The art of sensing a story — Life might be described as largely a matter of looking for signs. Signs that someone likes you. Signs that someone doesn’t like you. Signs of a storm coming. Signs of care. Signs of food. As an artist, you have to be especially attuned to the mysterious pulses around you. You…

An aesthetic can be born from pain. An aesthetic can be born from beauty. I suppose an aesthetic can also be born from cotton candy. Or all of the above. I often use the word aesthetic. I think about my aesthetic a lot. When I encounter a new artist, I…

Writing to the questions, not the answers — We live in in-between spaces. We live in the liminal. We like concrete definitions of things. We have notions of solidity and permanence and singularity. But everything changes, of course. Life is about living in the shifts, the pivots, the ambiguous, the tenuous. To claim clarity is to claim authority…

Rejecting winning in a world that prizes winning — A few years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to relinquish my need to be right. We’ve all been there, right? …

A malcontented body can guide one to a contented soul — I was recently sick with Covid after eluding it for three years. I felt like I was a fugitive in hiding, living in the shadows (with a mask on), but then Covid caught me, as if I was an anonymous character in a horror movie. This was a serious matter…

Our longings are beyond us, yet they take root deep in our being — I have longing on my mind because I recently interviewed Madelaine Lucas about her debut novel, Thirst for Salt, which is a novel of longing for love, longing for a place, and longing to understand. It’s a beautiful, lyrical book, and it made me think about the place longing has…

At a bookstore event for my book, The Art of Brevity, one person asked me, “What unit of writing are you most focused on in the art of brevity, whether it’s word choice, the sentence, the paragraph, or something larger, like a scene or chapter?” My answer didn’t take much…

Writing in fragments — I’ve been thinking about my love affair with the fragment this week as my book, The Art of Brevity, enters the world. I don’t think of life as a round, complete circle — it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken…

The art of compression. The art of omission. The art of less. — So many things in life happen randomly. One night in 2010, my friend Jake posted a link on Facebook to nine 100-word stories his father, Paul Strohm, had published with the literary journal Eleven Eleven. It was late, my eyes were blurry, but I clicked on the link and became…