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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...

On December 28, 2016, just weeks before he left office, President Obama signed the proclamation creating the Bears Ears National Monument. The creation of this 1.5 million-acre monument in the southeastern corner of Utah represented the culmination of years of work by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a grassroots group composed of representatives of five different Native nations in the Southwest. Working together as never before, the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and two Ute tribes who collectively share an ancient and cherished history in this rugged landscape preserved an area that includes more than 100,000 archaeological and sacred sites and attests to more than 10,000 years of human habitation in this part of the world. Bears Ears, named for the twin buttes that are shaped like bears’ ears, has been a literal nursery of Indigenous nations, distinct in language and culture. A year later, on December 4, 2017, President Trump reduced the size of the monument by 85 percent...

My entire childhood library was overflowing with stories about little kids whose parents had died or were assholes. Anne of Green Gables, Matilda, Pippi Longstocking, even Harriet the Spy had absent dickhole parents. At the time, I LOVED THIS. As someone who raised herself, loved loved loved words, and deeply needed to feel seen amidst the competing backdrops of perfect families I couldn’t relate to, it was unbelievably healing to find solace in those books. 

As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve started to find the genre kind of objectively bizarre...

The Line Hotel in Austin is new. It’s in previews. The restaurant is operated by my favorite winner of Top Chef. The entire city is drinking bottled water. I used bottled water to brush my teeth this morning. I have a craving for a Slurpee. I haven’t had a Slurpee in like seven hundred years. The streets are lousy with Bird scooters and Lime scooters and another kind I don’t remember. I’m texting with Tommy about meeting up on Halloween. I’m texting with Anastacia about meeting up tonight for karaoke. My dad has been meditating. He sends me an email with his fondest memory of us. It’s us camping. Us “camping” was putting a mattress in the front yard and eating candy and looking at the stars...

The confluence of political events over the past few years, from the international to the municipal, is eating away not just at the fabric of our society, but at our humanity and emotional wellness. That is to say, the current political climate has been good for the therapy business, though I don’t know a single therapist who is happy about this. I mean, there’s so much normal human tragedy to address that the need for therapeutic support isn’t going away any time soon. 

My clients are hurting. I’m hurting. We’re all trying to figure out what “better” looks like when we have so little control over world events. This means that when clients come to me, expressing fear and vulnerability, I have to be brave enough to match their fear and vulnerability with my own while providing safety and comfort...

It is a cliché among the thoughtful class — the English majors, the publishing house interns, the baristas who write nonfiction essays with law school applications in their desk drawers like a depressing emergency eject button — to say that we found our True Home in a bookstore. It was there, we say, where we understood the world was immensely vaster than the confines of our childhood homes, by which we usually mean the discovery of other kinds of lives, far more interesting than our own; and also sex. But today, I rise in opposition: Get out of the bookstore. Go outside. Go for a run. 

When I was a young man, bookstores were more important to me than toy stores, even more than libraries, because anything I saw in a bookstore could be mine, forever...

"A London fog is as nothing compared with the dense cloud of smoke that envelopes us and makes existence almost unendurable,” wrote an August correspondent from the Idaho Panhandle. “No rain is due in this latitude for six weeks or more, so we have to suffer a while longer with red eyes, depressed spirits, etc.” 

Any present-day resident of any western state can understand all too well the summer reality of red eyes and depressed spirits. But these words were written in 1889 by prospector and plant buff John Leiberg, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15. The adventurous Leiberg traveled west on a job with the Northern Pacific Railroad, and was in his mid-30s before he homesteaded on the shore of north Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille...

I’ve illustrated many books, but Little Brown is the ninth book I’ve both written and illustrated. This is a big deal to me because I wanted to become an author-illustrator since before I started kindergarten. I say “before I started kindergarten” as if that was an easy process. I was a wreck about it and cried nearly every day leading up to it and all through the school year too. The book I clung to back then, the one that consoled me and set me on my vocational course, was The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson. That deceptively simple book gave me my first inkling that I exist apart from my mom and dad and brother and sister...