Hi there! I hope you’re doing well, and that, wherever you are, crisp, cool fall air is kissing your skin, and the scent of leaves and sun are filling your nose, and that you’re finding some peace in a not always peaceful world. Autumn is intermittent for me, right now (peace, too, though that’s a topic for another time). Back home, in Asheville (home? Can I call a place I’ve lived so briefly “home”? It’s the place where my things and my cat are, at least), the mornings have been misty and...
16 days ago • 10 min read
Hello! So, as you (hopefully) already know, it's Monday, and Monday is, obviously, not Sunday. This is coming late, is what I'm saying—but I have a good excuse! This weekend was full of family and fun and good food and hiking and all of the other things requisite for good mental health. It was a sorely needed reprieve during this period of continued uncertainty. Which brings us to today's reflection on uncertainty and sureness. I'll say up front that I don't have any particularly great...
29 days ago • 6 min read
Hi! Jumping right in: Yesterday, Sarah and I were fortunate enough to attend the 25th annual National Book Festival, hosted by the Library of Congress. This was and is a big deal to me for a couple reasons: First, because this was our first visit back to DC since making an ultimately very healthy move under less than ideal circumstances. It was wonderful to reconnect with our friends here and lovely to experience this event with so many of them (love to all of you!). But it was also hard to...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Oh hey! Sorry about, uh, completely and utterly missing the last newsletter with no forewarning. It's been a busy few weeks! The first and foremost reason for this: We moved to Asheville! Everything has gone remarkably well, overall, thanks to a lot of help from friends and family and kind strangers. But still—and it's crazy that I forget this every time—moving is hard. Exhausting, too. And settling into a new place takes way more time than it has any right to. So, for those reasons, I missed...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi! Life has had me pretty down, recently, because the things I want to do keep getting interrupted. So today—if you'll humor me—I'd like to take a moment to reflect on that. Let's start by considering this statement: Life is a series of interruptions. This is a slightly humorous generalization, sure, but an interesting idea; one I'm sure I've heard somewhere before, from someone smarter than me, and that I've certainly lived, recently. I'll offer some examples, to explore the idea, keeping...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Hello! Hope you’re well! I’m on vacation this weekend, so I’m going to keep the reflection a bit shorter today (hey! That sigh of relief was rude). To jump right in: I (and everyone else, more or less) have been thinking and talking and worrying over GenAI quite a bit, as of late (some random, recent-ish takes that I enjoyed: John Oliver talked about AI slop in his main segment; author Ted Chiang wrote about why AI can't create "art"; and musician Jacob Collier discussed human creativity with...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Let's do a quick thought experiment: Picture yourself standing at an intersection—black asphalt, gently-cracked concrete sidewalks, weeds pushing through, with some traffic lights, signs, cameras, and a few cars stopped, waiting, with others whizzing by. There are shimmering, bright-white bicycle lanes and pedestrian crosswalks; other people are passing through, too. There's a business, a drugstore, or grocery, maybe, on one corner, and a fence-topped retaining wall on another, with grassy...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Hey friends, You may have noticed, as of late (how could you not?), that my newsletters have been both sporadic and intentionally vague (bordering on frustratingly opaque). Well. No longer. I have three truths to tell you. This first truth addresses some ambiguity about a certain secret project I hinted at the end of last year. The long and short of it is that last fall, after a period of discernment, I decided to apply to a single Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing so that...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Hey there, I’ll start off by acknowledging, here at the top, that I did miss the first newsletter this month—which is more or less what I want to talk about today. I have two versions of an explanation for you: The short version is that things have been bad lately, and something had to give. The long version is that things have been really bad lately, for a lot of reasons, and my capacity to write, and to write about my writing, or really to do much of anything, has dwindled to little more...
5 months ago • 7 min read