Category: Newsletters
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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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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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Part of a healthy balanced breakfast, or the myth of procrastination
I love Lucky Charms. I love that, like Pop-Tarts and Dinosaur Egg Oatmeal, it is very nearly pure sugar that has somehow conned us into believing that it is a nostalgic breakfast food and not a decadent, once-in-a-blue-moon dessert. The commercials tried so hard, too: an aesthetically pleasing bowl of Lucky Charms with the perfect…
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Little weird flowers
Sitting next to my keyboard as I type this is a cheap, 4×6 pink notebook. Like any good writer, I have more notebooks than I know what to do with, a few of them half-filled and forgotten, most of them empty and piled in a box, waiting for some project or other to frantically fill…
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I like your elephants!
My freshman year of high school, the only year I took art, I was assigned the task of making a sculpture that was at least four feet tall. To the best of my recollection, it could be anything we wanted and made from any materials. (Normal people made giant soda cans and person-sized pencils out…
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To the stars on the wings of a pig
I named this loose collection of newsletters “Earthbound but Aspiring” mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to not give it a name and still get the site to display correctly, and a little bit because Steinbeck’s pigasus was the first sticker I saw on my coffee table that lent itself to a catchy title.…
Earthbound, But Aspiring 