first person “The Dubliner” is a series of twelve stylized first-person pieces I wrote for the alternative weekly newspaper the Philadelphia Weekly while I was living in Ireland. The column won third place for column writing in the large-circulation division from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. And I wrote 'em all in the present tense! Each installment was illustrated by Karen Klassen. Here they are in order: “Are Ye About?” // “Twilight’s Slow Burn” // “Defacing Castles” // “Time Waits for No Woman” // “Pitching Frank O’Connor” // “Far as the I Can Sea” // “Leaving Me Softly” // “Leaving A Serious Mark” // “They’re Marching Today” // “Warming the Pub, Drowsily” // “Love, American Style” // “Sleeping Like Bono”I wrote an essay about how EXCELLENT AND IMPORTANT ZINES ARE for a book called The Alternative Media Handbook, published in December of 2007 by the UK's academic publisher, Routledge. Yay. I wrote a how-to piece on making found poetry for the delightful and super-stylish craft magazine Snippets, in which I boldly assert that making found poems is like a kind of craft. It is, I swear! I did a few months of grad school for literature before I realized it wasn't for me. But roaming around Ireland, reading all the while—for pleasure, for once—taught me more than I ever could have learned in school. When I got back home I wrote about reading my way through Ireland .“I Live at Home” is an essay about how I moved back home with my mom after my father died, which I wrote for a small publication called Here magazine (now defunct). The Utne Reader reprinted it in 2002, and after it ran in Utne it got reprinted elsewhere, including a college textbook on creative writing. "Found Things" is an essay about poetry, prayer, and getting my wisdom teeth out. It was published in the essay anthology My Red Couch, And Other Stories On Seeking A Feminist Faith.“Summering With the Loons in Cape May” is an essay I wrote about birding for the wonderful general interest newspaper/literary journal the Philadelphia Independent. “Nerds Gone Bad” is about how linguistics dorks are cooler than hipsters. “Falling Star” is a paean to the late, great, trashy, pre-Bonnie Fuller Star magazine “The Semantics of Grief”: How (not) to talk about tragedy. I contributed a bit of research to the book That's Amore: The Language of Love for Lovers of Language having to do with the Japanese linguistic phenomenon of onomatopoeic words that reflect psychological states. Like love. This is a pretty little book.I guest-blogged for the awesome huge bookstore website Powells. I wrote about zines, the poet H.D., an effed-up play, the dictionary, and other things. Here, look: Science Fiction Food for Feminist Babies // Feverish Fine Small Mechanisms // A Life Less Ornery // The Pillowman and Other Stories // The Little Red Hen // An Open Letter to Mr. Schaeffer // H.D.T.V. I have a piece in the Compulsions issue of the clever little literary magazine 400 Words. 
second person! “How to Become the Media”: I went to the Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, OH, and wrote about it.
feature stories
My story about adults reading young adult fiction “Best-Case Scenario" profiles the two guys behind those ubiquitous Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook books. Don’t miss the photo. One of the stories I have found most interesting to write was about Matt Smith , a kid from a podunk (his word) in Georgia who starred on The Real World: New Orleans and has used his fame to head up a stirring, old-time preaching circuit for Catholic teenagers.“No Rooftop Was Safe" chronicles the birth of graffiti in Philadelphia from the perspective of its early “kings.” This was the other most interesting thing I've ever written about. The article was used as a resource in the making of Bomb It! The Global Graffiti Documentary, a film produced and directed by Jon Reiss. His previous feature films include Better Living Through Circuitry, which was about rave culture, and he made the video for the Nine Inch Nails song “Happiness in Slavery.” “Ye is Ye Olde The" is a piece on orthography I wrote for the Independent. This is more exciting than you think it is. Gadfly was a fantastic magazine of cultural exploration. It’s now defunct, but a lot of the original content is online. I wrote a few pieces for them, including one on female graffiti artists. I’ve written about creepy marketing come-ons and graffiti for Adbusters. unabashedly feminist The first thing I ever published that I really cared about was an interview with a member of the arts activist group the Guerrilla Girls for Bitch magazine. I was very excited and proud to write for Bitch, and to make it even awesomer the Girls themselves did original art to run with the story.
I asked a smart lady about the connection between feminism and knitting .I interviewed the lovely, funny woman who wrote the parody book Are You My Husband? Two young women moved to Philadelphia from Columbus, Ohio and quickly saw that their new city was missing something important: a drag king troupe. They righted that wrong, and I wrote about their fabulous first performance. I love the photos for this one. unsheepishly bookish , who wrote a novel about the final few months of Sylvia Plath’s life. Moses contributed some really interesting insights into Plath’s last work, the Ariel poems, and we had a good conversation about it all. “Living Between the Lines” is an essay-review about Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, an unusual memoir by NPR’s book critic Maureen Corrigan. The review was published in Penn’s alumni magazine, The Pennsylvania Gazette.Did you know that the first English dictionary wasn’t Samuel Johnson’s? I didn’t until John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, put the real first one—compiled by a controversial, defrocked Anglican priest named Robert Cawdrey—back into print. The Inquirer ran my interview with Simpson in July of ’07. This is a very short piece about a unique literary tour the poet Tom Devaney did of the Edgar Allen Poe House in Philadelphia. He calls his program the Empty House Tour because the museum has absolutely nothing in it. It's a humorous and haunting meditation on silence.books I've written three nonfiction YA books (grades 6-9) for the educational publisher Rosen Books (New York, NY). One of them is about Opportunities in E-Marketing (this was back when e-marketing was a term people still used). Another one is called Cool Careers Without College for Nature Lovers . Here's to doing what you love without going to college. I profiled a Christmas tree farmer, a commercial fisher, a ranch hand, an ecotourism planner, a park ranger, a whale watcher, and a river guide. I had fun talking to these interesting people about their interesting jobs. School Library Journal called the book “clearly written.” Yeah!The third book is about the life of Negro League baseball player Monte Irvin, who I got to meet this summer at the Free Library of Philadelphia. He had some wonderful stories about the Negro Leagues and the Majors during the glory days of baseball, and about some of the jazz musicians and other famous athletes he knew back then. It was very neat. |
