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"Deep," by James Nestor (book review)
My review of James Nestor's wonderful new book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, appears in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. Mr. Nestor is a very brave...
View ArticleTen Cents a Dance, by Erika Schickel (Mayday Essay 22)
It's been a fabulous month of essays here on the blog, and I thank all the authors. Go re-read them, and buy their books, and mine, too.We are going to wrap it up with one of the best. Erika Schickel...
View ArticleIs There Something I Should Know? by B. Frayn Masters (Mayday Essay 21)
Speaking of knowing: B. Frayn Masters is one of those people in Portland that everybody knows, whether as producer and co-host of the storytelling series Back Fence PDX, her writing in McSweeney's, her...
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"Winnie," by Roman Genn (Mayday Essay 20)
Back in 1997, Buzz magazine contributors attended a monthly luncheon at Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. We may not have been glamorous in our day-to-day lives, but for this we dressed, we chatted, we ate...
View ArticleResurrection: A Zombie Novel, by Michael J. Totten (Mayday Essay 19)
When I moved from LA to Portland in 2004 I knew one journalist who lived here, if only by name. "You should meet Michael Totten," my buddy Matt Welch told me. "He's blogging some cool shit about...
View ArticleI Hope They Come Crashing Down Into Our Bed, by Natalie Briggs (Mayday Essay 18)
Several years ago I was having dinner with a former editor, a man a few years older than I."Don't you hate going to dinner parties these days," he said, "where everyone is over 50 and just wants to go...
View ArticleTo the Bridge
Five years ago today, two children were found in the Willamette River. Eldon Smith, age four, had drowned. His seven year-old sister Trinity had screamed for help for 40 minutes and was rescued by a...
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The Scent of Petty Theft, by Annabelle Gurwitch (Mayday Essay 17)
I did not meet Annabelle Gurwitch until we found ourselves on the same stage, or rather the same back porch at Sandra Tsing Loh's house, for the first annual Bad Girls of LA Lit. Annabelle was smart...
View ArticleSave the Wails, by Amy Alkon (Mayday Essay 15)
I have known Amy Alkon since the mid-1990s. I was sitting at the Farmer's Market with Cathy Seipp, waiting for others to arrive at the every-season-or-so writer girls breakfast Cathy used to call us...
View ArticleFlori-duh, by Mark Ebner (Mayday Essay 14)
Where do I start with Mark Ebner? I knew him only a little when I lived in Hollywood; I better knew the late Andrew Breitbart, with whom Mark wrote the "nasty but truthful polemic" (as Andrew inscribed...
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Don Discovered America, by Leah Umansky (Mayday Essay 13)
I met Leah Umansky last summer, when she flew from New York to read from her book, Domestic Uncertainties, at a series of poetry events on the West Coast, including one at Ristretto Roasters."Hello!"...
View ArticleStunt Foodways, by Manny Howard (Mayday Essay 12)
When you grow up in a neighborhood as tiny as Brooklyn Heights, you tend to know every face, every house, here is the marble flagpole base where B. gouged out a pyramid chunk of forehead, here stood...
View ArticleDestination Gacy, by Nancy Rommelmann (Mayday Essay 10)
Destination Gacy, my e-book released today by Shebooks, tells the story of a drive I made cross-country with a pen pal of John Wayne Gacy’s, to visit the serial killer in prison in the weeks before his...
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Photos, by Tafv Sampson (Mayday Essay 9)
As some of you know, Tafv (rhymes with "lava") Sampson is my daughter. I will not write an extended intro here, because she is shy of my bragging about her, and also because if I wrote all I wanted...
View ArticleMusic, by Carl Adamshick (Mayday Essay 8)
I met Carl Adamshick when he was reading his poetry at Loggernaut, the quarterly reading series that uses Ristretto Roasters Williams as its homebase. As usual, the place was packed. My husband Din,...
View ArticleMom Drank Too Much, by Samantha Dunn (Mayday Essay 7)
Scene: Office park somewhere in the San Fernando ValleyTime: Mid-1990sCharacters: Samantha Dunn, staff journalist at Weider Publications (ed: You can't remember more detail than this? NR: No, I recall...
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The Language of Disintegration, by Nouel Riel (Mayday Essay 6)
Shortly before my daughter Tafv moved to New York in 2010, she was involved in all manner of interesting projects, including a weekly radio show on the college station with two girls I'd never met,...
View ArticleWhy I Live Where I Live, by Debra Gwartney (Mayday Essay 5)
I met Debra Gwartney when I was assigned to write about her and her book, Live Through This, a Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters. I urge you to read this book, a book that sits on my bookshelf in...
View ArticleThe Skies Less Traveled, by Aria Sheeks and David Rensin (Mayday Essay 4)
Memory is a funny thing, what seeps in and what slips off. David Rensin most remembers our first meeting at a party; I am wearing a catsuit. I first see us standing together at an LA Press Club event...
View ArticleShame, by Wendy Chin-Tanner (Mayday Essay 3)
It's essay a day in May on the blog, work from friends, old and new. Today, a poem from Wendy Chin-Tanner, who I have not known long but in a sense pre-know. We both went to Saint Ann's School, which...
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