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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...

My new book takes an honest and open look at mental health. The last word is key: health. (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health features the insights and experiences of life with a brain from a wide array of writers, athletes, artists, actors, and celebrities. Some speak to living with illnesses like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. Others write about being neurodivergent and navigating a world that overlooks those who think differently. Still others take on alcoholism and recovery, confidence, plastic surgery addiction, and grappling with life after surviving a school shooting. Each voice is raw and vulnerable, sharing some of the lowest of lows alongside some of the brightest glimmers of light...

One night in June 2015, a mom in Pennsylvania was watching the news when she decided to write a letter to President Obama. She wanted to tell him how disappointed she was in his conduct at an event celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month that day. A heckler at the event had abruptly interrupted Obama’s speech, shouting a demand to end the deportation of LGBTQ immigrants. “You’re in my house!” Obama had shot back, and he had her removed...

My howl for help echoes into the silence. Incensed, I kick a rock, which sails over the edge of the bluff upon which I’m marooned and tumbles toward the river below. 

I hear a rustling as the rock flushes out a duck like none I’ve ever seen. The thing flaps wildly up out of the gulch, its neck elongated like that of an egret, its feathers chartreuse, orange, charcoal. It nearly wings into my face, but then it banks upward, leaving behind a feral pungency.

I wish I could fly out of here, too. There’s no going forward, since the rock face is too steep and brittle. Nor backward, since the path I edged in on has crumbled away. That leaves right here. Alone in Bolivia, where the Andes meet the Amazon, far from the familiar...

In 2012, a strong wind toppled an ancient tree in New Haven, revealing the remains of two people, a mother and child, who had died 300 years ago. That same year, I buried the umbilical cord of a stranger in the courtyard across the street. The cord belonged to a five-year-old boy whose name I cannot remember now, the son of a distant family friend from Adana, Turkey, the city where I was born. His mother had come to the United States to visit the university she dreamed her son would one day attend. My boyfriend and I had tea with her at my house when she arrived because my parents had insisted on it. I had just drained my cup and was checking my watch pointedly...

“The word ‘Korean’ has to be in the book title, Rachel,” said Susan kindly but firmly. It was our first real sit-down to talk about the title, which was something we’d danced around in the weeks since I decided to publish my first cookbook with Seattle-based Sasquatch Books. Susan is Susan Roxborough, the book’s editor. She was an amazing force behind my book, and I knew from the start that she knew more than I did about publishing.

“But it’s not really a Korean cookbook,” I pushed back. “I have worked so hard over the last 10 years to convince people that while I am Korean, my restaurants aren’t really Korean.” She waited patiently for me to finish. She knew what sorts of titles Sasquatch needed to sell a book and, ultimately, knew what readers would expect...

The time between the actual writing of a book and finally seeing it in print is pretty significant. So much of our life has changed during that time, and in some ways, we hardly feel like the same people. We became parents, moved to a new city (Portland!), and even changed careers. It was nearly two years from signing the contract to seeing our first advanced copy, and we were both beyond excited to read the book in print… and anxiously hoping we’d love it.

As we leafed through the pages, we noticed that some sentences and phrases were highlighted through a design system. Our editor had selected these phrases. We had some recollection of this in the review process, but it was not until the book was in front of us that we paid them much attention...

Carl Weston knew something was wrong when the kids started lighting the lemonade on fire. This was in the late ’80s in southwestern Colorado, a rural place dotted with sagebrush, fence posts, and increasingly, oil and gas wells. After companies nearby started drilling for natural gas, methane seeped out of the ground and into Weston’s drinking water. Other people in the area had water that looked like milk and fizzed like Alka-Seltzer. One activist referred to the entire county as a “natural sacrifice area.” 

When I met them in 1999, I was a new reporter, repeating questions I'd learned from a This American Life comic book on how to be a journalist. I lived in rural Colorado then, in a town that hadn’t yet been drilled with oil and gas wells but was rife with questionable air and water: the insecticide malathion was regularly sprayed on the orchards near my house...

Patient X is my new “novel of tales” inspired and informed by the life and works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the “Master of the Japanese Short Story,” who murdered himself at the age of 35 on July 24, 1927. This day has since become known as Kappa-ki, or Kappa Day, Kappa being the title of one of Akutagawa’s last works, and the date is now a Japanese “Bloomsday” in commemoration and celebration of the life of Akutagawa. 

On Kappa Day, people of all ages, though usually all serious and solitary types, come to the grave of Akutagawa in the north of Tokyo to leave flowers and cucumbers, cucumbers being the favorite food of Kappa, and cigarettes and cans of cocoa, being addictions of the late Akutagawa...

When Elephants Fly is the story of Lily, a young woman genetically at risk for schizophrenia who avoids anything that might trigger the disease. But when she bonds with Swifty, a baby elephant violently rejected by its mother, Lily risks her freedom, first love, and sanity on a desperate road trip to save the calf and find her own wings. 

Every novel is woven through with inspirations and When Elephants Fly started with my first job out of college as a traveling writer for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. 

In many ways writing for a circus was an incredible experience. I traveled to different arenas around the U.S. interviewing performers to place articles in local newspapers. I wrote a story about two clowns getting married and families ranging from trapeze artists to teeterboard acrobats...