Portland Walks: West Across the Burnside Bridge
This is the first in a series of walks around Portland, Oregon. I walk through the city every day anyway, so I figured...why not bring you with me? Once a...
*tap tap tap*
Ahem. Hey there! Yes, you’re right. This is not at all where we were standing when you last heard from me. I did, in fact, bundle you off into a new room...
Okay so now what?
Fuck. I mean... FUCK. In 2016, I was pretty sure that Trump would win. This time around, when it was still Biden running, I knew that Trump would win. But...
Little Embers of Hope
This has been a difficult year for me for a number of reasons, not least of which was the impending doom I felt whenever I considered a rematch between Biden...
Workshops, Classes, and Coaching (oh my)
Hey folks, I hope your summer is off to a good start (or your winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere). I tend to keep these announcements mostly...
Our fathers' graves
My father and me, 1973 I had a zoom coffee date with a beloved far-away friend last week. He was talking about a recent trip back home to see his mother, and...
Thumbnail Sketch #1
I’m going to do a series of sketches of people I come across on my walks around Portland and in my neighborhood. I’m not sure how many I will do or how often...
The end of urban homesteading
Fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and chickens were my consolation prizes for getting priced out of New York in 2007. Yes, we had to leave our hometown when...
Substackers Against Nazis: an update
A still from a Youtube video on antifascist organizing. That’s me in the sunglasses, at one of many antifascist counterprotests here in Portland between 2016...
Substackers Against Nazis
A collective letter to Substack leadership
You know what you need? More Cynthia Ozick
Greetings from my bed on a Sunday evening. I’ve been here all weekend, tucked in with a stack of books that I’ve been too tired to read. No, it isn’t Covid....
Ceasefire Now. Release the Hostages.
I have shared links to articles and calls for ceasefire in Gaza on social media. I have signed petitions and an open letter against the conflation of...
Laying My Dead Dad Novel to Rest
My father died when he was fifty years old and I was nineteen. He died suddenly and then slowly—a heart attack at work that he never regained consciousness...
In which I filled my bedroom with tiny kittens
Just as the summer was drawing to a close, and I was looking forward to quietly gliding into fall, I pulled a typical Cari move and upped the degree of daily...
“Unrequited love’s a bore!”
Fucking Jack Kerouac, man. This weekend I read Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, as research for my current novel. Folks, it was a damn good read. If you’re...
The Dangers of Auto-Fan-Fiction
Greetings from my mother’s kitchen table. The kids and I are halfway through a not-quite-two-week trip back east to visit family in NYC and New Jersey. It’s...
You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: The end
(pages 206 to 273)
You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week Three
(pages 149-206)
You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week Two
(pages 78-149)
You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week One
(pages 3-78)
You, Me, and Doris Lessing gets underway in just one week!
Hey folks, Here’s your reminder that one week from today I’ll publish the first of four posts dedicated to our group reading of The Summer Before the Dark by...
You, Me, and Doris Lessing
A proposal
I'll be the boy with the pink carnation
We’ve had a cold spring here in Portland, and a wet one. The wet is to be expected, but the cold dragged on longer than usual. Lots of dreary 40- to...
Breaking Up with Jack Kerouac
Me, age 16, with Kerouac’s giant head on my shirt. Photo: Christina Graf My agent is shopping my new novel, The Narrow Place, around to editors right now....
Fiction is fiction.
Consider this your permission to make shit up.
That cool, modern, laid-off-via-Twitter feeling
Like many novelists, teaching is my primary income source. Luckily, it’s work that I love to do. It feels like right livelihood, like I’m truly helping...
Sunrise, Sunset... (Dispatch from Utopia)
I’ve been quiet the past few weeks because our family was up to our necks in the mucky ending of the first semester and I had to go into Family Project...
Refilling the well with a nice, lighthearted murder
Happy New Year! I hope the final stretch of 2022 was good to you. I’m emerging from a mostly delicious holiday cocoon, somewhat irritated that it’s time to...
The Books I Loved Most in 2022
We’re well into the cold and gray and dark here in Portland, and with 2022 coming to a close with alarming swiftness (seriously, what the hell is happening...
A Secret (okay, not so secret) Well in Toledo
In my last letter to you, I talked about catching covid on the way to Spain this summer, and I briefly mentioned dragging my covid-negative-but-still-sickly...
Okay, so a pandemic and an anxiety disorder walk into a bar...
I’m among friends here, right? So can I just say that... Holy hell, the threat of covid does not play well with my anxiety disorder. Pandemic plus a natural...
Same Cari, New Box
So...I did it. I tucked you all into a box and carried it over from Tiny Letter to Substack. I’d been going back and forth on the decision for months now. I...
Recommendation: Burn Your Journals
I started a fire because I was sick of myself. I was discouraged and exhausted, wallowing in a humiliation that was entirely self-imposed and perhaps even...
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
Me and my dad, Spring 1974, NYCMe and my mom, Spring 1974, NYCI sometimes joke that after I die (many, many years from now) my children will say, with great...
The old man at the vet's office
Shortly before the pandemic, when we still blithely breathed near strangers in small indoor spaces, I took the cat to the vet for his annual exam. (I say...
Hey there
At some point in the past, you very kindly signed up to hear from me once in a while. It’s been quite some time since I last sent one of these out. Some...
After listening to Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree for the first time...
(Go here for some background on Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree) What do you do with a stranger’s grief? What do you do with a stranger’s grief when that stranger...
How it was
Tomorrow, July 25th, is my husband's birthday, and the third anniversary of my accepting Tin House's offer to publish The Revolution of Every Day, and the...
Mix Tape
Hey all. It's been a while, huh?A few days ago, I hauled a dusty cardboard box up out of the basement. It had been down there since we moved to Portland in...
Little Suzie Homemaker
There was a period of time—a solid three-year stretch—when I baked all of the bread my family ate, made all of our yogurt, grew most of our vegetables,...
As Mitchell S. Jackson likes to say, lit life is life
On Monday evening, my husband and I got all dressed up and went to the Gerding Theater here in Portland for the Oregon Book Awards. At the beginning of...
Five years in the wilderness...
In 2010, Gail Hochman, my first literary agent, passed on The Revolution of Every Day, firing me after five years together. It felt as big as any break up,...
A confession...
I recently saw 20,000 Days on Earth, the Nick Cave documentary. I’m a longtime Cave fan. I met him in 1992, and wrote about it. I sit square in the middle of...
I'm Very Into You
I’ve been thinking about emails lately. Jeff Jackson and I recently completed an epistolary review of I’m Very Into You, which is a collection of emails...
Greetings from the Small Blue Room
(The blue walls are hard to see, but they’re there.) I used to have a blog. Technically, I still do, but now it’s just a place where I occasionally post...