Other Writings – personal essays, op-eds, musings, and feature stories

A compendium of freelance pieces

My Turn: I Know What John Fetterman Is Going Through — I Was A Psychiatric InpatientNewsweek – February 22, 2023

Ghosted – AARP Arrow – January 9, 2023

How An Insane Backpacking Trip Made Me A Better Dad: A Father Found His Teenage Daughter And His Sense Of Purpose In The Mountains  – AARP Arrow

Never Lost: On The Pacific Crest Trail Before Smartphones, A Hiker Never Had To Choose — Appalachia Journal, Fall 2022

My interview with Toni Morrison and Angela Davis in Five Dials literary magazine, April 2022

An interview with Jonathan Franzen: Catamaran literary magazine 

Luxurious full-service picnics are a new spin on an old American tradition — The Washington Post, (Made By History, Perspective)


In The Sierra Nevada, An Escape To The Past – The Washington Post Travel

How A Long-Ago Trek Is Helping Me Survive In Quarantine — the Washington Post

The Main In The Shoebox — Why We Write — Poets & Writers

Wild Victorian Ladies; women in the woods a hundred years before Cheryl Strayed- Catamaran Literary Reader 

The Haunting: A Conversation With George Saunders about Lincoln In The BardoCatamaran Literary Reader

A brief history of #vanlife and RVing – The San Francisco Chronicle

Vanlife is an escape for some, a necessity for others- San Francisco Chronicle

Strange Brews – San Francisco Chronicle

The Boy Scouts Will Now Allow Girls. Will It Kill The Girl Scouts? — The Washington Post 

How to Forestall Your Child’s Inevitable Misery at School, featuring Amy Ettinger — McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

When Camping Was Serious Politics — The Washington Post

Making National Parks More Expensive Will Only Make Them Whiter — The Washington Post

How Americans Got Over Their Fear Of Camping — The Wall Street Journal

Three people who helped America fall in love with camping — The Huffington Post

Force Of Nature: A Conversation With T.C. Boyle — Catamaran Literary Reader

A conversation with Toni Morrison and Angela Davis — UC Santa Cruz Magazine

These Walls Can Talk — UC Santa Cruz Magazine

The Remains Of Tom Lehrer (a rare interview with reclusive genius of musical satire.)