READ ALL ABOUT IT
Since 2012, I’ve been writing about books. And the act of reading. And the importance of story and narrative. But, mostly, the underlying theme of all I write is how taking a moment to stop and digest some longform text — instead of scrolling, instead of watching a video, instead of multitasking — can be one of the most grounding things we can do for ourselves. Here’s the one-stop online home for all this writing.
You can read more about me and my work by moseying over here. Want to peruse periodic “essay drops” — excerpts from my work-in-progress essay collection about Homesickness? Here ya go.
The Fell
There’s a difference between isolation, “alone time,” and loneliness. Maybe they intersect a bit, but the distinct ways that we experience — and perhaps sometimes crave — solitude don’t really share qualities, beyond the obvious granular one, with each other.
Dayswork
Some real literary figures feature in Dayswork, a novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (who are married to each other). Namely, Herman Melville, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Lowell, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the still-living and Pulitzer-winning Melville biographer Hershel Parker (thinly veiled as “The Biographer”). They aren’t characters, exactly, as they play the historical figures that they actually are only through the lens of the protagonist’s internet deep dive as she becomes obsessed with Melville during the early days of the pandemic — that time when we were all sequestered inside with our computers as our only tethers to the outside world.
Tom Lake
I recently read a New Yorker piece titled “Becoming You: Are you the same person you were when you were a child?” In it, writer Joshua Rothman references a study of 1,037 individuals in New Zealand who are interviewed by a psychologist periodically from childhood to midlife in an attempt to understand humans’ connections with their “past selves.” (This kind of thing fascinates me.)
Reading + Pandemic = Travel? On Amy and Isabelle, Beyond Babylon, and Being Well-Read & Well-Traveled
I’ve never really bought the “reading is like traveling” argument. Reading is reading, and travel is travel, and never the twain shall meet. (Reading an Elin Hilderbrand book is just as good as actually being on Nantucket? Girl, please.) On Instagram, I occasionally tussle with the idea of why we read – and inevitably, someone brings up “travel.” I’m not saying that is not their experience, but it has never been mine.
The Mystery of Leadership: On Kingdomtide, The Secret Life of Bees, and Becoming a Curious Expert
If anyone can be a leader, are all leaders experts?
Crazy times, huh? When you don’t encounter as many people in day-to-day life as you used to, you tend to think a bit more. I’m generally more of a pensive person – happy to observe the intricacies and tendrils of life unfolding – but since about mid-March, this pensive side has gone into high gear. Well, in one sense. There is a lot more time to “think.”
