Blog Posts

Marginal and messy places: ‘The Inner Coast’

By Kate Blackwood / April 20, 2021

“All coasts are marginal and messy places, which is why people like me are drawn to them, I suspect,” writes Donovan Hohn. I feel the same.

Read of the week: Songbird lost at sea

By Kate Blackwood / April 2, 2021

A female scarlet tanager dropped onto the ship and for five days became a star passenger.

Swimming is her favorite state of being: ‘Chronology of Water’

By Kate Blackwood / March 27, 2021

If we ever ended up in the same YMCA pool, Lidia would swim me out of the water. But we both know what it means to show up.

What I didn’t expect from a place I’ve never been: Action in “Mendocino Fire”

By Kate Blackwood / March 6, 2021

The way she tells it, it’s happening before you know it’s happening, much the same way the character is plunged into the sea or down a steep drop or into the vortex of an irrevocable relational tangle. The prose is swift and unexpectedly physical.