LeeAnn Pickrell Recounts the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Intimate New Memoir

PORTLAND, Ore. August 11, 2026 — On December 26, 2004, LeeAnn Pickrell was drinking coffee near the beach in Rai Leh, Thailand, when the ocean disappeared. People ran to look. In the distance, a wall of white approached the shore. Slowly at first​, then boats began overturning. The water kept coming.

In Tsunami, a new memoir published by Unsolicited Press, Pickrell recounts her experience of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Rather than attempt to tell the story of an entire catastrophe, Pickrell remains grounded in the place where she stood​, the people around her, and the disorienting hours and days that followed.

The result is a deeply personal examination of survival​. Pickrell was not physically injured. She came home. Yet returning home did not return her to the person she had been before the wave. Tsunami traces the psychic shifts created by catastrophic experience: altered memory, questions of chance and mortality, and the gradual unraveling of religious ideas that could no longer contain what she had witnessed.

“Pickrell’s writing is lyrical and brilliant, a powerful account of her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami,” writes Elizabeth Jaeger, author of Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID-19. “Her beautifully crafted vignettes create a mood filled with desperation and fear. It is impossible to read her narrative and not empathize with the trauma she so clearly conveys.”

Written in vivid, carefully shaped vignettes, Tsunami moves through immediate confusion, separation and reunion, the landscape after the water receded, and the longer process of understanding what survival demands from memory.

Pickrell also confronts the complicated position of the Western traveler who survives a disaster that devastates local communities. Her account remains conscious of relative fortune and the countless stories lost alongside the estimated 230,000 people killed across fourteen countries.

Patricia Bidar, author of Pardon Me for Moonwalking, praises Pickrell’s “rich and unhurried prose” and an account that “provides the wider picture and never forgets her relative good fortune.”

Tsunami asks what happens after the unimaginable has already happened. How does a person carry an experience that feels impossible to communicate? What beliefs remain when old answers stop making sense? And what might be found in the connections created when people attempt, despite the limits of language, to tell one another what they have seen?

LeeAnn Pickrell is the author of the poetry collection Gathering the Pieces of Days, published by Unsolicited Press in 2025, and the chapbook Punctuated from Bottlecap Press. Her work has appeared widely online and in print, including in the anthologies Coffee Poems, A Gathering of Finches, and A Moment Like None Other. She is the managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche and has worked as an editor for more than thirty years. Pickrell holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in California's Bay Area with her partner and two cats.

Tsunami will be published by Unsolicited Press on August 11, 2026.