On the essay "Charade"
In Tim Burton’s film “Corpse Bride,” my favorite movie when I was sixteen, a young man accidentally proposes marriage to a dead woman. After a ceremony in a moonlit winter woods, he leaves his drab Victorian village and enters the land of the dead. In the end, he almost prefers what he finds to the lot of the living.
It was the land of the dead that I wanted to inhabit when I was sixteen.
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A Public Inheritance
I came to the University of Minnesota without having done much creative writing outside of undergraduate courses. I knew I wanted to write about my home region in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California, but I didn’t begin to understand how to narrate the book until I took a 1,400-mile road trip in the summer of 2014 to observe California stricken by drought.
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