Blog

Writers Are My Tribe (And Other Things I Learned at the Quills Conference)

I just got home from the Quills Conference in Salt Lake City.

I wasn't a speaker or attendee. I was a volunteer and a chapter president, which lands somewhere in the middle of the official-capacity spectrum, and even that felt like more space than I was allowed to take up.

Let me tell you why...

The Reason I Didn't Enter the Contests

I didn't submit any of my work for the awards. I disqualified myself preemptively because I've used AI in my process. Here's what I mean by "used AI." I have never...

Radical Resilience, By the Numbers I just got home from the Las Vegas

I just got home from the Las Vegas Writers Conference.

I was faculty.

Let me say that again, because my brain is still trying to accept the sentence. I was faculty at the Las Vegas Writers Conference. At twenty-nine years old. Me, little redneck from a town of three thousand people in the middle of rural Utah. Sharing the roster with New York Times bestselling authors, senior literary agents from major firms, talent managers actively developing Broadway musicals, Bram Stoker Award winners, and...

The Operating System I Didn't Know I Was Running I've been asking myself

I've been asking myself the wrong question my whole life.

I kept asking: why am I unhappy? Like if I could just find the right answer, the right relationship, the right accomplishment, the right combination of being enough... the unhappiness would lift. Like it was a puzzle and I was just missing a piece.

But that's not the right question. The right question is: how could I possibly be anything else when I have never, not once, been allowed to just exist?

Let me explain what I mean by that. And...

View All

Inaya Larson came home to Clover Valley to lick her wounds, not to blow the lid off of anything. One quiet reporting job at the county paper, that...