ABOUT

THE PLACES I'LL REMEMBER

That opening line of The Beatles’ song “In My Life” always gets me: "There are places I'll remember . . ." I’ve moved around a lot in my life, and it’s shaped who I am more than anything else.

I was born in the English village of Frimley—now a fashionable suburb of London—to an Australian mother and a German father. As a child, I had three passports. I then lived in Federal Way, Washington, now a suburb of Seattle, from first grade through third grade, just long enough for Mount Rainier and the Pacific to imprint on my brain.

Then I moved to Germany where I would stay until I graduated high school. I lived in Übach-Palenberg, a farming town right on the Dutch border. In fact, I commuted to The Netherlands for school from eighth grade on.

After that, it was upstate New York for college, then Connecticut for more college, then Flagstaff, Arizona, for my first (and last) academic position.

I live here now with my dogs, Daisy and Alice, and my cat, Ferris Mewler. If you don’t know Flagstaff, it’s about as un-Arizona as you could get. We’re at 7,000 feet and surrounded by pine trees, not giant cacti. It rarely gets over 90 in the summer and almost always falls below freezing in the evenings come autumn.

All this moving made me love nature and travel, gave me a strong awareness of cultural differences, and means I’m always homesick for somewhere I can’t remember all that well. I think most of my characters are, too.

I ALSO DO SOME WORDLESS THINGS

When I was little, I thought anything I colored looked ugly unless it had lots of green and blue, and I still feel that way about life. I’m happiest outside: hiking, camping, backpacking. I recently got my scuba diving certification and discovered that my worst fear— swimming in the ocean—is also one of my favorite things ever, thanks to the humphead wrasse who kept me company during a night dive at the Great Barrier Reef. I hope to get under water a lot more in the future.

I do photography, too: you can find my old photo blog here and more recent work on Instagram. And I play guitar (come find me on Yousician). I sometimes try to paint.

What I love about these hobbies is that they remind me that every art form is also a craft, learned over time and mastered with practice. To play guitar, your fingers must first gain the dexterity and strength they need to form notes and chords. Painting requires other kinds of muscle memory, brush control and an intuitive sense of how paint moves.

It’s different when your medium is words. Since almost anyone can write a sentence, it feels like anyone should be able to write a story. But storytelling is also a skill developed over time and with practice. It’s the hardest thing I try to do, incomparably satisfying when it’s going well, insufferably painful when it’s not, and, truth be told, I’m never quite sure how it’s going anyway.

Is it the same for you?