Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California. She attended The University of California, Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area for eight years until she moved to Toronto, Canada. It was while she was in Canada that Jessica started writing fiction. She was not granted a w ...
When I was growing up, my parents had a fairly loose policy of not driving me, my sister, or my brother around town. We biked to the dentist and doctor. To go anywhere else-school, the beach, the movies-we walked, rode the bus, roller skated, and hitch-hiked (the method of choice in high school). The no driving policy was cemented sometime before my sister, Becca, went away to college, ...
You might remember my mother, Bonnie Blau, from the interview I did with her earlier this year. We talked about the fact that she thinks she looks like Bruce Springsteen. You can read that interview here. As a follow up, here's an interview with my mother where I ask her about one of my favorite photos. It's the only picture I have of me as a little kid with my mother. Do you remember ...
My mother gave my father a Diane Arbus photo book for his birthday the year I was ten and he was thirty-four. The entire family (Mom, Dad, my older sister, Becca, and my younger brother, Josh) gathered around and slowly waded through it, picture by picture. The pages were thick and glossy and smelled remotely of plastic. Almost all the photos were portraits-people whose entire lives seemed ...
