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Quartzite is a tiny town in La Paz County, Arizona. It’s one of those bright, gone-in-an-instant flashes along Interstate 10 that feels utterly roofless — all sun and open sky — and yet, somehow, simultaneously full of secrets. During winter months, a glut of gem shows draws streams of vacationing snowbirds to its main thoroughfare. Pride of place in its solitary graveyard belongs to a squat, brilliantly tiled pyramid, a mausoleum whose shape might strike blow-ins as odd, but not especially out of place. Pyramids, after all, belong in the desert. So do camels — and this particular pyramid happens to be topped with the rusty silhouette of one of those. To an unknowing visitor, the whole ensemble might look like just another piece of desert kitsch.

In truth, however, this unlikely monument is the “last camp” and final resting place of a man identified by the grave-marker as “Hi Jolly.”...

When I made my way through the local book club circuit after the publication of my first novel, The Weight of Blood, one topic came up again and again. People would remark that I seemed so normal, so nice — they were surprised that a pleasant Midwestern mom would write about such dark and disturbing crimes. I didn’t have an easy answer prepared for the question that would inevitably arise: Where does the darkness in your writing come from? I would smile, and shrug, and drink more wine.

I used to think it was simply my nature, that the darkness was innate, but that’s not quite true. My earliest writings were as innocuous as any other child’s, though that wouldn’t last long. As the youngest of eight children, I wasn’t sheltered...

I have always loved to read. Here’s the thing, I know that I am not alone in this love. A love to read may have brought you to this essay, and it is the thing that binds us all. My love began the way love often does, on a warm afternoon and all at once. I won’t bore you with the age-appropriate books that made me love the craft of books, though they were often about young girls on adventures, solving mysteries, or falling in love. Instead, the work of Nora Roberts, Sidney Sheldon, and James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet’s Sundays at Tiffany’s are the genre of books I want to touch on. These stories and these women — a ranch woman from Montana, a lawyer, and the daughter of a Broadway producer — were the women I rooted for long before I truly understood the intricacies of womanhood, when I was still too young to know exactly what I was reading but I read and read and read anyway...

A trail meanders alongside the Sammamish River in Bothell, Washington. I walked this trail every morning with my small bearded dog, Ewok, as his voluminous Gandalf beard collected crispy leaves and brushed the body of moss and other bryophytes. Ewok is a Brussels Griffon, a funny breed known from the Jack Nicholson movie As Good As It Gets and for greatly resembling the Lorax. If I’d had my way, we would have power walked or at least Prancercized along the gurgling river, but Ewok set our pace (glacial) and we’d tootle along at the speed of a stoned sloth. The walking helped me escape my own mind, a frenzied hive of doubts and dejection. Frankly, I felt broken. I’d failed at an acting career in LA, and now having rediscovered my love of writing, I was facing more rejection. I had known these walks were about the restorative meditation of following a path. I had not known they would literally inspire me along the path to publishing my debut novel from the perspective of a crow with a severe to moderate junk food addiction...

I remember the moment I sat up and took notice of the risks my cousin Guido Rahr was taking for fish — the same moment I started taking notes about his adventures, notes that would one day become a book. We were sitting in the grass outside our family fishing cabins on the Deschutes River where, since childhood, we had enjoyed days of wilderness and unbroken conversations. Our regular returns to the Deschutes marked our family’s time and highlighted the twists and turns of our personal journeys. Guido’s had long been the most surprising. A born hunter, he had spent his childhood stalking the high desert for snakes and lizards. Then it became fish, and his hunting ground expanded from the Deschutes to the entire Pacific Northwest. Guido pursued salmon all the way to Alaska and became one of the world’s finest fly fisherman...

In my historical fantasy novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, a young woman takes a road trip with a Mayan god across Mexico during the 1920s. Their ultimate destination is a hotel by the seaside in Baja California. The hotel is inspired by a famous Mexican resort called Agua Caliente (literally Hot Water, named after the hot springs in the area), which for a few years was as ritzy as Monte Carlo.

In the novel, the architecture of my imaginary hotel follows the Mayan Revival look that became popular during the Roaring Twenties — the Fisher Building in Detroit and the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles were both designed in that style. The Agua Caliente hotel had less of a modern edge. It was a bit Disneyland-ish, attempting to evoke an “old Mexico” which had never really existed...

It is fair to say that most people in the modern world regard nature as a collection of “resources” that exist solely for our aggrandizement. Even the foremost putative “progressives” now on the national stage (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et al.) argue that we should continue to exploit resources to keep the capitalist growth machine humming, but that we must do it more gently, more ”sustainably,” with more intensive application of advanced technology, with “green” production of energy from wind, solar, hydro, and the like.

The central problem of our time, I’ve come to conclude, is that humanity now consists predominantly of “resourcists” — which is to say, humanists. I mean humanists in the ugliest and most benighted sense of that word...

There is, so often, a phantom book lurking behind a published novel. I know mine are haunted in this way. And so sometimes, when people ask how long it took to write Family of Origin, I wonder: Should I count the two years I spent writing the phantom novel that came before? I think the answer might be yes.

What happened was that I tried to write a postapocalyptic novel. I wrote almost 200 pages and extensively researched both Shakespeare’s comedies and robots (don’t ask) to do it. Novels have died later, and more tragically, than this one...

Since I have started answering interview questions about my novel Supper Club, I have been asked the question a few times: “Why did you decide to include recipes in the novel, and what do they represent?” And while I do have a number of sections dedicated to the methodical process of cooking or baking a particular food — kimchi, sourdough, spaghetti puttanesca, caramelized onions — I don’t necessarily think of them as recipes, but more the embodied experience of following a recipe, or thoughts on a recipe.

The first passage I wrote in this mode was a section that quite meticulously details the various methods for caramelizing onions...

Forty years ago, I began studying Buddhism and practicing various forms of meditation. Based on my studies and encounters, I have a deep appreciation, gratitude, and respect for the Buddhist tradition. The meteoric rise of the “mindfulness revolution,” however, took me by surprise. I was baffled by how mindfulness, which for several millennia has been an integral part of the Buddhist spiritual path, suddenly morphed into a domesticated self-help technique and widely touted panacea for assuaging virtually any middle-class desire — from mindful sex to making a killing on Wall Street. How did Buddhist meditation — once embraced by Beat writers, Bohemian artists, and hippies, and which was a countercultural, anti-establishment, anti-materialist movement — become a $1 billion industry that has been warmly received by corporate moguls at the World Economic Forum?...