Essays

  • Making Nothing Happen

    A cross-genre essay tracing my decade in a writing group that mostly didn’t write—using critical theory and Buddhist psychology to reexamine our ‘failure’ against productivity culture.

  • The LA River Gets a Makeover

    This article follows volunteers at a 2018 river cleanup and traces the decades-long effort to revitalize the LA River, from grassroots advocacy to the hundreds of parks, bike paths, and restoration projects now winding through city and county bureaucracy.

  • Allocthon

    The geological concept of the “allocthon,” a rock displaced from its origin, becomes a method for self-investigation.

  • Quarantined in Utopia

    Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary approach to history offers a framework for reading the mundane changes of pandemic life as symbolic artifacts of a larger transformation we have yet to understand.