The first time my stepdaughter, Autumn, called me her wicked stepmother, I experienced it as a relief and a kindness. She was well into her teens by then. I’d known, loved, and part-time-parented her since she was a wee tot. Still, the easy affection that passed between us when she…

For the past seven years I’ve been educating myself, little by little, about plants and trees native to this land of the Lenape people that we call the New York City Borough of Queens. I’ve experimented with containers, raised beds, and streetside plantings. Inevitably some attempts have been less successful…

My first book, Ancestor Trouble, was published by Random House on March 29. It’s received some very nice reviews. Adapted excerpts appear in Esquire, Time, and The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the excerpt that appears on booksellers’ sites. It’s the second chapter of the book. A Doorway Over time the…

Most people where I live (on Lenape land in Queens) are familiar with mugwort, if they are familiar with it at all, as a weed that crops up where you least want it: in sidewalk cracks, on roadside shoulders, overtaking flower beds. Imported from Europe, it flourishes here, threatening in…

I grew up being taught the Bible as fact at church, at home, and at school, with the same emphasis and weight that most children learn history. Although I am not a believer now, inevitably I remain in conversation with the stories I learned back then, and I find myself…

A tree full of owls, a calf at a new gate, a mouse peeing on cotton — my mom and I disagree on many things, but one thing that brings us joy together is remembering my Texan granny’s expressions. Grannyisms, my mom calls them. Granny was born into poverty in…

"Why aren’t you living in a trailer park?” a writer asked me once. I was (and am) a fan of this writer’s books, and I had just met them at a small gathering in Manhattan. We were talking about the writer’s work and some other things, and over the course…

In the early 1980s, my mom claimed to see demons everywhere, coiling around drivers who cut her off, perching on department store shoppers, floating above strangers walking down the road. Nearly everyone who didn’t agree with my mom was possessed, it seemed, from secular news anchors to the teachers at…

At times while working on my book over the years, I would become resentful of it, as if it had its own expectations, as if the draft itself were insisting I recount the entire history of genealogy in the United States or offer a dissertation on genetics. Ugh, now I…