A living hall of story and craft
For the Essays & Works that don’t fit neatly into categories.
A man on YouTube — not a writer, not even someone who makes his living off words — recently declared that anyone who treats writing as a side hustle “has no respect for the craft.” He said it with the confidence of someone who has never had to make rent off their own creativity, and … Read more
There’s a popular story about depression that sells well in a culture addicted to self-improvement. It says that if you just push harder — get out of bed, stay busy, grind your way through — you’ll eventually brute-force your way back to being “okay.” It’s the story of willpower as salvation. But there’s a quieter … Read more
Back to the Ground: Leaving the Creator Economy The Vegas Strip of Socials When I finally stepped back toward art as a career, I did what everyone said you’re supposed to do: I walked straight onto the neon promenade of the platforms. It was all there — the carnival barkers with growth hacks, the slot … Read more
Escaping the Creator Economy and Breathing Again My feed felt like a mall food court during a fire drill — everyone juggling trays, alarms, ring lights, and a brand voice, while even the cows have adopted Gen Z cadence and a serotonin-deprived wink (and it must be said: this is not an indictment on Gen … Read more
Against Christianity-as-Nation and the Anti-Christic Costume I have stood in rooms that smelled like frankincense and brand-new carpet and heard the same sentence stitched in different fonts: Christ is King. Sometimes it was a chant, sometimes a caption, sometimes a way to end a conversation before it began. In each case it landed like a … Read more
It’s Not “Protestant Work Ethic” to Care About What You Make The Accusation of Effort It happens in a dozen small ways, usually wrapped in kindness, occasionally laced with smugness. Someone sees you working with focus—sanding a seam no one will see, re-throwing a vessel that’s almost right, rewriting a paragraph that would pass in … Read more
The Mystery of the Disappearing Job Title A few years ago, you could point at the screen and name what you were looking at. “Influencer” meant someone who monetized the soft power of attention; “content creator” meant someone who produced a steady stream of on-platform media to keep that attention fed. These were not slurs … Read more
The Joke That Isn’t a Joke Here’s a hilarity I didn’t order: my long, carefully structured essays about precarity, value, and the quiet violences of “content” get ten times the traffic of my actual handmade work. Google, apparently, is a connoisseur of fury—so long as the fury is arranged in clean paragraphs with descriptive subheads. … Read more
The Paradox of Praise Watch how the compliments fall. A canvas of splattered gesture earns reverence. A field of simplified symbols—a circle that means sun, a line that means horizon—gets laughed off as childish. A 3D-printed trinket is hailed as sleek and modern; a clay figure with fingerprints still visible is called dated, school-project, “dirty.” … Read more
The Look That Says “Oh, You’re Doing That?” There’s a particular look that crosses a face when someone sees a tip jar on an artist’s page. It isn’t disgust, not exactly. It’s etiquette’s little wince: oh, you’re doing that? As if a line has been crossed—some invisible threshold between “serious creative” and “person who needs … Read more