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It’s been years since I’ve cried over my son being transgender. Years since I’ve lost sleep over thoughts of his future. We’re the lucky ones. 

On November 22, 2018, I woke up, checked the news: “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”; and was snatched back to a place I hadn’t been in years. Essentially, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is planning to redefine “sex” in order to exclude transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people from federal nondiscrimination protections — erasing the legitimacy of gender variance and in doing so endangering the lives of all those who aren’t cisgender. We’re talking millions of people.

Let’s look at it this way: First, consider that the estimated adult trans population in American is about 1.4 million...

Twenty years after I first began writing publicly about Black Americans’ experiences with oppression, I didn’t think I’d still be at it. I didn’t think I’d still be writing about our collective struggle, the restoration of our full humanity, and respect for our autonomous citizenship. At least not with the same ferocity or the same lamenting heart. Yet here I am. We have so much more work to do to achieve equal rights for all. But at the heart and forefront of modern movements for social justice is one group who I believe will lead Black communities to the personal freedom and collective liberation we’ve been fighting for. We will be led by Black women.

Centering the ways Black women — and in particular, Black feminist women — are fighting for Black liberation is the focus of my new book...

This past summer, the world watched the saga of the 12 boys trapped in the Tham Luang caves with a mix of horror and fascination. Thousands of journalists flocked to the cave mouth, erecting a tent city high in the mountains of the Mae Sai district, while people in every corner of the planet watched shadowy footage — sometimes haunting, surreal live broadcasts — of the boys and their soccer coach huddled deep in the labyrinth. With each new detail — the boys slurped groundwater from the stony cave walls; their coach led them in meditation rituals to stave off hunger — the public fever seemed to rise. I was up late nights, scrolling through feed after feed on Twitter, poring over every article on the cave, obsessively watching every news broadcast I could find...

In 2013, the largest fire in Southwestern Colorado’s history — 109,615 acres at final measurement — burned a mix of spruce fir and aspen forest on three sides of what has been my high mountain meadow home for 25 years. The fire raged for more than a month, running seven horizontal miles along a hillside in one afternoon alone. We were on standby to evacuate for two solid weeks, and although all of my neighbors on both sides were evacuated, I was not. At the closest, the West Fork Fire came within half a mile of my property.  

For weeks of no rain and daily red flag warnings, the containment number stayed at 0%, as the fire continued to eat up forest, as the indefatigable firefighters, who at one point outnumbered the residents of the county by three to one...

The road from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction is long and flat, a two-hour drive up the western border of Nevada, past sagebrush, power lines, and water towers. Cruising 75 mph through a wide basin with low mountains in the distance and an eternal, raw blue sky stretching overhead was monotonous but peaceful. I cracked the window to let in a rush of cool November air carrying the scents of dry earth, creosote, and mesquite brush, and hoped that I wasn't about to waste a week away from my family and a couple thousand dollars on this trip. 

I'd just finished the first draft of my novel The Weight of a Piano, a sizable portion of which takes place in Death Valley National Park...

Deep into researching a novel about sleep, dreaming, and consciousness, I found out that I was pregnant. 

I had always wanted to do these two things: to write books and to have children. But now that it was happening — my body busy building a child while my mind was busy constructing my second book — I was not at all sure how the combination would go, or what one pursuit might cost the other. 

There’s a familiar idea in our culture that working too much is bad for a woman’s children, but there’s a newer idea, too: that having children might be bad for one’s work. Sheila Heti’s Motherhood captures this bleak anxiety here: “It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their ’30s — when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience — from doing anything useful with them at all.”...

There was a point in my life, not very long ago, when the only kind of movies I wanted to watch were horror movies. The Purge, Paranormal Activity, Honeymoon, The Conjuring, Wolf Creek, It Follows. Slasher films and haunted house stories, feminist revisions of the genre and the bloodiest, most pointlessly misogynistic garbage. They say horror movies are good entry points for aspiring filmmakers, because horror fans are the sole subset of the movie-going audience who will show up at a theater to see every single movie in their chosen genre, regardless of the skill of the director, the size of the budget, the star power of the actors, or the quality of the reviews. For a time, I was one of those avidly consuming, nondiscriminating fans...

The birdbaths have frozen here in Minnesota. I step onto the porch and pour some water for the birds. Winter came early and everyone seems a bit unprepared or in denial. It’s a worry because there’s a very large group of mostly Native people living in tents in what they’ve named the Haiwatha Encampment. The city promised help before it got cold. Lots of help came, but people will be there until mid-December. Two hundred human beings who need water, warmth, food, homes, help.

Before I am back inside my warm home, the birds dive for the water I’ve poured for them: blue jays first, then dozens of robins, woodpeckers, eventually starlings — birds I rarely see in numbers — land. I’ve responded to their need...

Someone recently asked why I write science fiction and fantasy. I believe the question went something like, For what? As if writing science fiction and fantasy was a degradation, a waste of time, or, at the very least, certainly not literature, definitely not art. So what was the point? 

This question was not asked at Indigenous Comic Con, a 3-day event celebrating the Indigenous creators in popular culture. It was not asked by the comic book artists reimagining their cultural stories as superhero stories. It was not asked by the families crowding into the theater to watch Star Wars dubbed into the Navajo language. It certainly wasn’t asked by all the cosplayers dressed as their favorite science fiction and fantasy characters. Everyone there inherently understood why...

Firstly, I don’t sleep much anymore. A year ago sleep left me. I’ve spent the year in a complex postmortem of the sort that often follows a relationship breakup. What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back? Is it possible to learn to survive without it? A year of counseling, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, mindfulness, CBT, meditation, supplements, drugs, and general earnest searching has left my questions with the following answers, respectively: Unclear. Unclear. No. 

The two or three years prior to that I’d been working on a novel set in the late middle ages, whose genesis was confession — confession of the Catholic sort that happens in a booth, a little dark box. I’m not a Catholic and have never confessed, but I’m drawn to the idea of this little dark box...