JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD

During my artist’s residency at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in the Chihuahua Desert, I crafted set of daily meditations. These are catalyzed by the sources of religious inspiration adopted by Unitarian Universalism: Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. Savoring Guadalupe Mountains National Park means harmonizing with daily and seasonal patterns: the cool

Last month, I served as the artist-in-residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice, Nebraska. Having come to believe that constraints catalyze creativity, I chose the number 160 to shape my writing—the number of acres that a pioneer could claim under the Homestead Act of 1862. Some days I worked with schoolchildren and every day I took a walk equivalent to circumambulating the border of a homestead through the restored tall-grass prairie while contemplating

We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The Opera in Agadir, Morocco, at the 13th International Congress of Orthopterology (the scientists who study crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and, of course, locusts). Everything went just as expected, meaning that almost nothing went as planned. My years of international ecological research paid off in terms of anticipating surprises and emb

Earworms are songs that stick in your head. Midland, Texas, is my eyeworm. Cultivating a noir sensibility means looking keenly into dark, bleak, and dangerous settings: the back alleys of New York (Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder), the fetid underbelly of Chicago (Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski), the dreary winters of Boston (Robert Parker’s Spenser, who grew up in Laramie, Wyoming—a little known fact about fiction), or the fog-shrouded streets of San Francisco (if this w

In December, I snuck away for a long weekend in San Francisco to research settings for my next book in the Riley Mystery series. Having begun my writing life in non-fiction, I feel compelled to experience a place where I’m going to have action unfold. I could make up the locations, but this feels lazy. Ok, fiction is, well, fictional, I believe that readers can discern whether an author knows a place in a deep and authentic manner. So here are some of my (abridged) field n