I am co-editor of the book Wild Things & Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children and a regular contributor to Story Warren. My work has also appeared in Every Moment Holy, Vol. III, Ordinary Saints, Only the Lover Sings, Deeply Rooted Magazine, Risen Motherhood, the Rabbit Room, Wildflowers Magazine, and more.

These days I write regularly for my Substack, The Setting. And my now-retired blog, Little Book, Big Story, still stands as a storehouse of children’s book reviews.

You can read a few samples of my work below.

I park the van at the top of Section C, and my daughter and I get out into the rain. The spongy ground slopes away from us to the road below, speckled with headstones that are, in turn, speckled with lichen. Already my daughter bends over one, wipes the drizzling rain off its surface, and reads a name aloud.  

About this cemetery hangs a pleasant sense of disorder. Stones shaped like benches, pillars, or pensive children kneel in the grass, half-sunken where the ground beneath them has settled; moss laps at their edges. Certain monuments here are notorious, like the massive stone angel whose attendant urban legends have nearly eclipsed the family she was meant to memorialize. Broken stones lean in pieces against cottonwood trees whose burly roots slowly shoulder the soil away.

Unlike another local cemetery, which styles itself as a “memorial park” and offers natural burial as well as farewell tributes, death is still a presence here, not something to be sponged away with rebranding. I feel comfortable saying “tombstone” here, or “grave.” As in, “Look at this grave!”—which I call to my daughter when I find one carved to resemble a scroll draped over a log and slicked with real moisture, real moss. She is at my side in a moment and together we puzzle out the inscription.

It is beautiful, but it is not his.

— Read the rest at The Rabbit Room

At 9:30, my daughter comes downstairs—she can’t sleep. She’ll be seven next month and the world is expanding around her, I can see it. She’s more aware of other people now, more aware of adult conversation, more aware, in this instance, of volcanoes.

“Volcanoes?” I repeat, settling down next to her on the couch. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just worried about them. I read about them in class today and I . . . “. I know that she sees it clearly, whatever she read that day, as real to her as I am. A definite fear shapes the set of her mouth and she gives into it for a moment before drawing away and finishing lamely, “I’m just worried about them.”

I want to offer her comfort—immediate, tangible comfort—in the shape of a promise. They’re far away. We don’t have to worry about that here. Things like that don’t happen anymore. Or the great silence-killing assurance, “It’s okay.”

But I can’t say any of that.

We live at the foot of a volcano. I can see it from our kitchen window on clear days and it is beautiful—white and graceful, edges pink and softened by the morning light. It’s such a fixture in our county that my high school was named after it. Every so often the mountain sends up plumes of steam, and the local newspaper does a piece on it, chronicling the overall health of the mountain with a particular emphasis on any strange behavior.

The mountain, gentle as it looks there slumbering, will one day erupt.

— Read the rest at Story Warren

Last winter passed slowly—a trickle of sick days and snow days, mostly—so we spent our Christmas money on roller skates and a disco light and turned our ground floor into a skating rink, my daughters and I cruising from the front door to the back, around the dining table and out again, singing “Eye of the Tiger” loudly and off-key. But our house is not large. It’s old and the floors are uneven, and despite our enthusiasm, this story ended exactly the way you might expect it to: with a fall.

Healing from an ankle sprain, it turns out, can be slow work, so when I landed in a physical therapist’s office months later, I wondered aloud what I could have done differently to help the process along. Surely it shouldn’t be taking this long to heal one stubborn ankle? But the therapist’s answer surprised me: instead of talking about recovery or, perhaps, about not skating in one’s dining room, he talked about movement.

He explained it this way: as we go through life, we need to put our muscles through a variety of motions. Instead of walking only on even surfaces, we need to walk on sand, trails, rocky beaches, stairs, ladders, and dance floors. We need to introduce our muscles to challenging, uncomfortable, and even awkward situations because these movements teach our muscles what to do when they encounter a stumble. Instead of snapping fully into a sprain, he said, these challenged muscles will be strong and flexible enough to move through the fall without (too much) damage.

I found myself thinking about this long after my appointment. It’s not just muscles that benefit from encounters with weird, uncomfortable situations, I realized: childhood is essentially a series of situations—plenty of them enjoyable, but many weird and uncomfortable—that prepare our children for the uneven terrain of adulthood, where the falls can be sudden and hard and the recovery grueling.

But, I wondered, do I allow my children to risk the falls that develop the muscles they’ll need in the years ahead? Or do I catch them every time they stumble? As my four daughters cross the threshold from childhood to young adulthood, I’ve thought about this a lot, because I am beginning to see how hard they’ll have to work to strengthen the areas where I was too quick to catch them—and how steady they are in the places where they’ve had to struggle.

— Read the rest at Risen Motherhood