Toward the start of every session of the Writing About Ancestor Trouble class I’m teaching, we explicitly invite in kindness and spaciousness around the…
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January 2023

Dear friends, I’ve been gearing up to teach my Writing About Ancestor Trouble class, which starts next Tuesday (it’s full! I’ll let you know if I teach…
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December 2022

Hi y’all, I’m getting excited for the solstice and the gentle turning inward this season brings for me nowadays. Reading and daydreaming more, pouring…
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November 2022

Hi y’all, I’m grateful to you for following along in these times of inundation. I still enjoy jotting down informal thoughts in a place where I’m not…
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October 2022

Hi y’all, I wrote a letter of recommendation for this delightful and inclusive southern pronoun in the most recent New York Times Magazine and suggest…
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September 2022

If you’re working on a project about your own ancestors, you might be interested in my latest giveaway—read on or scroll down. Early in the writing of…
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Hi hi, The Guardian U.S. has published my argument for what I’ve called acknowledgment genealogy, the importance of reckoning with our individual…
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August 2022

Dear friends, Anyone who’s followed me since the bloggy aughts might remember how for years I worked on a quasi-autobiographical novel. I wanted to…
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July 2022

The longer I go without sending a newsletter, the more daunting sending a newsletter becomes. Especially in these times, when our democracy is in such…
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April 2022

Dear friends, Ancestor Trouble is out in the world! If you follow me on social media, you may have heard plenty about it by now, but if not, here are…
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March 2022

Hi friends, Ancestor Trouble is coming out at the end of this month, eep! My editor, Andrea, sent along some photos of the finished book, which is still…

February 2022

Hi friends, Thank you for reading and sharing this newsletter — I’m so grateful to all the new subscribers following along. And I hope February is…