A living hall of story and craft
For the Essays & Works that don’t fit neatly into categories.
I was scrolling, half numb, when I saw the line that finally made my brain short-circuit: “PMDD can cause symptoms that closely mimic hypoglycemia crashes.” Intense hunger. Dizziness. Shakiness. Sudden, violent mood swings that feel like the bottom dropping out of your body, and you don’t know if you need food or a priest. I … Read more
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