I’m a freelance writer from California, currently living in England. I’m particularly interested in representations of space and place and in how we interact with geography, both online and offline, but I write about other stuff, too. I spend most of my free time reading, eating cheese, drinking cider, riding my bicycle, and swimming (although not usually in that order).

In 2009 I earned an MA in creative writing and am currently at work on my first book, a series of linked essays about music, myths, and making a living. You can pre-order it here.

Please feel free to email me or say hello on Twitter.

Some (sort of) frequently asked questions…

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

Yes, probably! Learn more…

How did you end up in England?

The really short version: I had always wanted to visit Oxford, I visited Oxford, I met a man in a pub on my first night here, and 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, but I sort of wish they would, so here’s the answer to the question that no one’s ever asked: 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 thought, what 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 stuck, and now here I am, with a blog named after a misquoted line of text.

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

Try these:
- The Dissolving Mirror
- A Short Personal History of Cameras
- Sunday Rant: The Internet is Not the Enemy
- Natural High
- 7 Ways of Looking at Belonging
- Out of Nairobi
- Still Being Human
- This is Not a Pep Talk
- The Ongoing Story