A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties. Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was … Continue reading Ripe
Mid-2000s, late twenties, and I got pulled into a funnel. Blogs were taking off. Everybody had an email list and a free PDF and I wanted the free prize inside, so I signed up, and then I read the thing. The copy was ridiculous. Overwritten, wandering, wild claims stacked on top of each other, and … Continue reading The Wrong People Are Shipping
Some nights I sit down to write and there's nothing there. I check the top of my head, find it empty, and conclude I've run dry. Forty-seven years of material and the drawer's bare. Nothing worth anybody's time. This has been happening my whole life. What's different now is that I've stopped believing it. Here's … Continue reading Out Of Stuff To Say
I've been interviewing myself. It's a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody. What I expected was to remember things. What's … Continue reading Ahead of the Room
Christmas of 1997 I asked my parents for a guitar, and they got me one. I was halfway through my sophomore year, home for the break. I opened the box and I was genuinely thrilled — right up until I got my hands on the neck. It was a beginner's three-quarter model, and my hands … Continue reading The Wall
