I am more ecstatic than I can describe to finally be able to announce that my website and online newspaper, Phoenix & Cricket, after so many years of tinkering and imagining, is done.
There are no true beginnings to things, but if I had to pick one for Phoenix & Cricket, it would be a windowless room at the University of Michigan in August 2014. It was the moment I dropped out of my Ph.D. program, and tears streamed down my face and I looked at the clock on the wall and I told myself “now you can go write.” And I did. I applied for the same science writing internship three times, and got it on the third try, and that’s when I started writing for EARTH Magazine — a now-extinct magazine covering the geosciences that had the best editorial team I’ve ever worked with. I grew up as a journalist writing for them, and then, piece by piece, built a career that’s still evolving today.
Phoenix & Cricket has a very special meaning to me. The name came during a fever dream in Ann Arbor; “Phoenix” came from the feeling of destruction and renewal after I quit UM (“born from fire in a snowy place,” I often say), and “Cricket” came from my late grandma, Liz, who knew I loved the outdoors and wild places and who saw an ad for a trailer called a “Cricket” in a magazine. She thought I might like to know about it so she cut out the ad and saved it for me.
“Phoenix” and “Cricket” came together in my dream to make a newspaper that for me is how the world is: something rooted in natural phenomena (the science journalism you’ll often find in the lefthand column), where there are often-mundane and sometimes-fantastic things that, when you look at them the right way, become, imperceptibly, magical things (that’s the essence of my righthand fiction column, where I write short stories I think of as magically real things).
There are no true beginnings, but finishing this website feels as close to one as I can get. A beginning hitched to an ending, and where the ending truly ends and the beginning truly begins, no one can say.
Nevertheless, like that ending/beginning in 2014 in Michigan, I can feel the tears coming again.
Thank you to my good friend, Alex Mandrila, for helping get this project started, and my sister-in-law, Donna Almendrala, for designing my logo. 
Backwards/onwards,
Luca
April 2022