While on vacation in Thailand during Christmas 2004, LeeAnn Pickrell ('88) had a routine. She spent her mornings drinking coffee and writing in her journal as she took in views of the beach.

But the peace changed on Dec. 26.

"I saw everybody run to the top of the beach, and I followed to see what was happening. And the ocean had left. The bay was completely empty. There was a wall of white coming. But it was moving super slowly."

That wall was a tsunami, the result of an undersea earthquake that hit the Indian Ocean just before 8 a.m. local time. In the 22 years since the tsunami, Pickrell has processed the traumatic event through writing, a form of expression she has used since she was an English student at UNT. Now her experience has become the book Tsunami.

'It's Not Like in the Movies'

Pickrell and her friend were staying in Rai Leh, a peninsula separated from the mainland by very steep limestone cliffs and accessible only by boat.

That location proved to be fortunate as Pickrell witnessed the tsunami.

"The long-tail boats started to flip, and it was clear it wasn't going to stop. Everyone took off and ran. Because it was a very small peninsula, we were able to get to higher ground."

Her friend had been rock climbing on the other side of the peninsula. They were separated for several hours and found each other later that afternoon.

Although the first wave hit Thailand two hours after the initial earthquake, people in the areas of impact were caught by surprise because there was no tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean at the time. The disaster inspired the creation of a global, multi-basin tsunami warning system.

Pickrell made it home a few days later. But she didn't start writing about it until years later, when she saw news reports that a tsunami hit Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

"It's like, 'OK, I want to write about this.' It is a traumatic story. I wasn't hurt. I didn't have to hang on to a pole to avoid getting swept away. I got to come home to my nice life here in the United States while 230,000 people were killed across 14 countries. I had a lot of survivor's guilt to even feel like I owned this story, that my story was even worth telling, because it was such a small piece. It took a long time to feel like I could even write it, and I think it also took me time to realize what the effect of the tsunami had been on me."

Pickrell wrote about the experience slowly, about once a month. She hadn't talked much about it with others, although she did go to therapy.

"It's not like in the movies. You would survive a natural disaster, and you're like, 'I'm going be a completely different person.' It's more of a slow process of working through all that, and in many ways, it was a spiritual crisis for me. I had to re-examine how I viewed the world, and how I viewed spirituality, and it's much different from how I viewed it before. There's much more uncertainty -- so then being able to appreciate each moment."

'Writing Furiously'

Writing has long been an outlet for Pickrell, who was always reading while she was growing up in Dallas. Her English teacher at W.T. White High School in Dallas encouraged her to write, saying one of her short stories was publishable.

When she came to UNT, she majored in English. Her favorite teacher was James Ward Lee, then head of the department.

"He inspired me and encouraged me to keep going and keep writing," she says. "I started writing furiously after that creative writing class at North Texas."

After graduation, Pickrell attended a writer's retreat that led to graduate school at Mills College in Oakland. She has lived in the East Bay area of California ever since, working in various positions in the publishing industry. She currently serves as managing editor of the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.

Poetry is her main genre. In 2024, she published her chapbook called Punctuated, with each poem centering on a punctuation mark. Last year, she released her first collection of poetry, Gathering the Pieces of Days, which features 52 poems written over the course of a year, exploring events that happened each week.

Tsunami started as a series of vignettes that she workshopped with her poetry critique group. The book was published in August 2026 by Unsolicited Press, a small, woman-owned press based in Portland, Oregon.

"It's about how important it is to pay attention," she says. "To be here right now, to appreciate the ordinary -- and that the ordinary can actually be extraordinary."