I’m Erin Van Rheenen. I write, teach, and travel.

My life has been an effort to see the beauty in being upended. Life upends us all, again and again. I seek to claim my upendedness as a good thing. And to write about it.

That means exploring everything from moving abroad to surviving hospital stays to personal and professional transformations—not just my own, but others’, too. I’ve also never met a subculture, underappreciated artist, or quirky backstory that didn’t move me to find out more.

Here are a few of my favorite projects and assignments:

• My debut novel, YOU COULD BE HAPPY HERE, which took only two decades to write and is forthcoming in Fall 2025.
• Researching and writing Living Abroad in Costa Rica.
• A tribute to a personal hero, Mary Colter, whose architecture and design celebrated Native American and Spanish colonial culture and was key in the development of what became known as Southwest Style. (BBC Travel)
• The story of Meow Wolf, a dumpster-diving arts collective that morphed into a multi-million-dollar entertainment company (Southwest Magazine, sadly no longer operational).
• A photo essay (in collaboration with my husband, a tugboat engineer) on the battered beauty and obscure (to the uninitiated) markings of container ships. We were astounded when The Secret Language of Ships became Hakai Magazine’s most viewed article of the year. Sadly, Hakai Magazine, dedicated to covering “issues that play out at the interface of sea and land, and in the marine world more broadly” is no more (are you sensing a trend here?). They maintain their website, as a kind of an archive.
• The history of burros in the Grand Canyon. I’m a burro fanatic and a lover of Southwestern landscapes, so this assignment was a dream come true. (Atlas Obscura)
• The tale of a boat trip upriver from Costa Rica to Nicaragua, where the whole row of back seats was monopolized by a coffin. (Best Women’s Travel Writing).
• A multi-media celebration of Punta Islita, Costa Rica, a beach town that reinvented itself as an open-air art museum and also contributed some of its awesomeness to the setting of my novel, You Could Be Happy Here. (Marriott Bonvoy Traveler)
• A conversation with podcaster Joe Bauer, where we talk about expats vs. immigrants, and the responsibility writers owe the places they cover.

I’m lucky to be able to write about what I love. I’ve contributed to many guidebooks and have been interviewed on CNN, local TV, and radio programs like Rick Steves Travel, as an expert on Costa Rica and moving abroad. My work has been anthologized and published in newspapers, magazines, and websites, including Bellevue Literary Review, The Sun, NPR, and Best Women’s Travel Writing.