about this site
The Drift Notebook is a newsletter, an art project, and an archive, launched in the fall of 2025 by Alexis M Smith.
When you subscribe, you'll receive a monthly newsletter, composed by me: a living, breathing human; a biological and spiritual intelligence; an LLB (Large Language Being). It’ll be short and sweet (a 5-8 minute read), with publication updates, upcoming online or in-person classes, book recommendations, and other odds and ends.
In addition, you’ll have access to posts from my notebook—with pictures, ephemera, and jottings from my novel-in-progress, Drift (a sequel to Glaciers)—and occasional pieces resurrected from my archive of short stories and essays.
That’s no more than twice monthly, a little something in your inbox to peruse at your leisure.
about your support
I wouldn’t be here without you, dear reader. I’m compelled to write by forces I’ll never understand, but I share my writing because there are folks out there who seek connection and understanding through art. That’s you! Thank you for being here!
One small way to support my writing is to purchase my books—and any books I recommend—through my BOOKSHOP.ORG AFFILIATE SHOP.
In addition to supporting indie brick-and-mortar stores around the country, when you shop through my affiliate page and links in my newsletter, 10% of the proceeds come back to me, to support this newsletter’s overhead. Every little bit helps me sleep better at night and wake up at 4:45a.m. to put words on the page. (Yes, that’s when I wake up.)
From the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, I love you.
about the author
Alexis M. Smith is a novelist. Her debut, Glaciers (Tin House, 2012; reissued 2023), was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize. Marrow Island (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) won both a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and occasional pieces have appeared in Tin House, Portland Monthly, The Portland Review, Bon Appétit, The Spokesman-Review, Moss, and elsewhere. She was an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow in 2015 and in 2025 she was shortlisted for a Creative Capital Award.
Born in Seattle, she spent the first ten years of her life on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, before her parents returned to Washington State. She spent her teen years in Seattle, thrifting her heart out and embracing queer life on Capitol Hill in the 90s. She attended Mount Holyoke College for 1.5 years, returned to Seattle to work at the Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market, then moved to Portland, Oregon and completed her B.A. in English at Portland State University.
Alexis began writing professionally for the Powell’s Books Blog, while a bookseller at the City of Books. During this time, she completed the low-residency MFA program at Goddard College; Glaciers was her thesis. She left Powell’s in 2011 and wrote her second novel, Marrow Island, as a single mom living in St. Johns, just steps from Cathedral Park. In 2017, she relocated to Spokane, Washington for several years of teaching, bookselling, fantastic hiking, and difficult gardening. Today, she has a teenaged kid and lives in Eugene, Oregon with her partner, artist and body worker, Rye Badger.