Category Archives: Published Work

TQ Ski & Ride

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Tahoe Quarterly’s Ski & Ride issue is on stands now! My copy came in the mail yesterday and it looks fabulous. The rider on the cover gives me chills, and that’s just the beginning of the fabulous photography. Some great stories: a retrospective on Tahoe’s role in the birth of snowboarding, a piece on the landowner standing between Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows and a look at cloud-seeding using drones to maximize the area’s snowfall. Appropriate the issue’s theme, I wrote a piece on Marianne Rosenfeld, the South Lake Tahoe-based owner of Forest Furniture. When her husband died in 2008, she repurposed his old skis into a chair as a sort of tribute to him. Since then, her business has grown, and in addition to the ski chairs she creates high-end furnishings, as well. A very fun piece to write, and I got the nicest message from Marianne saying she loved the article. Writers often work in a vacuum, so it’s wonderful to get feedback!

In other TQ news, we begin the Mountain Home Tours on Friday. I’m afraid that Friday may be the only tour I can attend, but it’s set up to be a great day—we visit Donner Lake and Alpine Meadows, with a lunch stop at the final house. These houses are incredible… although I always return from the tours ready to gut my own and start from scratch!

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TQ Winter 15-16

The TQ Winter issue is on stands (well, it’s been on stands, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it!) and it looks beautiful! Our very talented graphic designer recently switched up the cover graphics and I’m really loving how it looks. I wrote the Art piece—a profile of the painter Christie Marie Elder. I love her story: She’s a natural at everything she tries. She started snowboarding after years of skiing and immediately landed on the world circuit. After years competing (and investing in her own tattoo equipment to support herself while continuing her art), she retired to start a family. She really wanted to focus on her art, though, and so she joined South Shore’s Tahoe Art League and almost immediately became its president. A very talented woman and a pleasure to interview!

I also wrote the Home Design story about a French-inspired estate in Southwest Reno. The couple has spent a decade tracking down antiques (often while riding their Harleys to antique shops) for their gorgeous home.

Some other great stories—a feature article on Snow Park Technologies, which makes features such as halfpipes, a My Sierra piece on Sierra Nevada College (wonderfully written by Tanya Canino, whose two classes I’ll be taking over this semester!), and a story looking at the possibility of an ice rink coming to Reno, among others. I am fairly intrigued by the ice rink, as it will be just a few miles from my house! Anyway, if you haven’t seen the issue, do yourself a favor and pick it up from stands around the Basin and Reno, or subscribe now!

TQ Ski & Ride 2015

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TQ‘s Ski & Ride issue is on stands and it looks great! This is our issue to get hyped up for the snow season, which (thanks to El Nino, read more about it in the issue!) may be shaping up to be the first good year since 2010. Lots of fun stories, including  an interview with the founders of Coalition Snow, a for women by women ski company, an article about managing avalanches and a historical piece about the 10th mountain division and it’s impact on Tahoe-Reno region in the 1940s.

 I wrote an article about Tesla choosing to locate its Gigafactory in Reno, and the expected impacts the electric car maker’s presence is expected to have in the fields of education, employment and housing. It’ll be exciting to watch Reno’s growth over the next few years as more and more companies are drawn to America’s Biggest Little City.

I was in the office on Thursday for the first proof of the Winter issue and return for second proof next week. As excited as I am for the issue, I also can’t wait to knock it out of the way and get started on Mountain Home!

Fun Find

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It’s always fun to see Tahoe Quarterly in unexpected places—in this case, in a bathroom display at Western Nevada Supply in Reno. I was there to pick out a sink and faucet, but if I’m ever in the need of a new bathtub, this model has my vote!

Getting Ready for the Summer (Issue)

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Just finished editing the Summer issue of TQ and it looks beautiful! Lots of great articles, including one on scuba diving Lake Tahoe (which made me a little queasy reading) and a really interesting feature on the state of the forests coming off four years of drought. I wrote a big piece on the Nevada Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition Tahoe: A Visual History. It will be pretty impressive and include basketry from the Washoe Tribe, nineteenth century paintings, large-scale wall installations and will include pieces from artists such as Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, Maya Lin, Phyllis Shafer and Erika Osborne.

During the first proof, last week, I got to stop on Mt. Rose on my way back over the Summit and take my fur baby for a hike (the first hiking I’ve done after a solid three weeks of being sick). For the second proof, it rained most of the day in Incline, so we skipped the beach. Not complaining, though—we’ll take all the water we can get!

Interwebs

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I’ve been meaning to update my online presence—beyond being awful with my blogging, my LinkedIn profile is from about six years ago and I’ve been needing to update my Google+ profile as part of the Tahoe Quarterly website update. So, I just got on Google+ for the first time in a few years and the above photo popped up! It’s Brad Henry, a Truckee-based potter who I interviewed a few months ago, reading my article (License to Kiln) in his copy of the magazine. Pretty cool to see! Now what else is on the Interwebs that I’ve been missing out on…?

TQ Collaging

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My kids have had a looong winter break—three weeks off from preschool, plus my babysitter and daycare provider were out of town. So it hasn’t been great for productivity, but it has been a lot of fun! Last week, the girls and I went to the Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum for kids. I love this place—there is a room for kids five and under, a three-story high “cloud climber,” rooms for science and experiments, a model of the Truckee River. The only bad thing is that, when nap time comes, it’s hard to get my children to leave. Anyway, we were in the art room, where the featured project was to create Salvador Dali-type projects. There were a variety of magazines from which to cut out pictures, including a bunch of old Tahoe Quarterly’s! My daughter loved seeing my name in print, and cut out my byline from an old Arts article to paste onto her collage. Fun day at the museum, and always nice to see where the magazine (sometimes unexpectedly) ends up!

TQ Ski & Ride 2014-15

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Proud to report that the Ski & Ride issue of Tahoe Quarterly is on stands and it looks beautiful! This is a fun issue—some interesting stories, including one about the expansion of the Lake Tahoe Wildlife Center and another exploring Granite Chief Wilderness. For the Arts section, I profiled the concertmaster for the Reno Philharmonic (as well as the Nevada Opera and Reno Chamber Orchestra), Dr. Ruth Lenz. She’s an incredibly talented violinist, who manages to balance her numerous musical organizations, teaching violin and life with two young children, as well as her hobbies, which include hiking and horses. Very impressive!

In other news, I finished proofing the Winter issue of TQ on Wednesday (look for it on stands the first or second week of December!) and spent Thursday interviewing and touring for three of the articles I’m writing for the Mountain Home issue. Some beautiful—and very inspired—homes. I came out of my last tour determined to build a living wall of succulents inside my home. That resolve quickly faded, but it was very cool to see it done well in someone else’s home!

Insomnia

My children have had coughs that get worse at bedtime, so I haven’t slept much the past two nights. Kids are finally feeling better, which was great for many reasons, chief among them that I was been exhausted. So I tried to go to bed tonight and it was like I’d forgotten how—my brain wouldn’t turn off. Since my brain isn’t tired enough to sleep, and not lucid enough to do anything creative, I’m finally updating my website with a few more recent articles!

Some of my favorite stories are from the Arts department. I was lucky enough to interview three super talented artists (visual artist Phyllis Shafer, literary artist Ellen Hopkins and performing artist Rosine Bena) in the Best of Tahoe article A Talented Trio. I’ve also recently profiled the watercolor artist Joyce Major (whom Tahoe has recently lost to a move to Hawaii) and sculptor Pat Blide.

I’ve also added links to one of my favorite articles from the Mountain Home issue, Storied Spaces, which is about the Beck home in Martis Camp, and the feature I wrote for the Winter issue about local athletes who were contenders for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. It was incredibly cool to talk with such amazing athletes, and it made the Olympics even more fun to watch—I felt like I was cheering on old friends as I watched Reno’s David Wise and South Lake’s Maddie Bowman scoop up gold medals.

That’s all the website updating I have in me for tonight, so here’s hoping my insomnia has passed and my brain can return to normal for tomorrow!

TQ Mountain Home 2014

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Woohoo! The 2014 TQ Mountain Home issue is here and it looks beautiful! I’m a huge fan of our mountain architecture and this issue is my favorite that TQ produces… not only are the pages full of beautiful houses by talented architects, builders and designers, but the stories behind the homes are fascinating. I’ve got a bunch of stories in this issue, including a profile of Barclay Moore, who creates one-of-a-kind “functional art” (or furniture) and the many facets of the Martis Camp home that won the TQ Interior Design award.

Grab a copy from stands around Reno/Tahoe or subscribe here!