian American dimensions, shaped Christianity as she first learned it, and white, Western Christianity set the norms even for herself and other Asian Americans. Testing her faith in college moved Kristin to start integrating her Asian American and Christian identities.

Kristin claims marginality and exile as positions of power that help her practice her faith. The heart of this book is family—both where it empowers and where it wounds. Through this framework, Kristin urges readers to unlearn a Christianity based in debt, duty, and fear, and instead practice one animated by solidarity and love: an expanded sense of family.

The book is grounded in other Christian thinking, but also in Asian American history, so Kristin expertly walks a line between making sure there’s a *there* to “Asian American” while constantly disaggregating rather than overgeneralizing. She draws on other thinkers as well as profiles other Asian American Christians to show how they find and give back to community. I found this to be a healing and inspiring read, and I can’t wait for it to reach readers who need it. If you know someone who might benefit from this one, encourage them to pick it up!

I read a lot of books I really enjoyed for this year’s Trans Rights Readathon (and made a mutual aid donation) but the highlight was my reread of Emily St. James’s novel Woodworking (2025). You might have already read about my love for this book in this newsletter, as it was one of my favorite books of last year. It held my attention just as intensely on reread. I love this novel, which somehow reads the world in a way that feels like it understands me, even though I’m quite different from the characters.

The novel primarily follows two trans women in Mitchell, South Dakota in the fall of 2016. The first person Erica Skyberg, a 35-year-old high school English teacher, tells after she finally admits to herself that she’s trans is the only other trans person she knows—her 17-year-old student Abigail Hawkes, while Abigail serves detention for calling her classmates “fascist c***s.” The two then embark on a not exactly appropriate, but clearly not unethical student-teacher friendship (I would not behave like this with a student but I also wasn’t disgusted).

Abigail is hypervisible in the community. Everyone knew her story—parents wouldn’t accept her identity, she moved away to live with her sister—before she even arrived in town. A local pastor/state senator champions a bathroom bill.1 I am cis, but Abigail speaks to my high school experience in ways that few other characters do. She’s ready to explode at the drop of a hat because her days are so intense with identity-based indignities. Most of her world is against her, and she has trouble believing that anyone isn’t.

Erica lets everyone else believe she’s a man. She has no idea how to change her life to make it hers, and confides in Abigail, her constantly exasperated teen “trans mom.” They drive to Sioux Falls for a trans support group. The two also interact with a rich cast of characters in Mitchell. Erica pines after her ex-wife Constance, while Abigail dates popular Caleb. Caleb’s mom, Brooke, is surprisingly kind to Abigail even though she manages the pastor’s campaign. Megan, the only person in town who loves Hillary Clinton, forms a “Democracy Club” to support the candidate running against the pastor and ropes Abigail and Erica in. I love all the small-town dynamics here, which feel completely lived in. Big moments are small, small moments are big. The texture of good, evil, and every shade in between feels so correct.

This is a book about characters striving to explain themselves to themselves, reconcile their own competing narratives and images. I think that might be why I identify with it so much. St. James does inspired things with first, second, and third person points of view—to dissect that here would be to spoil the book. I loved this book’s heart from the first page, but I admired the craft even more on reread. The little descriptions St. James chooses, where she begins and ends chapters, her careful attention to place and distance—it’s all wonderful. And how could I not love a book that has pivotal scenes on a tractor and at the World’s Only Corn Palace?

30 by 30

In addition to Rattlebone, which was one of my favorite reads in March, I read Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. I am always struggling with sci-fi, but I appreciated the small doses of Butler with little afterwords she’d written for each story. Definitely worthwhile. Annihilation of Caste was a super important classic that I was glad to get to, and extra glad that my friend Sravya reread it and discussed it with me.

My friend Vanessa and I are finally resuming our buddy read of We Are the Ocean. We should finish that this month. I haven’t quite decided what else I want to get to on the list in April, but definitely a couple more—we’re now only 3 months out from my birthday!

Here’s the full list, with titles I’ve read in bold (and links to reviews):

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - to read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - reading with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

Spring classes

Spring quarter started on March 30, and I’ve got two classes (as I continue to prep my online course—perhaps regretting some of my scheduling decisions here, but it will work out). I’m teaching the children’s lit class I taught online last spring in person this time I seem to have some very enthusiastic students so far!

Here’s what we’re reading—

In full:

• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (1935)

• Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (1999)

• Shing Yin Khor, The Legend of Auntie Po (2021)

• S.D. Nelson, Buffalo Bird Girl (2012)

• Joyce Carol Thomas (illustrated by Floyd Cooper), I Have Heard of a Land (1998)

• Carole Lindstrom (illustrated by Michaela Goade), We Are Water Protectors (2020)

Excerpts:

• Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (1932)

• Elizabeth George Speare, The Sign of the Beaver (1983)

• Jennifer L. Holm, Our Only May Amelia (1999)

• Linda Sue Park, Prairie Lotus (2020)

• Lesa Cline-Ransome, One Big Open Sky (2024)

I’m teaching all books that I really love in my Oregon lit class, so it’s kind of fun to teach a couple that I kind of hate in this one.

Guide to Oregon literature

On the first day of my Oregon literature class, I passed out road maps of the state (thank you to the employee at the Visit Portland center who immediately agreed to give me 25 maps for this purpose) and everyone loudly unfolded them at once. This might have been one of the most exciting moments of my teaching career. Having a physical object was exciting, and I’m asking the students to think about place in new ways!

On the first day, we also discussed excerpts of works by four Oregon icons: Beverly Cleary (A Girl From Yamhill), Elizabeth Woody (Luminaries of the Humble), William Stafford (An Oregon Message), and Putsata Reang (Ma & Me). Several of my students expressed a desire to create a less white canon of Oregon literature, and the first day emphasized the need for this—most people had heard of Beverly Cleary, a few people had heard of William Stafford, only the students who read Ma & Me in a different class with me had heard of Putsata Reang, and no one had heard of Elizabeth Woody. I’m looking forward to seeing everything these students discover.

Pacific Northwest Magic

My father was visiting me for the first bit of March, and we went to the top of Marys Peak, where we could see the Cascades seemingly floating above the clouds.

There are little waterfalls on the road up.

We also went to Portland and tried out some food carts.

Started to feel like spring. I walked a favorite trail at the wildlife refuge.

I went to Bozeman, Montana for a conference over spring break, and that is not the Pacific Northwest (some parts of Montana are considered part of Cascadia, but not the ones on Bozeman’s side of the Continental Divide). As my plane back descended into Portland, though, I had a peak PNW moment, with an absolutely stunning view of Mount Hood—and, not pictured, other Cascade volcanoes on both sides of the plane. The pilot said “When the volcanoes are out, it’s a good day.”

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• This year’s Western Literature Association Conference is in my backyard—Eugene, Oregon, August 26-29 (I’ll try to ignore that it’s in an aggressively Ducks-themed hotel since I get to sleep in my own bed every night)! The abstract deadline has been extended to April 15.

• Corvallis folks, I have two “appearances” coming up week after next. My colleague in film recruited me for a post-screening discussion of Beau Travail, a film I have not seen, which should be fun. And my friends and I have put together an anti-AI panel for OSU’s AI Week, which is April 13-17 but … has not been scheduled yet? So TBD.

Have a lovely April, everyone!

Reading Highlights

Lots of reading in February. I read some things that were pretty disappointing and some things that really stood out. I read a bunch of things to prep future courses. My friend Kristin and I plugged away on our buddy read through Craig Santos Perez’s work. My friend Audra and I finished our slow read of Louise Erdrich’s The Red Convertible. It was, generally, a big buddy read month, which is always a good thing!

Here’s a list of everything I read in February.

Favorite books I read in February

Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton, which was released in Spanish in 2020 and is newly translated into English by Christina MacSweeney, was a standout this month. Rivera Garza notes in the acknowledgments that she was inspired by José Revueltas’s novel Human Mourning, which was based on his engagement with a cotton farmworkers’ strike in the 1930s. Revueltas appears as a character here, and at first seems to be a central character, until he becomes a window into the lives of José María and Petra, Rivera Garza’s grandparents. Rivera Garza researches the novel largely through archival fragments, residues of bureaucratic documents, since so much of this history has been erased. She speculates on José María and Petra’s lives, asks questions in the middle of each yarn she spins. This is a portrait of hard labor and domestic grief, and alongside it, an economy of extraction. The cotton industry exploits laborers, irreversibly harms the land, asks for more, more, more until no more remains.

While reading this, I repeatedly thought about how poorly informed I am about Mexican history, yet at the same time, how aligned the novel’s themes and events are with the American West. Forms of extraction, boom and bust cycles, migrant laborers and hydroelectric dams, all things I think about all the time. It’s a good reminder that though the border inflicts key differences, the same ecosystems are shaped by similar forces on both sides.

And the novel includes border crossings, both in the early 20th century and in the contemporary period. Rivera Garza writes within the novel of researching it, of trips back to a place that is not on a map, no longer supposed to exist. There are a million layers of narrative, social critique, and emotional resonance in this singular novel. It’s autofiction, it’s history, it’s all of the above—both a classic and completely original story of the West.

I’ve loved Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poetry for a while and have read most of her collections, but the new with snow pouring southward past the window is probably my favorite. I’m taken, every time I come to Kane’s work, with how she describes Arctic environments. In her hands, even a list of plants or birds cascades across the page, stuns. Everything comes into focus immediately. That doesn’t mean, though, that it’s obvious—quite the opposite. Kane writes from her vantage point and rarely provides context, never belabors it. I find her invented words—“wavous,” “hells” as a verb—beguiling. There was plenty I looked up, like plants and place names; there was even more I could not look up. I had to trust in never understanding everything.

That opacity to readers like me is clearest when it comes to Kane’s use of the Inupiaq language. Some poems appear first in Inupiaq, then, on the other side of the page, in English. One of these poems reads a bit like a vocabulary list, recalling the act of language learning. The collection’s final poem is long, entirely in Inupiaq, no English translation. Two titles and two columns indicate, perhaps, two different dialects. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, having been bilingual for my entire remembered life, about the impossibility of translation, which is asymptotic at best; the humility in accepting you cannot fully understand and listening anyway. I pored over the beauty of these words on the page, not knowing what even one of them meant.

As in some of her other work, Kane thinks about motherhood and daughterhood. Deteriorating illness and grief thread through. The “After Anchorage” series, ending with prose poem “Without Anchorage,” gutted me. She plays with blackouts and erasure, space on the page. One series blacks out what seem like letters from a missionary. She writes of military occupation, with references to Ukraine. Like all my favorite poets, she openly asks after the purpose of poetry. Throughout it all, her language was so carefully crafted that I wanted to feel it; I read some poems out loud. Here’s one I couldn’t get over.

I love most rereads, but coming back to Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe’s essay collection Thunder Song (2024) in February was special. When I last read this in March 2024, I had just decided to move to the Pacific Northwest, a region I didn’t yet know particularly well. Now, I’ve lived here for a year and a half. I’ve driven through western Washington, recognizing some of the places from LaPointe’s essays. Her essays have shaped how I see this region. I think this is a must-read for all Pacific Northwesterners. LaPointe advances sharp arguments grounded in her experience as an Indigenous woman (her other memoir describes her as a “Coast Salish punk”), considering settler colonialism, racism, the environment, class, gendered violence, reproductive freedom, and more.

LaPointe uses stories about her great-grandmother and namesake, Vi taqwšəblu Hilbert, as connective tissue throughout the memoir. A powerful storyteller, Hilbert commissioned a Coast Salish symphony that premiered in Seattle, and as a reference, gave the composer a spirit song of Chief Seattle (or, more accurately, siʔaƛ̕). The two figures both play a large role as LaPointe explores colonial and decolonial histories.

Each essay is incredibly intellectually rigorous. In one, LaPointe muses on her childhood on the Swinomish reservation while torching the Skagit Valley tulips as a landscape of colonial erasure. She writes about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, a miscarriage and an abortion. Many of the essays untangle complex forms of love, always shaped by colonial environments. She also thinks about cross-racial solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests and cross-Indigenous solidarity in one essay that considers Pacific connections. There’s an essay on eating salmon after being vegan, finding meaning in riot grrrl culture even as some of it is racist. I love thinking with LaPointe on all these topics.

30 by 30

In February, I finished The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, which I’d been reading since September—definitely the biggest project within this big project! I’m so glad I finished it … really, about ten years after I first started it. I also read another book that had been on my TBR for a while, Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well. The final story, “The Space Traders,” is one I think everyone should read—and I rewatched the TV adaptation with my friend Jeremy to cap it off.

My friend Vanessa and I kind of fell off our buddy read of We Are the Ocean, but we plan to resume in April. This month, I’m hoping to read Bloodchild and Annihilation of Caste, and maybe one other title from the list.

Here’s the full list, with titles I’ve read in bold (and links to reviews):

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - to read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - reading with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

My students are brilliant

My students are brilliant! I just felt like I needed a little section to recognize that. I love how they’ve been working with criticism and with original ideas. I love that they’ve given me new ways to think about a novel I’ve now read seven times (Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats). I love that I’ve had so many great conversations with them in office hours. English majors are going to save the world.

Guide to Oregon literature

This projects-based class starts at the end of March! It is enrolled to capacity, and two-thirds with students I’ve had before, which is really exciting—I’ve never had so many repeat students, and I’m glad that they seem to like me as much as I like them! There’s a lot I’m leaving up in the air with the structure of the class—the students will get to determine (with my guidance) much of how we structure our public-facing class project. In February, I made useful connections with librarians and the OSU Press editor, and I feel so lucky to be learning so much from all of these experts as I put together the course.

I agonized over my textbook order, but I of course love to make deadlines, so I locked in during February. The students will be reading all of:

• Oliver de la Paz, The Diaspora Sonnets (2023)

• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

• Dur e Aziz Amna, American Fever (2022)

• Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (2019)

I think all of these texts explore Oregon, and positionality towards the state, in slightly different ways, and they’re all books I absolutely love (a criterion which helped with some tiebreaking for the syllabus). I am also going to have them read some excerpts (which I am still nailing down). For the latter half of the term, they’ll be independently reading of Oregon texts of their choosing and writing entries for our eventual guide on them. I cannot wait to see what these students do!

Pacific Northwest Magic

These Eurasian collared-doves have been getting really cozy in my backyard.

And yet they were not even the most inspiring bird couple in my neighborhood this month. Throughout February, a couple of bald eagles started hanging out at the top of the Douglas-firs behind my house. I first heard and saw them from inside my house, one fine afternoon—and inside my house turned out to be the best spot to view them. It is very hard to photograph something that far away with an iPhone, but if you pay attention, you can see the two eagles atop the trees here:

They’ve been there nearly every day, more often in the same tree. One afternoon, I saw them cuddling—wings comforting each other, one’s head on another’s shoulder. I didn’t even know they did that, and I cried at the tenderness. Luckily, my father came to visit later in February and brought his camera, which gives more of a sense of what I saw (though he would say the lighting is wrong):

I walked by the Willamette at sunrise one day.

It was so peaceful and beautiful. I saw cormorants taking off.

It’s beautiful in every light.

At the wildlife refuge, saw hundreds of geese taking off …

Miscellaneous Thoughts & Plugs

• I’ll be participating again in the Trans Rights Readathon this March. It’s more important than ever. Here’s some of what I might read.

• This year’s Western Literature Association Conference is in my backyard—Eugene, Oregon, August 26-29 (I’ll try to ignore that it’s in an aggressively Ducks-themed hotel since I get to sleep in my own bed every night)! The abstract submissions are due March 31. I’ve been going to this conference since my second year of graduate school and am so excited to have it so close to home. Consider attending!

Have a lovely (rest of your) March, everyone!

Reading Highlights

Lots of reading for work and for fun in January. I read a lot of books about and set in Oregon. I read some new-to-me memoirs. I started a series of buddy reads through Craig Santos Perez’s body of work with my friend Kristin. I made plans for more buddy reads. I read one of my favorite novels in ages. And more! There were surprises, disappointments, and everything in between.

Here’s a list of everything I read in January.

Favorite books I read in January

I was surprised at how much I thoroughly enjoyed Alia Hanna Habib’s new Take It From Me (2026), a guide to publishing in nonfiction. Habib is a highly esteemed agent who represents Hanif Abdurraqib, Clint Smith, and probably a few more of your favorite authors. She starts with an intro that addresses how she landed in her career as an agent and why she wrote this book. Then, she methodically offers advice on each stage of a nonfiction writer’s career. Chapters focus on pitching articles (this was full of information I had never considered and may put into use), the different educational paths a nonfiction writer may or may not take (I found the section on moving from a humanities PhD to nonfiction writing interesting), a writer’s platform (defined as how they might demonstrate reach to potential audiences), how to write a book proposal, the role of an agent, submitting manuscripts, and what happens between a book contract and publication.

So many people don’t even think about all the actors beyond the author who go into a book. I think about the behind-the-scenes of books more than most people, but I learned so much from Habib, from how to identify media outlets to pitch to, to how an auction works, to language found in book contracts. And it was delivered in a way that only made me love books more. Habib’s prose style is a delight, rife with extended metaphors that both entertain and explain. I had no clue that this book would be a joy to read rather than merely informational. Alongside her knowledge, Habib includes examples from clients and friends, with her interpretive annotations, as well as interviews with some writers and publishing professionals. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about how books are made.

And a bonus that made me love this book even more—Habib saw my review and offered to do a virtual class visit, which was so unexpected and generous!

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a few months, you know that I’ve been struggling to really love novels for a while now. Linda LeGarde Grover’s A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids (2023) astonished me. It’s short and skillful and I can’t even comprehend how Grover pulled it off.

The basic sketch of the plot—in 2022, the fictional Mozhay Point tribe, located in northern Minnesota, is considering buying some allotment land to absorb into the reservation. Margie, who owns the land, resists the sale and is preparing to speak on it at the tribal council meeting. Meanwhile, the nearby Miskwaa River Historical State Park, managed by the tribe, is in need of improvements. Hapless hikers aiming to improperly scatter ashes over Miskwaa Rapids unwittingly unearth old human remains. The novel then flashes back in the middle to 1972, showing how the remains came to rest there, before returning to 2022.

No summary can do this novel justice, because its power lies in craft. The plot doesn’t feel linear, and storylines cross each other constantly. The novel feels wrought in chiasmus. Things rhyme, but not everything lines up perfectly—everything has a purpose, but not necessarily teleologically. There is a rich chorus of characters, and I found that I did need the character sheet at the front. It’s a bold move to work with so many characters in a short novel. POVs shift freely, and many of the characters “although unseen are still with us,” as Grover puts it, but gossiping all the same. The lines between past and present, living and dead, are thin.

Rather than slice-of-life, this is many slices of many intersecting lives. The details cover various scales of politics, yet never stray from community-level impact. This book amazed me and stayed with me more than anything I’ve read in the last few months. It made me reconsider what a novel can do. The novel opens and closes with meditations on robin’s songs that made me cry. Robins as carrying the voices of ancestors. I have not looked at robins the same way since.

And then I read Chanel Miller’s new middle-grade novel, The Moon Without Stars (2026). An absolute delight. I really believe this is what Miller’s highest purpose is, and that this is the pinnacle of what middle-grade fiction can be. Luna is a seventh-grader in Palo Alto, California (at a fictional school named for Mine Okubo, which is very cool). She has parents who really love her, though her mother, an artist who struggles with bipolar disorder, isn’t always reliable. She mainly has one friend, Scott, a strange and sensitive boy who always knows how to support Luna.

At the beginning of the book, Luna inherits a book collection from a late classmate. As she notices some of her classmates struggling with various things, mostly rooted in self-image, she starts “prescribing” books, and they really make a difference. Soon, Luna starts writing her own zines, with help from Scott, about things like eczema. Through this, Luna starts to make more friends. Many of them are total sweethearts, or basically good with a few flaws. Slowly, though, a group of popular girls, with a mean ringleader, sucks her in—and Luna starts to lose herself and her values.

The story touched some familiar, timeless beats (sleepovers, a first period, popularity), but also unfolded in ways that I found surprising. The side characters were quirky and varying levels of developed, and Luna’s journey wasn’t always linear. I flashed back so hard to middle school, when social situations felt like they never made sense and it was so easy to, both physically and emotionally, suddenly realize you didn’t like the person you saw in the mirror. I wish I could have looked to Luna back then. I could see this being the new Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

30 by 30

Kept plugging away on my 30 by 30 this month. I read Kao Kalia Yang’s Where Rivers Part. My friend Annabeth put it on my list and I agree with her that it’s the book Yang was always meant to write. I cried a lot and am adding excerpts of it to a syllabus. Got to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, which I’d been meaning to read for ages, and reread Passing for good measure. I made a lot of progress on The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser and am about to finish. And I began We Are the Ocean as a buddy read with my friend Vanessa. Looking forward to continuing that this month.

Here’s the full list, with titles I’ve read in bold (and links to reviews):

1. Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, The Iliad (2023)

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

4. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) - recommended by Sravya

5. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953) - recommended by Ari

6. Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

8. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1976)

9. Derrick Bell, Faces from the Bottom of the Well (1992)

10. Maxine Clair, Rattlebone (1994) - recommended by Kristin L

11. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - recommended by Jeremy

12. Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (2000) - recommended by Laura

13. le thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

14. Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2008) - to read with Audra

15. Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008) - reading with Vanessa

16. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (2010)

17. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011)

18. Wendy Walters, Troy, Michigan (2014) - recommended by Cyndi

19. Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World (2017) - read with Kristin MB

20. Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) - recommended by Natalie

21. Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing (2018) - recommended by Chandrica

22. Cherie Dimaline, Empire of Wild (2019) - recommended by Charlotte

23. Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America (2021) - read with Ana

24. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (2021)

25. The Care We Dream Of, ed. Zena Sharman (2021) - recommended by Grey

26. Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (2022) - recommended by Krithika

27. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (2022)

28. A Flame Called Indiana, ed. Doug Paul Case (2023)

29. Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home (2024) - recommended by Kristin MB

30. Kao Kalia Yang, Where Rivers Part (2024) - recommended by Annabeth

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Teaching Reflections

Guide to Oregon literature

I’m hard at work preparing a new course for the spring term. Our English major requires that students take at least one course that’s “projects-based”—centers something that’s not a regular paper—and this is one. My students and I will collectively create a guide to Oregon literature. The last guide that was more substantial than a random online article, from what I can tell, was a six-volume series of anthologies that came out in 1993 and 1994. It’s largely out of print now, and it’s also, of course, out of date (for example, there’s some true effort, but not great results around including Indigenous literature). My students will get to determine (with guidance from me) the form, parameters, and content of this guide. I’m so excited to see what happens.

It’s also the most chaotic syllabus I’ve ever tried to put together since so much of it will be determined by students, and they’ll have to do independent reading towards the end as they work on their entries for our guide. We’re going to start with some theory on literature and place, read excerpts and books that represent different aspects of “Oregon literature,” and will look at other place-based literary guides to decide what we’ll do. The final product will be available to the public in some form.

American women’s memoirs

I’ve also been developing an online course that will run next year, focused on American women’s memoirs. It will be largely excerpts-based, but the students will read all of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Carmen María Machado’s In the Dream House, and be able to choose either Chanel Miller’s Know My Name or Putsata Reang’s Ma and Me. I’ve just finalized the reading list, but am in the midst of thinking through how to keep things engaging in the asynchronous format. What would you want to see in an asynchronous course?

Pacific Northwest Magic

Began my year by the Willamette River.

And with a rainbow! You see so many of them here in the PNW.

This. This is where I live. I still can’t believe it.

Tundra swans at the wildlife refuge.

I’d been trying to see the herd of Roosevelt elk that lives on the wildlife refuge for close to a year, and finally spotted them right by the side of the road at sunset. Even more spectacular than I’d hoped.