I’m a freelance writer from California, currently living in England, where I overindulge in cheese and cider on a regular basis and ride a bicycle. I’m interested in representations of space and place and in how we interact with geography, both online and offline. I’m a defender of the internet and old books. Also, I’m kind of neurotic. And sometimes on Sundays I have a nice (or not so nice) rant, which often has very little to do with anything else on this blog. To be honest (and I do like to be honest), a lot of the time I write about things which have little to do with anything else on this blog.

In 2009 I earned an MA in creative writing and am currently at work on my first book.

I like hearing from people, so please feel free to email me or say hello on Twitter.

Some (sort of) frequently asked questions…

Can I hire you? Or can you write something for [delete as appropriate: me/my blog/my publication/my company]?

Yes! Learn more…

How did you end up in England?

The really short version: I had always wanted to visit Oxford, I visited Oxford, I happened to meet a man in a pub on my first night here, now we live together. The long version could probably fill a book.

Why “A Literal Girl”? What does it mean?

No one has ever actually asked me this, which kind of surprises me. The name of my blog comes, in a very roundabout way, from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

When I was in high school a friend of mine started a band and one night he asked me if I had any suggestions about what to call it. He was also an ex-boyfriend so I wanted to impress him by being hip and literary. I started flipping through A Moveable Feast, and I got to the bit about the lost generation, where Gertrude Stein calls Hemingway “a very literal boy”, and I just thought, that’s a nice line! I don’t know why I thought that – it wasn’t a good band name and I wasn’t a boy. But I changed my AOL screen name (remember those days?) to a literal girl anyway. I was 16, and it just stuck, so here I am, with a blog named after a misquoted line of text.

I’m new here, what should I read first?

Try these:
- Sunday Rant: The Internet is Not the Enemy
- 22nd of May, 2007
- Shared Geographies
- Natural High
- 7 Ways of Looking at Belonging
- Out of Nairobi
- Still Being Human
- This is Not a Pep Talk
- The Ongoing Story