personal Essays
Sometimes stories come from research & reporting, and sometimes they come from life itself. These are the second kind.
Image by Jeren Tran
the coming pollen storms
noēMA MAGAZINE, August 2024
What does the climate crisis feel like in your body? It’s easier to imagine it in the form of large-scale, dramatic events: settlements swept away in floods, towns torched in wildfires. But for many of us it will make landfall in a multitude of more intimate ways.
Image by Natasha Vermeulen
the opening
The Spinoff: Sunday essay, October 22, 2023
I was the ideal home birth candidate. Fit, healthy, confident, comfortable. Trusted my body. Loved my partner. Read positive birth stories by Ida May Gaskin and none of the pamphlets about inductions, ventouse, or caesareans. Quietly suspected that such interventions were the domain of those less committed, more high-maintenance, less ‘embodied’ than me.
Photo by Kate Evans
Follow her home
North & South, January 2023
If it weren’t for that photo, I’d never have learned the backstory of this place. It’d be just another quirky inheritance of the Raglan land that my partner and I bought with my sister’s family six years ago, passed on like the avocado tree and the dodgy plumbing for us to puzzle over, prune, and problem-solve as we saw fit.