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The kid in front of me was scuffed-up at the edges, young but weathered. The book he most wanted from the street library was a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but he hesitated.

"I’m hopping a train tonight to get to the Rainbow Gathering in Washington,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t take this because I just don’t know when I’d be back through to return it."

"But you have to take it,” I told him. “Given everything you’ve just described, I’m pretty sure you’re the reader it’s been waiting for."

In ten years of running a bicycle-powered mobile library in Portland, I met thousands of readers like him. One of them was Ben "Hodge" Hodgson, the co-author of our book...

In some ways creating this book was driven by a desire to make walking around cities an official part of our jobs. Walking allows us to take in details at a human pace. We remember thinking we needed a new creative focus after finally finishing Portlandness. In part we decided the next book should be about the cities in which we most wanted to spend time walking.

At first, the working title and vision for the project was Transects. We thought that choosing five routes through each city would provide us with a solid platform from which to create maps and graphics, write essays, and tell stories. After working with that idea for about a year we decided that the concept was too limiting so we refocused on a cultural atlas in the spirit of Portlandness...

The happiest moment of my life occurred on the day I held in my hands the golden ticket, the winning lottery, the thing I desired most in the world — a visa to America. Since then, life has gifted me many remarkable moments, but none have been as electrifying.

I was a 14-year-old Iranian girl, standing with my parents in a crowded and humid auditorium in India, staring at the red shimmery stamp on my passport. My entire body hummed with the anticipation of escaping the place I called home. There was the war, of course, and crackdowns on dissidents, but more than anything, I longed to dance without the fear of getting arrested...

“It’s Always 9/11” struck me as a good title for a book. Perhaps it was some odd manifestation of my subconscious attention, but every time I glanced at the clock it read 9:11. While contemplating this, I envisioned a woman emerging from a backpacking trip on the pure and wild Northern California coast, readjusting to the degraded civilized world. Sitting in a motel breakfast room, surrounded by industrial food she does not want to eat, she sees a report of a terrorist attack (again!) in New York City.

I like to establish a slow burn with my writing, so that by the time the narrative explodes, the reader is deeply immersed in the fictional dream (or nightmare). I am not a planner, in real life or in fiction. I set parameters and see how they develop.

When I began writing in 2017, Trump was already president. But I did not want the president in my fictional universe to be Trump-like...

Since I was in middle school, I’ve wanted to be a published author. What person doesn’t, as a child, dream of creating something that changes lives? It didn’t matter how I changed lives; I wanted to elicit the kinds of reactions I had to my favorite books and shows. I wanted to devastate people. I wanted to make them really feel something. I took writing classes in middle school, wrote like mad in high school, posted my work in online forums, exchanged rough drafts with friends in hopes of satiating my need for an audience. When I got to college in 2012, I was fairly certain I was on the right path. I knew what I wanted to do, I’d practiced, and all I needed was the degree. But in my first-ever college writing class, I was asked a question that changed my entire outlook on writing...

My debut novel, Cemetery Boys, is the first fiction book about a trans character written by a trans author to ever hit the New York Times bestseller list. It’s taken far too long for that to happen, and it’s certainly not going to be the last.

A common question I got asked when I entered publishing was, “When was the first time you saw yourself in a book?” There was always a moment of panic where I’d race to think of a book that had one aspect of my identity that I could use as an answer.

The sad truth is that according to media, people like me (Latinx, transgender, and queer) didn’t exist. When I was growing up, I thought there wasn’t a place for me in publishing. I never saw Latinx characters in books, let alone ones that were queer, and certainly not trans. While there’s still a huge need for more diverse stories in the world, finally having books that reflected parts of my identity (Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova being a huge one) is what made me think I could finally write a book like Cemetery Boys, and people would want to read it...

For 50 years, I’ve been listening to my husband’s stories about growing up on San Diego’s Mission Bay when it was more of a small fishing village than the popular resort it is now. The warm bay water lapped at the sand when the tide was in. There was swimming and surfing. Phil went without shoes from June until September, and his feet grew calloused and summer-wide.

He’d row his small boat out where the reeds and grass grew tall and read comic books until his nose was sunburned and his empty stomach growled. He watched seals tumble in the water and fished for perch and small halibut. When the tide was out, the beach was mud, pocked with pickleweed and eelgrass. Shoals and small islands, home to colonies of mussels and sand dollars that stood on end in soldier-like rows, were revealed...

You’ll want to avoid teachers or workshops — in an MFA program or elsewhere — that caution you against stories in second person, warning they can be difficult to write and annoying to read. Instead, naively explore a form that threatens you with death-by-pronoun.

Start with a story about a day in the Idaho woods when your mother was visiting from the Midwest and you took her and your young children to hunt for garnets in Emerald Creek. Relate how time and pressure create semi-precious gems that look rough — like any other rock in the creek — until they’re cut and polished. Describe your mother’s discomfort. Allude to your own disappointment.

Stand back. Ask yourself why you’re unwilling to own up to being the narrator of a story you’ve defined as nonfiction...

I’ve always loved historic house museums, loved peering beyond the velvet rope into a Victorian bedroom or a colonial kitchen and imagining the ghosts that wore those dresses, or worked the handle of that butter churn, or laid the fire in that grate. If the rooms still exist, with their ornaments and implements intact, surely the people must also be hovering nearby? The veil between past and present feels transparent.

I’ve spent the last five years getting to know Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, pioneering women doctors and prolific writers who gave me plenty to do in the archives. But some of the best discoveries happened when I left the library and started following them around out in the world. When you’re trying to tell a story about people born two centuries ago, it helps to stand where they stood, wherever that is still possible...