I think of myself–metaphorically!–as a buoy in the North Atlantic. Somedays I float closer to the US–say, bobbing around somewhere in the Georges Bank fishing area–but on other days I’m within sight of the Faroe Islands. My life is transatlantic.

I’m American but I received my MA from the University of Wales Trinity St David. My first three nonfiction books–all travel memoirs that spilled out of genre into food and science writing, history, biography, linguistics–were published by HarperCollins, London. My most recent nonfiction work came out with Little Toller Books. My great subject is Wales and why I feel more at home there than in America. In my first book, Travels in an Old Tongue – Touring the World Speaking Welsh (1997), I recounted my (pitiable) attempts to learn Cymraeg and fashioned an image of Cymru made up from the memories and dreams of those living abroad. In my latest book, The Long Field  – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir (2021), which followed the first by 25 years, I examined why the quintessential Welsh word “hiraeth” is central to my life. Hiraeth gives a name to the incompleteness you feel when something important is missing; something you’ve left in the past – a home, a sense of feeling at home in yourself, an out-grown dream – or  an ideal you’ve invented that can never be realized, a hope that always eludes you. At its core, hiraeth boils down to an awareness of the presence of absence, kindling a feeling in which pain and joy are braided too tightly to untangle.

The Long Field was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year and named a Travel Book of the Year by The Telegraph and The Financial Times.

My two non-Welsh books include Sitting up with the Dead – A Storied Journey through the American South (2001), about oral storytellers in the Southern States, and The Slow Breath of Stone – A Romanesque Love Story (2005), about doomed American archaeologist Kingsley Porter and his wife Lucy, and the stone, wine and art of Southwest France.

My upcoming book is tentatively called Haunts  –  Ghostmaking Past, Present and Future, which will take the measure of haunted sites around the globe including Cape Cod, Wales, East Sussex, Hawaii, Poland, and Argentina. 

I’m also a photographer and have widely exhibited my “Petrograph” and Dusk Series photos, mostly in America, and created an artist’s book, AfterShadows, based on my (glorious) time as Artist in Residence at the Grand Canyon.