Stories, art, and musings from a wandering mind
Every so often, a stranger finds something I wrote at 2 a.m. and sends back a piece of their own life. Here's what those small, anonymous messages have taught me about courage, honesty, and why the people who know us least sometimes read us best.
I found a shoebox of my grandmother's letters from the 1970s while clearing out my mom's garage in Ohio, and I haven't been able to shut up about it since. Not because of what she wrote about — because of how. This is what fifty-year-old ink taught me about voice that no writing program ever did.
Somewhere in my analytics is a person who has read every essay I've published and never once said hello. This is my attempt to thank them — and to make peace with the fact that most attention will always be invisible.
I made a zine, printed forty of them, and sold exactly three — two of which went to people who have known me since middle school. Here's why I'd do it again tomorrow, and what the whole gloriously unprofitable ordeal taught me about making things anyway.
Somewhere along the way, artists got convinced that sounding confusing equals sounding deep. Here's a field guide to spotting the jargon — and writing a statement that sounds like you, not a thesaurus with a gallery show.
For one month, I drew commuters at my neighborhood bus stop — fast, imperfect, slightly terrifying portraits. What I learned about my city, my attention span, and the strange intimacy of being caught looking.
Forty hours on regional buses through towns you'd never Google taught me more about character than any workshop. Five lessons in the craft of watching—each one earned the hard way, somewhere between here and nowhere in particular.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped finishing things on purpose—and discovered that an open loop is its own kind of honesty. This is a defense of the half-told story, the abandoned ending, and the beauty of leaving a little room for the reader to wander.
There are 214 files in my drafts folder, and I've decided they're not failures — they're the most honest self-portrait I own. A case for treating unfinished writing as a living archive instead of a shame closet.
Somewhere between the productivity gurus and the step-counting apps, we forgot that walking used to be a creative act, not a metric. Here's how aimless wandering saved my writing—and why your best idea is probably three blocks from where you're standing.
Somewhere in my closet lives a sketchbook so bad I nearly threw it away—twice. I'm glad I didn't, because the ugly pages taught me more than the pretty ones ever could.
Most creative websites make the same mistake: they sand off all the personality to seem 'professional.' Here are five practical fixes for building a portfolio that actually sounds like a human being — without tanking your credibility.
In a culture that treats every idle minute as a problem to solve, I've started defending my right to zone out. Here's what happened when I let my wandering mind off its leash — and why neuroscience says you should too.