My memoir manuscript was one of ten finalists for the 2025 AWP Award Series Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction, judged by Cheryl Strayed. Congrats to the winner and my fellow finalists! The Problem of Happiness is about moving from one of the world's most beloved and big-hearted cities, New Orleans, to one of the most populous and politically repressed—with a depressed boyfriend and an unresolved grief in tow. From the Big Easy to the Big Hard. I did that. In the mid 1990s. The book is about how love failed me, and how I failed it, and … [Read more...]
Want to be awestruck?
Visit my list of recommended Books That Fill Me with Awe on Shepherd.com. Founder Ben Fox hopes to make it easier to find books you'll love online while helping authors grow their audience. While I still love a bricks and mortar bookstore--and I urge you to support yours--I'm all in on any endeavor to support writers in this difficult publishing market and that aspires "to improve the world by increasing our understanding and empathy for complexity." Plus, I found myself just really enjoying browsing the virtual aisles at Shepherd. … [Read more...]
Remembering Hozan Alan Senauke
In late December of 2024, Lion's Roar published this tribute I wrote to the late abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, Hozan Alan Senauke. For twenty years, Hozan was a teacher, friend, and inspiration to me. He opened doors--literal ones and the passageways of the mind. I'll be forever grateful. … [Read more...]
A Planet on Fire
KQED's Erin Baldassari wrote this probing piece in November 2023 about the intersection of climate change and wildfire. She came over to chat about Fire Monks, and a brief excerpt from our conversation appears at the end of her thoughtful piece. https://www.kqed.org/science/1985440/draft-living-in-californias-sierra-foothills-residents-confront-climate-change (Erin Baldassari/KQED) … [Read more...]
How can you keep your heart open and mind clear during a pandemic?
Near the end of March 2020, ten days into the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, I reached out to Fire Monk David Zimmerman to inquire about the parallels between his experience protecting Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery from a wildfire in 2008 and his current experience, as abiding abbot at San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center, during the coronavirus pandemic. Here is our exchange. May it open your heart, settle your mind, and help you to remember that we’re in this (and every) conflagration together. CMB: Is your experience during the 2008 Basin Complex Fire … [Read more...]
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