Tara Roberts

Moscow

Novelist: WILD & DISTANT SEAS (@wwnorton). Freelance writer, occasional teacher, mom, wife, Idahoan, Lutheran, book nerd, ice cream enthusiast. She/her

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Articles

Five years later, looking back on that first COVID spring and marking how far we have grown

2 weeks ago | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge Young Kwak photo At the dawn of COVID in late March 2020, Lewis and Clark High School students shared their resolve. Five years and one month ago, I wrote my first column for this newspaper, a few weeks into the COVID lockdown. Like most people, I was bewildered and exhausted.
Screen TIme

Oct 27, 2024 | citylifestyle.com | Tara Roberts

Forty years ago, screen time wasn’t hard to define. Most families had one television with three channels, and if you were lucky enough to own an Atari, you couldn’t play it when the news was on. In a world of mobile devices, immersive digital spaces, and interactive social media, Michigan Medicine’s Jenny Radesky, M.D., says it’s time to move the conversation beyond screen time. “The nature of technology has changed.
Meet Bill: the crazy, COVID-era impulse purchase who became the glue that still keeps the family sane

Oct 2, 2024 | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge Bill the Seal loves pumpkin spice lattes. (Obviously.) Bill the Seal is part harbor seal, part leopard seal — and part ghost. He is listed among the world's chonkiest seals and is a champion in the sport of chonky-seal nose-boxing. He subsists on pumpkin spice lattes and sausages. On occasion, his body is taken over by a malevolent alien, which must be sprayed with an alien-detecting substance and subsequently banished.
Even as the world seems harder and harder, summer still takes the gold

Aug 7, 2024 | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge Ice cream and hugs and huckleberries and LeAnn Rimes and Olympics memes. This summer has been full of joy and grief, adventure and confusion, excitement and exhaustion — and that's just the internet for five minutes. But real life has been that way, too, for me and pretty much everyone I know. As a writer, I find myself making lists amid the ups and downs: of things I need to do, of things I want to do, of things I want to remember, of things I need to hold onto.
Wild and Distant Seas: A Novel

Jul 15, 2024 | audiobooks.com | Tara Roberts

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once all she needed-but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea.
Summer Stories: 'Escape Velocity'

Jul 6, 2024 | spokesman.com | Tara Roberts

Jessy uses her lawn-mowing money to buy a map of Idaho and a map of Washington at the quick stop. She cuts them apart, glues them together on a piece of cardboard like a puzzle, and measures out a hundred kilometers along Highway 2 from her house to Spokane. The line lands in a blue stripe of river. She didn’t even know there was a river in Spokane.
Nature offers lessons on how to learn to love slowness — sometimes very slowly

Jun 12, 2024 | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge Eventually, and on its own terms, the peony's bloom will burst out. Three weeks ago I took a picture of a bud on the peony plant at the end of my driveway. It looked about ready to open, and I thought I'd snap a photo every day for a few days and end up with a cute Instagram post. A week in, the bud had barely changed. But I was OK with it — I was struggling with ideas for a column, as always, and appreciated the peony handing me a tidy metaphor about progress.
You really should be watching women's sports

Apr 17, 2024 | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge The Gonzaga women's basketball team had the 10th-highest average attendance at home games among all women's programs in the NCAA for 2021-22. In 2010, I was a broke, pregnant grad student with a toddler who never stopped moving or talking. My husband worked swing shift, and I hated being stuck in the house. So I decided one night to pack up my 2-year-old, Henry, and go to an Idaho Vandals women's basketball game. It wasn't relaxing, exactly.
Adults and children both meet the wider world through reading; too many want to take that away

Feb 22, 2024 | inlander.com | Tara Roberts

click to enlarge Books teach about science, history and philosophy; friendship, family and love; grief, death, violence and war. When I was 11 years old, I received a scandalous book. It was full of bizarre stories of monsters and demons and talking animals, terrible tales of violence and suffering, and complex meditations on morality and mortality. Also sex. Lots of sex. You might have already guessed the punchline: The book was the Bible, an NIV with a blue vinyl cover.
Wild and Distant Seas Audiobook on Libro.fm

Feb 12, 2024 | libro.fm | Tara Roberts

Skip content Spread the (audiobook) love! Send a referral, and we’ll send you a bonus credit 💖 Refer your friends In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account. Spread the (audiobook) love! Send a referral between now and February 17, and we’ll send you a bonus audiobook credit to keep or gift. Plus, if your friend starts a membership, you’ll earn a second free audiobook.