River Mapping

Spend a little time (or a lot) with something you love

When my son was little, he loved maps. He studied maps and atlases, he made maps of our neighborhood and noted which cats lived at which house, and he had us print out loads of maps for him to watercolor (below, you can find him in his US phase.)

I’ve been working on a map project myself up on the Nestucca River, which my family and I think of as our home river. It’s where we get our town drinking water, and though it’s full of native cutthroat and caddis flies and dotted with larkspur and salmonberry and massive maple and leaning alder, the Nestucca, like so many Coast Range rivers, has been heavily logged and used hard these many years.

I love it for all these reasons. That it is beautiful. That it is and has long been a peopled landscape. That when we camp there we often cross paths with folks we might not cross paths with in nearly any other setting. I don’t love the beer cans and trash fires folks sometimes leave, I don’t love the clearcut that appeared one spring on the ridge above one of my favorite fishing holes. I love the work the Salmon SuperHwy is doing on the river, and I love that so many people have loved and still love, in their way, this river.

Here’s an early draft of one of my river maps:

Mapping is an attempt to know. It’s like language that way. Or love. Here’s a poem, about another of our favorite rivers, the Rogue, from my collection Thieve:

Where the River Breaks the Mountain's Back

Scrub trees pock the cliffs. 
Tumblestones lean against the wind, 
the emptiness. 
Grass dries down to sunlight, 
& glyphs of gone animals 
scallop the hot dust— 

starry nights 
they step gracefully back 
through their own absence. The sky 
in any weather is a long time coming, 
like gladness. This is a map. Love, 
I leave it here for you.

All this is to say: I hope, despite the news, despite the grief, that this mid-summer newsletter finds you spending time with people and places you love. I hope you’re coloring with whatever bright colors seem best. I hope your own maps are leading you out on all kinds of adventures and then helping you find your way back home.

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Good News for The Entire Sky

My second novel is a year old this July, and it’s been gratifying to get a recent run of good birthday news. Alongside work by Percival Everett, Richard Powers, and Tommy Orange, The Entire Sky has been named to the long-list for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, a prize that “honors a work of fiction from the previous calendar year that speaks with an ‘American Voice’ about American experiences.” The Entire Sky has also recently been named a finalist for the 2025 High Plains International Book Award.

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New Work

I’ve got a story, “Riprap,” up at the Idaho Review and a few poems over at Terrain.org.

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Safe travels, friends. Stay in touch!