I have not forgotten you, dear readers. I’ve wanted to be in touch for a long while, but I let too much time go by and my silence began to feel heavier and harder to break. It’s a little like not calling your mom because you’re ashamed it’s been too long since you last called. Well, here I am Mom, shamefacedly breaking the silence. Much has happened since I last checked in. I took a mental health break from writing and worrying about agents, and the rapid shrinking of the tra

A personal story published in New Lines Magazine about my improbable friendship with a woman who was abducted as a little girl from my...

As I work on my book about one village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I like to weave in a bit of politics and history about the Central African nation. I came across this fantastic, short video about the atrocities of Belgian King Leopold II's rule over the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.) The summary lays out it: In 1904, Chief Lontulu laid 110 twigs in front of a foreign commission. Every twig represented a person in his village who died because of King Leopo

I wrote a blog post earlier this year about these tenacious Catholic nuns in my old Peace Corps village in the Congo, Kamponde, who were...