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Visions, goals, psychics, pumpkin spice lattes, and other sticky things
When I was a kid, I didn’t ever have a clear plan for what I wanted to be when I grew up. I cycled often between artist, engineer, architect, adventurer, small town shop owner, big city blogger, highly-sought-after mini golf course designer, the usual. But I do have a clear memory of knowing that whatever…
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Art v Artist, or the politics of throwing the baby out with the bathwater
I have a note in my phone titled “icebreakers” that contains a list of fun, quirky get-to-know-you questions I’ve collected over the years that I find far more interesting than “how many siblings do you have?” and “what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” Among these questions are: What’s your most useless talent?What’s your least…
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Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
While not Steinbeck’s most famous, Cannery Row is, in my opinion, one of his best. A short meditation on a lively place and the collection of people both living there and passing through, this novel is a beautiful and nonjudgmental look at the foibles and follies of humanity, and the joy that often triumphs in…
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Loot by Tania James
A short yet sprawling novel, Loot is the story of a young toymaker in India at the end of the eighteenth century commissioned to make an automaton for Tipu Sultan, and the journey that it sets him on for the rest of his life. Political intrigue, war, adventure, friendship, romance—the pages are packed with a…
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Doomsday prophet looks good on me.
After running a lit mag for two years and reading hundreds and hundreds of submissions, I’ve realized that there’s one thing I value in writing above everything else: a unique voice. A voice that doesn’t sound like all the other voices out there, using the same dead metaphors and basic sentence structures and cookie cutter…
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I’m leaving social media.
Sort of. Gently. With a good ol’ fashioned midwest goodbye where I slap my knees long after the conversation has died down, give a hearty “welp,” and continue posting my monthly photo dumps and occasionally checking in with friends and watching the reels they send me. I know, I know, that’s not leaving. But if…
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On Getting Lost
I hate driving. Any time I have the option of not driving, whether that’s carpooling or ridesharing or walking or sometimes just not going, I will probably take it. I have, at times, been known to bribe people to let me ride with them. Gas money, a cup of coffee, a concert ticket, dinner. Thankfully,…
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This is what happens when people stop seeing the arts as a learned skill.
I’ve been following the rise of AI in creative fields the same way I followed the spread of COVID in March of 2020. Every time I refresh the page, hoping for good news, I just find something infinitely worse than I was expecting. Of particular interest has been the lawsuit brought against OpenAI by Jonathan…
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Earthbound, But Aspiring 