After the Fire USA 2026

I just spent 1.5 days at a 2.5-day conference hosted by After The Fire USA, a nonprofit I love and support that was founded by Jennifer Gray Thompson and others after our 2017 firestorms. After the Fire USA supports communities that have faced similar devastating fires--sadly, there's no shortage of them--and lobbies local, state and federal lawmakers on behalf of fire victims. 

The conference was held in Sonoma, Calif., less than an hour from my house, and drew approximately 250 (?) attendees from across the country and internationally. There were fire victims, firefighters, fire prevention specialists, city planners, architects, healthcare providers and more. I met people from Spokane, Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Paradise, Santa Cruz, Lahaina, Alberta Canada, and other places whose names you only saw in the news because they burned.

One of the themes of the conference was "If you've seen one fire, you've seen one fire," meaning that while big fires have similarities, each is also unique. The Hawaiians from Lahaina look to be recovering from their August 2023 wildfire better--or at least differently--than most. Rebuilding seems centered on what people most want and need, including restoring some historic waterways to their pre-colonial states. Based on what I heard from them the past couple of days, Lahaina has a lot to teach other disaster-damaged communities (building on what they learned from After the Fire USA and others who'd been down that path before them). They're doing some interesting work. 

I found the event unexpectedly emotional. Our fire is never far from my mind, of course, particularly since I still give talks on the book I wrote about it, but I haven't been surrounded by that many people who'd survived similar crises, some quite recently, for a long time. It is, as the motto of After the Fire USA says, "the worst club with the best people." I found it warm but intense. Had to take a couple of laps around the patio sometimes. 

I think it was good for me. It at least felt instructional and constructive, and I was honored to be invited.

Approaching the event space, the Hanna Center in Sonoma. The patio to the left had places for people to meet and eat, plus tables of vendors around its perimeter. Talks and panels happened in the big room to the right...

...which looked like this. I took this photo first thing in the morning, before it filled in. It's a great space, with some of the smoothest AV and tech crew I've encountered. Food and drink were swell. The conference took good care of us.

An adjoining lounge/green room offered relevant books, including mine, available for a donation to the cause. Organizers bought 25 copies of A Fire Story and by the end of the event were almost sold out. Of course I signed them all, and got a chance to personalize some for people who said it meant a lot to them. That's very gratifying.

Another author present was teenager Leela Bahador, who wrote her children's book Wildfires to Wildflowers following the Pacific Palisades blaze in 2025. We coincidentally wound up sitting at the same table and had a nice conversation about the writer's life. Turns out I'm old. (Photo by Jennifer Gray Thompson)

I spent quite a while talking with a man whose name I didn't catch from an organization called The Foothill Catalog Foundation, which serves survivors of the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires by presenting them with dozens of pre-approved, ready-to-build house plans that retain the historical architectural aesthetic of the community and are meant to fit onto typical sized lots.

Man, we could have used something like that after our fire! Our rebuild process was absurdly haphazard, and although a few big builders came to community meetings with prospective floorplans, we didn't like any of them (and some of them ultimately turned out to be crooks who took people's money and didn't deliver). If a group like this had come to us and said, "Here are a bunch of designs that will look good in your neighborhood and fit on your lot," it would have made our lives much easier. 

A panel of folks from Lahaina who told very interesting stories about their recovery work to date (with some of us sadly and sympathetically understanding how far they have to go). I don't want to idealize or romanticize anyone, but their focus on history, family and community felt unusually strong.

250 Words on Home Design

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Houses are like trees: their age is revealed by the layers that accumulate within them. 

You can walk into most homes and tell which decade they were built in based on their floorplans, features and fittings. Trends that were once smart and hip grow old and tired. Taste and lifestyle pendulums swing. 

Hardwood was covered by linoleum that was covered by carpet that years later was pulled up to reveal hardwood. Walls were demolished to create open floorplans, then later rebuilt to create separate living spaces. Big bathrooms, big kitchens, big closets—each had their time to shine and then fade. 

We built a house from the ground up a few years ago, and even at the time I knew every design decision we made would someday scream “2018!” Nine-foot ceilings. Six-inch baseboards. Warm gray walls. Recessed LED ceiling lights. Plastic rocker power switches. USB and HDMI ports. Floors of laminated hardwood, concrete tile, and “luxury” vinyl. 

It’s a very nice house that is inescapably of its time.

Our insight from that process is that you don’t design a home for unknowable fashions yet to come or to maximize its future resale value. You design it for the life you want to live. Now. Ideally, you build in enough flexibility to change with the times—walls can be repainted, floors can be redone—but its bones should be timeless enough to last. If its next owners find it old-fashioned, they’re welcome to reshape it to their own needs and taste. 

* * * 

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.

250 Words on Back to the Future

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

(You may remember this as something I posted on social media last year. Afterward, I squinted hard and thought, “That looks like it’s about 250 words long!” So, with some editing, I repurposed it. If you read it before, I hope you enjoy it again!) 

After 36 years, today is the day I get something important off my chest.

There’s a scene in "Back to the Future Part III" (1990) in which time-traveling inventor Doc Brown, trapped in the year 1885, shows Marty McFly an enormous clanking machine whose purpose is a mystery until it deposits a few dirty ice cubes in a bowl. It's an ice maker! Very charming and funny.

My beef: artificial refrigeration had already been invented and was widespread by 1885. Commercial ice plants were operating in most major cities, including Los Angeles, which couldn't have been far from Doc and Marty's fictional Hill Valley, Calif. (which was also somehow within walking distance of Monument Valley, Arizona, but never mind). If Doc Brown wanted ice, he could have copied existing technology or had blocks of it shipped from L.A. on the train he later hijacked. 

I can only reconcile it by thinking of the ice-making scene as a character bit, like how in the first "Back to the Future" movie Doc built an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to feed his dog and cook breakfast. Maybe his Wild West freezer was the same sort of thing: an unnecessarily complicated creation to accomplish something that could have been done much easier but less cinematically or fun.

Otherwise, it's the one piece of the "Back to the Future" trilogy that shatters my suspension of disbelief. Or, as a disappointed Ant-Man realized in "Avengers: Endgame," "So 'Back to the Future' is a bunch of bullshit?!"

* * * 

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.

250 Words on the AP Stylebook

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

On my first day writing for a newspaper, I used a serial comma (also known as an Oxford comma), which goes before the “and” in a series like “tea, scones, and jam.” My boss, a crusty sportswriter who’d been on the job for decades and would continue for decades more, deleted it. 

“I think that comma’s optional,” I smart-mouthed back. Without a word, he walked to a shelf, opened a blue-covered spiral-bound book to a dog-eared page, and slapped it on the desk beside me. It was the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, the Holy Bible of the newspaper industry, and it forbade serial commas (unless required for clarity).

I read it cover to cover the same day.

Some of my favorite newsroom memories are arguments about tiny details of journalistic style. I still use the AP’s convention of writing out the numbers zero through nine (one, two) and using figures for multi-digit numbers (10, 137), except when they begin a sentence (Two hundred rhinos rampaged…) or are part of a sequence (Act 1, Act 2…) or have a decimal (3.14159) or or or…

There are many exceptions. You might imagine how fast you can get lost in the weeds. 

When I began working with Abrams Books, I was dismayed to learn they follow the competing Chicago Manual of Style, with very different, equally arbitrary, rules. One adapts. Still, decades after I last wrote for a newspaper, AP style remains my default setting. That job hammered it into me.

* * * 

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! I am sharing these little "250 Words On" essays via Substack, which will email a new one to your In Box every Tuesday morning. Just follow this link and enter your email address. It's free, and I promise to never use your address for evil purposes.