“Here I am again, taking my own advice / Conversations with my head about what I'm not doing right”

(Eliza & The Delusionals, “Feel It All (and Nothing)”)

 HELP WANTED: SEE BELOW

Here’s a thing I never thought I’d write: I have four novels that need readers. Scroll to the end of this week’s edition for details.

 THE TIM IN BOB ADDS TO THE TIM IN ME

I had a mentor, Charlie Seashore, who liked to remind me that “there is no John and no Charlie, only the John within Charlie. And the Charlie within John.”

His point was a simple one: we only know what we know.

We reflexively believe that what we know about another person is more complete than it really is. And we lose something when this belief quiets our curiosity.

I’m writing this on Día de los Muertos. Later today, I’ll be hosting a small party with friends. We’ll co-create a lazy mural together, eat and drink, connect, and remember.

I’ll remember my mom, who died in March, and by virtue of remembering her I’ll remember my dad. He died twenty-nine years ago. I’ll remember Bill Martin and Jim Ukrop and Eddie Slipek. My cousins Sclater and Armistead.

And I’ll remember Tim McCready, aka Timothy Bailey.

And because of an essay a mutual friend posted on his Substack this weekend, I’ll remember Tim more deeply than I might have otherwise. Perhaps more deeply than our relationship deserves. The Tim-within-Bob adding more gravity to the Tim-within-John.

I have a basket of names — India, Chesley, Charlie, Albert, Stephanie, Rufus, Tim. People I have loved, and who are dead. I cannot create new memories with them, or ask them the questions that will help me know, and love, them more deeply.

I have a larger basket of people I love who are still alive. I know each of them, in Charlie’s estimation, less than I should. Which means I still have time — a completely unknowable amount of it — to be curious.

 TURNING IT OFF

As we enter election week, there are a lot of conspiracy rumors circulating.

Probably they’re all true, and we’re doomed. But if only one is true, I sort of hope it’s the one where Russia or Iran and Donald Trump take down the internet.

I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of losing immediate access to accurate time, my money, good television shows, and a limitless supply of artificially generated content.

I mean, let’s not rush things. I like being able to connect across distance, share knowledge and whimsical ideas, ping random thoughts to friends at unexpected moments. Some of the best people in my life emerged from the internet. Some of my best relationships are sustained, in part, by its connectivity.

Heck, the internet made my consulting business possible. It’s where I share my writing. It’s opened doors, created relationships, and made a broad swath of my life better. And more interesting.

But an increasing tsunami of internet data is crap. And it’s getting harder, and more emotionally exhausting, to sort the good from the garbage.

People spent the first 15 years of the World Wide Web building real content. User groups, MySpace pages, animated GIFs and text-heavy websites centered around information. It wasn’t a utopia. There was plenty of garbage even then. But the economic architecture felt more democratic, less concentrated.

Back when we (technologically) walked to school, barefoot and uphill in the snow, real people were trying to make real content. And were sharing it. Building small tribes and communities of the like-minded. We built out small corners of the internet, invited people in, and wandered around exploring what everyone else was doing.

The last 15 years? Yeah, it’s been a bit of a circus. A vending machine crammed full of digital pablum. Addictive, hard-to-back-away-from pablum.

The new circus is overproduced by a handful of enormously powerful companies that decide what we see, what gets amplified, and how long they can keep us looking at it. Everything has an upcharge. The seats often come with terrible views.

Looking ahead, it seems we’re discovering that artificial intelligence will gift us with an accelerated drift into a really beautiful, super shiny, digitally dramatic, and increasingly useless information vortex.

It might be a good moment for it to turn off. Force us to reconsider how we create and consume and connect with one another. Give us time to ask what we really want from this digital space. This internet.

The odds are good nothing’s getting turned off, and even if it did we’d move heaven and earth to turn it back on. That’s a bit how addiction works. Especially when the addiction is hard-wired into quite literally every aspect of our lives. The whole system is built to reward our attention — our eyeballs, our fingertips, the parts of our brain that enjoy slurping dopamine from large straws lined with sugar. And to extract. Our attention, our data, our time, our money.

And it’s accelerating. Artificial intelligence is pouring an almost limitless supply of new content into that system. Content that feels more sophisticated, sounds more authoritative, and often has no relationship to the experiences, creations or emotions of human beings.

This isn’t happening because there’s nothing interesting left to discover, to create, to share, to say. It’s happening because we’re burying those things beneath a growing mountain of content that is disconnected from real life.

But maybe all of this artificial abundance comes with an upside. If everything we encounter online has been generated, polished, personalized by algorithm, and endlessly recycled… well, perhaps it starts to feel less like abundance. More like noise. Maybe the machine that never tires of entertaining us just starts to feel exhausting.

And that’s what keeps tugging at me as we wander down this path of AI integration: what if one meaningful outcome of artificial intelligence is that we end up consuming less content?

Many of us already know that we need much less of the internet than we consume — also, sugar, cigarettes and alcohol are bad for us. We already feel that our digital experience makes us more anxious, distracted, isolated, and overwhelmed. That the economic incentives driving major platforms have almost nothing to do with our psychological well-being or the health of our communities.

My sense is that AI-generated everything may force a reckoning. A moment where our own instincts are reinforced by psychologists, physicians and teachers pointing us toward the analogue world. A broad realization that human beings really are hungry for relationship with other human beings.

That coffee with a friend kickstarts our day. A walk outside with a coworker creates a reset. Picking the kid up at the bus stop also triggers dopamine. Hitting the trail, or an art opening, or a baseball game leaves us more awake when we do it in person.

Not that human activities are always happy or pleasurable, but that they are simply human. And that being human — especially with other humans — is not always optimal. It’s sometimes hard, disappointing, boring.

But maybe we need to be bored sometimes. To sit in silence alone, or argue with people we care about. To have conversations that wander. Make things no one else will ever see.

That we can be present without turning our presence into content.

Does the internet need to go away for this to happen? Probably not. In fact, I’d miss the small, strange human corners of the web that allow us to discover one another and create things together.

But I do hope that this next chapter of technological and social change triggers a deliberate shrinking of the digital world. Or at least shrinks our appetite for more content, more performance, more manufactured outrage.

Fewer algorithms deciding what should matter to us. More choice, and more happy accidents. And more of our finite time spent with other people in the physical world.

I’m pretty sure the internet doesn’t need to turn off in order for us to find the things that really turn us on.

 THE ISLAND GETS SMALLER

It’s November, which means it is time to get excited about movies.

This is partly because the industry tends to dole out the more consequential films during the bleakest months of the year. Partly, I just pay attention to the quality of my entertainment when I’m surrounded by thirteen hours of darkness every day.

This is all a lazy way of saying how excited I am about “Wild Horse Nine,” a Martin McDonagh film with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of CIA men on a last, bad assignment. Which is really a doorway into McDonagh, a director I didn’t know I loved until I connected the dots between “In Bruges” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Wild Horse Nine.”

A recent interview in the New York Times clarified some of why I’m instinctively drawn to his work. He leans into stories about male friendship, and he approaches those friendships with something close to tenderness. His own, he says, are “deep and sad and open” — everything the culture already grants to women’s friendships, and rarely to men’s. He wanted to put a bit of that on screen, and not just make another buddy movie.

It’s something we don’t get enough of from Hollywood, and something McDonagh has been working at from the start — Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, awkward and devoted and then not, in both of the Irish films.

The interview drifts to his youthful love of The Clash, which also resonates. The Clash taught him to question everything, to build a life that wasn’t dictated by others. Joe Strummer’s passion and morality, he says, are what he’s been chasing in his own work ever since.

I don’t think those are two different things. For most men, the script for friendship is the most dictated thing we’ve got: a buddy movie, nothing underneath, no words for what’s there. Gentleness between men is the punk move. Curiosity is the punk move. Time is the punk move.

McDonagh’s films refuse the script.

I can’t help but think about Gleeson’s character from “Banshees.” He decides too soon that he already knows everything there is to know about his friend. That’s where everything breaks. It’s the whole tragedy, really. He stops being curious, and the island gets smaller.

“Wild Horse Nine” comes out during my week with Jack, which means I likely won’t go see it with my favorite movie-loving friend, Jerry. Maybe I’ll invite him to a weekday matinee.

 SHUT UP & READERS WANTED

I’ve spent the last eighteen months writing novels, and four of them are ready for new eyes.

So, ISO readers. Not editors, not writers — simply people who enjoy a good story, and would be willing to read one of these books. (And answer a few specific questions about it, in writing, by phone or Zoom, or over coffee, by the end of the year. Give or take.)

Each novel needs a different kind of reader. If one of them sounds like yours, email me at jsarvay@yahoo.com and tell me which. I’ll send a PDF along with the questions I’m hoping you can answer. (I can’t print 400-page manuscripts for my non-digital friends.)

OPHELIA DOESN’T DROWN

A novel set in punk-rock-adjacent Richmond in the late 1980s. A teenage girl who treats constant motion as a way of never being seen finds herself drawn toward a girl who refuses to let her keep moving.

I’m looking for two specific readers, and they’re different people:

1. A teenager who’s into 80s music and willing to tell me, without diplomacy, where Kira and her friends don’t sound or act like actual teenagers. I don’t need craft feedback. I need “no one would say that” and “yes, that’s exactly it.”

2. A Gen X reader who came of age in the late-80s LGB community, such as it existed for teenagers then — someone who can tell me where the emotional texture of that experience is right, where it’s borrowed from later decades, and where I’ve gotten the silence and the risk wrong.

OFF BELAY

A photographer who lives deeply and intuitively hits the road with the man she loves — grounded, rooted in history, careful. Along the way, they both discover what happens when the stories they tell themselves, and each other, stop holding up. And how to love the person who isn’t their past anymore.

I’m looking for 3–4 readers who can read with three things in mind: whether Ellie’s and Harrison’s voices stay distinct and consistent across the book; whether the character arcs — Ellie’s especially — actually earn their landings; and any place where the plot stumbles in a way that pulled you out of the story. I’m not looking for line edits. I’m looking for where the book catches you, where it loses you, and why.

LAST QUARTER STANCE

Cal and Hadley are the kind of friends who know how to hold each other up. He works at a box factory, where thousands of people show up each year to decorate a box and seal their wishes for the year ahead. She owns a bookstore and trains dogs using novels. Then Cal’s college friends reunite, twenty-three years late, to finally stage the play they abandoned, and everything that held their relationship together changes.

This one needs a different kind of reader. I’m looking for 4 or more people who can read the whole thing and tell me where its real centers of gravity are — which scenes, characters, and threads the book is actually about, as opposed to what it says it’s about. I’m fairly sure the novel needs a tighter shape, and I need readers who can point to where the weight sits and where significant revision might be in order: what to cut, what to build out, what’s doing the work the book doesn’t yet acknowledge.

LAGRANGE

In a one-stoplight North Carolina river town, an Italian baker who stayed because someone handed her a glass of water and a musician who fled the place as a boy circle each other through a year of wheat, music, and rising water. Not the novel you think it is.

I’m looking for 4 or more readers for a delicate job. The book is shorter than it should be, and I want help finding where it can expand — scenes that want more room, threads that deserve another beat, places where the town or the year could be fuller. But the tension between Solène and Ezra is deliberately quiet and mostly unspoken, and it’s the thing I most don’t want to break. So the ask is twofold: where would you want more, and where would more be too much?

If one of these is your book, write me: jsarvay@yahoo.com. Let me know which novel, and I’ll send it your way with some stage direction. Thanks!

Last February, my friend Marlene and I spent ninety minutes contemplating Dutch seascapes at the National Gallery of Art in D.C.

We were participating in a program — “Finding Awe” — designed to strengthen connections between art and audiences. (I wrote about it last March.)

I recently found myself on a Zoom call with a Gallery researcher unpacking my experiences with awe — in the program and since. But really unwrapping what it means for me to notice that I’m experiencing awe.

“It’s so rare,” Paula said, diving right into the call. She said she didn’t often have a chance to talk to people seven, eight, nine months after they have an experience at the galleries. I was her sixth interview. She had seventy more on her calendar.

She was excited to listen. I was excited to share.

She began with two multiple-choice questions. The first was straightforward.

Awe: Less, the same, more since February.

“I’m gonna mess your question up,” I said, and proceeded to unspool my thoughts.

I’m not sure that I’ve been experiencing more awe than I was before the program, I continued, but I feel like I’ve been noticing awe more since.

She asked what the difference was.

I talked about going to concerts versus actually watching the band, the audience, as the music filled a space. About two years of the same walk along the same trails with my dog, and each walk different because of encounters with people, the seasons, myself. A sad moment in a cold rain years ago in Nancy, France — the warmth I felt walking into an exhibition of 300 Raoul Dufy paintings in one museum, an unexpected explosion of color.

I told her that my day job was basically to pay attention to everyone else’s experience. I do it at work. I do it at home with the kids, the dog, friends. I even do it in my novels.

I’m pretty good at paying attention to other people’s experiences. I’ve not been so good at paying attention to my own. But I’m getting better.

Which is what the program was for, it turned out. Being in a room as a participant. Observing art, observing myself. Not worrying a whole lot about everyone else.

In February, I walked into that gallery the way I’ve walked into a hundred galleries — looking for the Dutch seascape version of Kandinsky. Vivid color. Tortured angles. Something that would speak to me.

Reader, it turns out Dutch seascapes do not speak to me. Not loudly, at least.

I stood in front of a boat getting ready to crash on some rocks and thought, I don’t know what I’m looking for. It’s a boat. And rocks. What do I feel? I feel a boat, and rocks.

But. I stayed with it, and then I found the clouds, and the light. The texture. The way the painter moved my eye across the canvas without my permission.

None of it was the ship. Not really. The painting was larger than its subject.

When it was over, I was glad I made the trip. But, honestly, I was also a little disappointed.

I had come to Washington wanting some smattering of transcendence. Not quite weeping in a gallery, but adjacent. The National Gallery hadn’t promised that. Nobody said bring Kleenex. But I left thinking: that was cool, and also that I wanted a more emotional experience.

Which, as I wrote in March, arrived in the next gallery.

Marlene and I wandered through an exhibition of Aboriginal art, surrounded by 65,000 years of memory and storytelling. And something about those ninety minutes staring at Dutch boats had softened my attention. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at — bright, abstract lines and dots and patterns on bark — but I couldn’t stop looking.

On the call, I told Paula about my desire for a more emotional journey. She said other people had told her the opposite — they wanted more information about the art itself. I told her my life was an ocean of information. I never want to stop learning, but mostly want to feel more.

I think there are two ways awe shows up, I told Paula, and I think they work best together.

There’s experiencing awe. And there’s noticing you’re experiencing awe.

I went outside the other night — the Hunter Moon was lighting up the world. It was a clear night, and the moon was big and vivid. I stood looking at the actual contours of its surface. The shadows and shapes. The way it shone through the leaves.

I’ve seen it a million times. I stood outside in the middle of the night and looked at it anyway. I felt small, happy and slightly mesmerized.

A few weeks ago, the VMFA did its flowers-and-art show again. I snagged two tickets for a guided tour. I invited a friend to join me.

Ten minutes into the tour, we looked at each other and peeled off from the group.

We wandered and discovered the floral art that spoke to us — arrangements that riffed on the paintings. Not the ones that matched, or whose colors echoed. Not the shape sort of looking like the sculpture. The strange twists, and surprising moments, where a master gardener took a work of art and found something entirely unexpected in it.

We kept wandering. Looking. Finding things to show each other. Lost in the exploration.

Two weeks ago, I was driving with the tween. He was going on about something. It made me laugh. (Yeah, I know. An actual out-loud laugh.)

I looked over my shoulder and said, “I’m happy I get to spend time with you.”

A moment where I wasn’t thinking about groceries or caught in tunnel vision. Where I wasn’t just getting through whatever needed to happen next.

Lately, there’s been more breathing room, and I think I’m paying attention differently — to the moon and to flowers, to being present in a museum, to my kid in the back seat. And in paying attention, I can see just how beautiful life is.

And I can feel myself seeing that.

Paula’s last question was how I know. When awe is happening, what does it feel like, she asked.

A softening, I said after a moment.

I don’t carry my emotions on the surface often — but there are moments when I can feel my shoulders, my face, my whole body ease. Where I just feel less pressure.

And sometimes, alongside it, a small rise of delight.

An: oh.

The curve of a neck, the tone of a voice, the way the artist’s brush drew me exactly here.

The way forty-five minutes passed without my noticing.

“Okay,” Paula said. “We did it.”

We said our goodbyes, and I closed the laptop.

“All right, Jack. I’m done being awed. Math updates.”

 THE LOUDEST VOICES DON’T NEED OUR HELP

I sat still for 16 hours this week, learning. Well, I mostly sat still, and tried to learn.

Around me, several dozen community organizers, mostly from Richmond. At the front of the room, a small team from FIDE — the Federation for Innovation in Democracy — who have spent years doing the thing we’d come to learn: why and how to bring together a demographically representative group of citizens, over months, to work on a hard public question and hand the city (or region) an answer.

A citizens’ assembly. A mini-public.

The non-usual suspects together in a room, with time, knowledge, support and an important issue to resolve.

The City of Richmond’s nascent Office of Community Engagement — not yet a thing, but emerging as a possibility — organized the two days. City employees, community organizers, a few consultants, meeting together and wrestling with barriers to inclusivity, responsiveness and accountability in how government decides things.

From my notes:

Voice insecurity — the condition of not believing your voice matters in your own community.

Civic concierges, whose job is to meet the specific, unique needs of each participant so that showing up is possible.

The importance of multiple, full-day sessions, over months not weeks. Trust and safety first, then learning, then deliberation. Alignment before agreement.

The tension at the heart of the very mechanical sortition (selecting people) process: a belief that representing the population will get you representation of its views. It won’t, always, but it almost always gets surprisingly close.

“The loudest voices don’t need our help showing up.”

Lexington, Kentucky’s first assembly took on elements of the city charter. Akron’s tackled affordable housing. Boulder’s dug into the comprehensive plan and 15-minute neighborhoods. Each had flaws, hit speed bumps, would do something differently in the future.

I liked the nonprofit/government partnership in Lexington, and the enthusiastic optimism of the woman who guided it. Akron’s commitment to connecting the somewhat private work of their assembly to the broader public was reassuring. And Boulder — a very rich city, many of its workers housed in outlying communities — paid particular attention to creating a broadly inclusive, representative group.

I learned a lot — from the presenters, and the other participants.

But I also struggled with my own learned skills and habits and beliefs.

I’ve spent a quarter century designing rooms — first for working class quarry employees, then a crazy mix of nonprofits, boards, business groups, neighborhood and community organizations.

I know ways to create energy, to guide people through iterative processes together, to create voice in a room of strangers. I’m really good at the choreography of groups, and how to shape the energy in a room.

Sitting still for two days, I kept catching myself tweaking what the people at the front of the room were describing, tightening it, adding a step. Redesigning in my head. Maybe a little over-designing.

Not a bad thing. Just my thing.

An example: the FIDE team kept reminding us that good citizens’ assemblies are designed to build trust, establish safety. The first session always starts there.

My observation is that it’s not enough. When you pull together representative groups of Black and brown and white residents from nine council districts in demographically balanced groups of young and old, rich and poor, from varied gender identities, safety and trust and voice aren’t solved in eight hours.

The team at FIDE didn’t suggest that they were. But equipping residents to hold their own care, and the health of their emerging group, is work that has to run from the first hour to the assembly’s final minute. The design is the container, and the runway for discussion and decision. But the citizens need the commitment and the competence to hold each other.

Facilitators and organizers are really good at process. And at naming the importance of group health. My experience is that we, too often, get distracted by the content of the work and forget to consistently check the pulse. And we often don’t empower the group to check it’s own vitals along the journey. Even a simple pause to ask what’s happening between people, not just how the work is going, can help.

My other reflex that had me chewing the inside of my cheek? The importance of the framing question. My mentor, Peter Block, hammered into our heads that getting the question right is more important than our rush to solve the problem.

The questions we ask of citizens’ assemblies, Peter would say, are not neutral. They shape everything the group does, including its ability to hold possibilities. And “how” questions can too quickly orient us around logistics and technique — how much will it cost, who has done this before, what are the key steps. Not unimportant details, but not the most important detail.

Assemblies will live or die on whether the question asked of them is specific and clear enough to deliberate on. The temptation is to design the process before the question is sharp. To build the room before you know what it’s for.

But at the end of two days, what I appreciated most wasn’t anything from the front of the room.

It was the woman who surfaced the different ways we describe “safety,” and how perhaps we’re designing for two different things. A safe space is not simply a secure space where we provide the things that allow people to show up. There are deeper, less visible, needs that people bring in the room with them. She had better words for this than I do, but it pushed me to think a lot more about how to design for the emotional and social/cultural health of a group tasked with difficult conversations and hard decisions.

And a dozen other voices, woven throughout the two days, that gave me pause, stilled my inner critic, helped me relax into the competence of strangers. My neighbors.

 PESOS

I saw U2 in 2009 in Charlottesville. I wanted to be blown away, but I left underwhelmed.

My friend Richard drove, which was helpful because I was exhausted from waking up every morning before dawn — for eighteen months — by my daughter who was born with what felt like an incurable condition. Insomnia.

Nine years later, I dragged that same kid to DC for U2’s Experience + Innocence Tour. They blew me away. Thea, on the other hand, fell asleep in the middle of the concert and missed her father with tears streaming down his face during “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

When I got into the queue on ticketmaster.com.mx, I was gobsmacked to see the cheapest seats were $1,500. Way out of my range.

So I logged off, walked the dog, and asked Siri how much the U2 tickets in Mexico City were going for. $100 to 500, Siri said, depending on seating. It thoughtfully elaborated that the Ticketmaster site in Mexico priced tickets in pesos.

Pesos.

When I got home, I logged back in expecting to have missed the presale — but managed to score tickets at the grand price of $5700 pesos. I didn’t relax until my $300 transaction cleared my credit card.

 DON’T GIVE UP… YET

I dated my way into Jenny Holzer’s world.

My college girlfriend, Chesley, was in love with Holzer’s installations centered around provocative words, phrases and ideas projected or installed or displayed in public spaces.

ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE (1982)

MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE (1983)

TURN SOFT AND LOVELY ANYTIME YOU HAVE A CHANCE (2003)

ALL I AM IS IMPULSE AND LONGING PULLED FORWARD BY THE ROPE OF YOUR ARM (2004)

Holzer has taken over the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Last week, she took over the exterior, as well — a 469-foot projection of quotes for people strolling along the Seine to see at night.

Holzer remains absolutely relevant, slapping prescient and provocative quotes on furniture, walls, t-shirts. Whatever can hold the text, literally and metaphorically.

Way back in college, I’m not sure I really appreciated why Holzer resonated with Chesley, and millions of others. Clearly, it wasn’t the novelty of digital and LCD lights broadcasting clever turns of phrase. Not that.

In her New York Times interview, she reflects on her art but also on the Musée d’Orsay. Even when she reflects on a museum she is capable of startling her audience.

Women needing to carry revolvers…

She’s talking to Chesley way back in college. And to my daughter in college now. And to Jane Doe at Cornell. And to millions and millions of Jane Does and Jan Jansens and Madame Tout-le-monde and Yamada Hanakos everywhere.

And despite the battles she continues to fight, Holzer wants visitors walking through her exhibition to leave with something that’s not despair, “some crazy optimism and sincerity. So: ‘Don’t give up … yet.’”

NO ONE HAS BETTER JUDGEMENT THAN A WOMAN (2026)

 SHUT UP & PROJECT

Spending the week with the art of Jenny Hozler helped me see how much subtraction plays a role in her best work.

She takes a sentence and removes everything that might protect you from it — no character to say it, no scene to explain it, no page to turn — and then makes it forty feet tall. What’s left either stands or it doesn’t.

It usually stands.

My writing moves in an entirely opposite direction than Holzer’s art. It’s long. The novels are long. The chapters run long. The sentences are long. And the best ideas emerge from the voices of characters — not through my narrative lens.

I give the best lines to my characters so I don’t have to say it myself.

I tried an experiment. I went back through my six novels and asked a simple question: if Holzer walked through this book with a pencil, where would she stop?

Here’s what she’d have written down.

Ophelia Doesn't Drown

• WHAT IF SHE NEVER OPENS? (THEN YOU LOVE HER CLOSED.)

• BRING ME SOMETHING THAT COSTS.

Last Quarter Stance

• REVOLUTION IS BEING HELD BY SOMEONE WHO LOVES YOU WITHOUT CONDITIONS. AND NEVER LEAVES.

• COMPROMISE IS JUST SURRENDER WITH BETTER PR.

LeGrange

• NOTHING CURES BIGOTRY LIKE PROFIT.

• YOU NEVER LEARNED HOW TO COME BACK.

Off Belay

• EVERYTHING IN THIS YARD OUTLASTED SOMETHING

• I NEVER TAUGHT YOU TO LAND.

We Have on This Earth

• POWER UNCONSTRAINED BY CARE IS ABUSE.

• WE TREATED OUR CHILDREN AS FUTURE LABOR, NOT FUTURE WISDOM.

Down to the Sea

• YOU GRIEVED AHEAD OF TIME BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD HURT LESS.

Two things surprised me.

The first is that none of these are mine. Not exactly, not in the sense of narration — the voice of the book, the one I labor over. Every one of them is something a character says to another character, usually because the other person has backed them into a corner. Chamblin says then you love her closed because Kira won’t stop asking. Ray says you grieved ahead of time because Christopher won’t admit he’s scared. I don’t write truisms. I write people who get cornered into one.

The second is harder. Read them in a row and they’re not quite the same sentence, but they seem to be asking the same question. Six books, two coasts, three decades, a teenage girl and a dying woman and a man standing in a creek — and what survives when you strip the scenes away is almost always about what we owe each other. What love is going to cost. What power costs when care is missing. To be held. To come back. To land. To grieve on time instead of early. Or late.

I didn’t know I was writing that. I pretend I’ve been writing six different books — and I did, in almost every degree. It took imagining them on the side of a building to see that I’d been projecting one sentence onto every surface I built.

Holzer asks you to look in the mirror. I looked. I’m pretty sure what I am calling a theme is really a confession.

 A LITTLE LESS JOY DIVISION

There was a simple comment in my feed here last week that stopped me in my tiny, electronic footsteps.

“The art of staying section is some of the most lighthearted and hopeful you’ve been in awhile. It’s lovely,” it read.

I don’t recognize the user name, but I appreciate their singular ability to give me pause, and the reflections it triggered.

Sometimes I forget how weighted ache can be. And lord knows that ache sits at the center of so much of my writing — my poetry, my essays, my novels.

Until I began writing novels eighteen months ago, I couldn’t have told you what sat beneath it. I’m beginning to see it now. It’s a question about what we make, and what we preserve, when we know nothing lasts.

That question used to ache because I treated it as loss. I once saw my compatibility with other people as an equation I had to figure out. And fearing that everything might fade sometimes meant I’d over-invest in something that was never going to vanish in the first place.

I don’t think the ache has left my writing. I think it’s what gives the lighter moments any weight at all. But something in my relationship to it has shifted, and the reader saw it before I did.

My choice a week ago to go to the folk festival without an agenda, to be present for whatever and whoever presented themselves, and to be genuinely delighted by the people I saw and connected with — that is not something I could have easily done years ago. Not without turning it into a lesson about impermanence on the walk home.

The reader was right. Last week was different. I didn’t walk back to my car humming random Joy Division songs.

I felt lighthearted. I felt hopeful.

It really was a lovely weekend.

 FORTRESS COVID

I was going to get my Covid and flu vaccinations this past week.

Which is probably why circumstance, and possibly a random person at the Richmond Folk Festival, conspired to infect me with coronavirus last weekend.

Which is how I found myself entering this weekend with a body busy fighting off a virus, and a brain reflecting on just how much Covid has changed in six years.

Or at least, the Covid in me.

I came home Monday evening with a scratchy throat, some congestion, and a feeling. I did what I haven’t done in months. I took a Covid/Flu test. And passed the Covid portion with flying colors.

After scrambling to get the tween back to his mom’s, I hunkered down. I had masks, Covid tests. I ordered groceries. I rescheduled a few work things. Pined for tiramisu and key lime pie. (And later suffered the late night remorse of turning down a friend’s dessert delivery offer because I’m a fool.)

And watched my plans for the week begin to unravel.

I emailed my doctor about Paxlovid. His response, basically: it’s like a bad cold, give it a few days and move on.

He wasn’t wrong. But he wasn’t entirely right, either.

I’ve got six years of news, rumors, conspiracy theories, and actual epidemiological information lodged in my brain.

Millions of people died from Covid in 2020. New York City became a public health catastrophe unfolding on television every night. I remember the local news coverage of the Canterbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Henrico, where ~50 people died and hundreds were infected in those early months.

Six years on, I’m not afraid of Covid. But I am reasonably Covid cautious.

I don’t want my kid to get sick. Or his mom. Or her aging parents, who she cares for. I don’t want friends or clients to get sick. Or strangers at the grocery store.

And so I rescheduled coffee and lunch plans. I turned down two tickets to an in-studio performance by a band I wanted to see. I left the tween at his mom’s as long as our schedules could allow.

The doctor was thinking about my Covid as an individual medical event. I was treating it as something that could ripple outward from me.

I settled in for the long haul.

Monday night, a fever. Tuesday, congestion and a fever and generally feeling meh. Wednesday, the same, but I walked the dog two miles. Thursday, fever-free but still testing brightly positive. A three-mile walk.

But the bright pink line on Thursday’s test was a reminder that feeling better and not being infectious aren’t the same thing.

And since the tween was coming home on Friday, I found myself mapping air flow strategies Thursday night.

I spent thirty minutes with Gemini and a diagram of my house — rooms, doors, windows, ceiling fans, and three HEPA air filtration units — developing an air purification strategy to keep the tween buffered from my increasingly inconsequential but still potentially infectious illness.

I could defend his sleeping space with a HEPA unit and a closed bedroom door, creating a buffer. It wasn’t exactly elaborate, but Gemini backed its shit up with some serious diagrams and science, so it was reassuring.

By Friday afternoon, Fortress Covid was ready.

Windows cracked. The house clean and surfaces freshly sanitized. HEPA units in the bedrooms and living room, cleaning the air eight to ten times an hour. I masked.

I was thinking about his health. But also his mom, his classmates, his sister, her dormmates. The circles get big, fast.

Care and concern aside, I had forgotten how much I hate masking when I’m working. Drinking coffee is so much more complicated.

The tween also had a Covid and flu vaccination appointment on the calendar, and we kept it. It won’t help us with this weekend. But I’m not the one trapped in a germ-infused middle school five days a week for the rest of the fall and winter.

It’s Saturday morning as I write this. I’m relaxed but still mindful. Sitting in an adjacent room, drinking coffee, while the tween eats bagels and plays Roblox.

We’ll find some adventures outside later.

 THE COLOR IS NOT THE COLOR IS ALMOST THE COLOR

Let’s just start with the idea of puke. As in, let me puke up some of the fascinating details that kept me absorbed this week listening to “THINK” on NPR.

In the 1500s, puke was a luxury wool, reddish brown in color. People who owned puke clothing were upper class. So, of course, by the 1700s, puke became slang for an unlikable person. And by the 20^th century, it lost its association to reddish brown and became more characteristically yellow-green. A gross brown. Depends on what you had for dinner, or maybe if you’re raising a baby.

The interview — between Krys Boyd and lexicographer Kory Stamper — was a meander through the world of color. As I listened, I found myself just as smitten by the history of color categorization as I was by the absurdity of describing color with words.

Begonia is compared to fiesta, and to average coral. What color is fiesta, exactly? And is average coral the average of all corals, a type of coral, or just any old average coral?

Europeans thought the Greeks couldn’t see blue because Homer described the sea as wine dark — as if poets have ever been reliable witnesses to anything. (I should know.)

Seventeen aquas and none of them are actually ideal aqua, if there’s such a thing.

In the 1890s, dairy people got upset about a new competitor — margarine. “There was a senator from New Hampshire who insisted that yellow was the color of butter and butter is yellow,” Stamper says. Various states began mandating that margarine be dyed pink, or red, or black. Not yellow.

And the new kid: orange. Before the 1500s, English speakers just said red-yellow, or tawny. But because we weren’t Greek (see above, Homer), we didn’t assume our ancestors couldn’t see orange. They just didn’t know they saw it!

The whole modern system of color terminology for dictionaries? Born because pharmacists were writing “reddish green” and “blackish white” on pill bottles and nobody knew what they were looking at.

Our minds are fast and subjective, and are eager to move forward without worrying that a strawberry and how we perceive a strawberry and how our kids color a strawberry with the only red crayon available are all different reds.

It’s all strawberry.

(Then not an hour later, a friend drops a text to me about a podcast from the National Gallery in London called Stories of Color. Whatever colored rabbit hole that is I’m going down next…)

 TWELVE HANDS, RAISED

The conversation I’d planned with a small group of men — a chance to talk about what lives upstream from simply the idea of being a “good man” — was postponed by Covid (see above). Twelve men raised their hands to show up. That number alone gave me something I didn’t expect.

We’ll reschedule for the end of October, hopefully! Stay tuned. And, guys, there’s still room at the table if you want to join. Drop me a note.

I’ll share more when we’ve had the conversation.

 THE KEEPER OF STORIES

It’s hard to believe we’re coming up on a year since Richmond’s often wry, quietly big-hearted lover of history exited too soon.

When Bill Martin, executive director of the Valentine museum, was struck and killed by a car in downtown Richmond last December, Richmond lost a genuine presence.

Bill was a man who was always moving, and always grounded. You’d see him at a half dozen events in one evening — if you party hopped — but he was quick with the lunch invitation where he would stop vibrating for twenty minutes.

But it was the way Bill stewarded history — and the city’s historians — that changed the way Richmond saw, and told, its own stories. Bill was more courageous than iconoclastic, and he was fond of challenging systems and ideas.

It makes sense that the Virginia Association of Museums’ Bill Martin Award focuses on Bill’s best attributes as a museum professional – leadership with vision, community building, telling untold stories. More details are on the VAM website.

 SHUT UP & MORE FEELING

I may have written variations of the same novel six times, and that may be better than the 300 variations of the same poem I’ve been writing since 1996.

Although, if I’m honest, they’re probably just earlier, more succinct variations of the novels.

They’re not the same novel, of course, in the way that Grimm’s Fairy Tales aren’t the same fables. But they share a thread — the way characters try to close the distance with each other through small gestures, not big declarations.

In the school hallway, Katie hands Brendan a cold can of Sprite for his busted nose. Ellie climbs a tree and takes photos of yellowjackets on rotting apples because she doesn’t know what else to do with her anxiety. Hadley teaches a dog she’s grown to love how to leave her — for its owner. Soléne drives to an adjacent town to deliver pastries to a young musician.

Small things. Ordinary gestures.

My characters are forever misunderstanding each other. Or maybe what’s really happening is that they are missing understanding of one another. But they’re forever attempting to close the distance.

And beneath that, something else. They’re staying. Not in a thing that’s broken, or because leaving is frightening. Staying as the simple act of being present. Staying to say yes by presence. Staying because there is no need to go.

I’ve been writing about this for almost two years now, and I’m starting to notice it teaching me something.

My default: start talking, and I’ll figure out the framework from your words.

My panic space: let’s not talk, and I’ll build a framework out of twine and anxiety.

My practice space: let’s sit quietly, while I learn to breathe.

My writing space: all of the above.

 THE MEN AT THE TABLE

It has been less than a month since the news broke about the sexual assault civil lawsuit filed against Cornell University, the Chi Pi fraternity chapter, and seven former students.

I heard about it not through social media, but from a group of women in a client organization. It came up again later that same day, in a conversation with a friend — also a woman. That first week, every time the story surfaced, it was women who placed it on the table.

Furious women. Frustrated women. Tired women. And while their energy was catalyzed by the assault itself, the conversation kept shifting to the Cornell 57 — the alleged perpetrators and the 50 or so other young men on a group chat where the woman, and her body, were being promoted like chattel, like owned property. What were they thinking? Did none of them even think to intervene?

The line that continues to come up for me: A woman was being hurt, and no one did anything.

It really is that simple. Which is probably why it is sitting so painfully with some women.

Since that first week, I’ve been thinking a lot about these women — smart, professional women carrying decades of messaging in their bones and their nervous systems. And about my own daughter, a college freshman, who has spent as much time out socializing as she has in class or the library. And about recent conversations with female friends who’d been on the receiving end of unsolicited, hostile and misogynistic comments from strangers — walking the dog in the park, shopping in Carytown.

My first strategic planning client after I started Floricane was The James House, which continues to support people — primarily women — affected by sexual violence, domestic violence, and stalking. I remember a conversation with their longtime CEO about the environments that contribute to sexual violence in communities. Three stood out in her experience: the military, fraternities, and sports.

Her observation aligns with a broader body of research on hypermasculine cultures — where physical dominance, emotional suppression, intense bonding, and insular social connections can cultivate mindsets and norms that endanger women, physically, sexually, emotionally.

America’s own top military leader thumps his own chest about driving a military culture where “the patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.” A culture where women, Black and Latino, and LGBTQ officers are being pushed out of leadership roles, or out of the military entirely. You really don’t have to look far today to find men who equate leadership with physical dominance and extreme masculinity.

Being male, embracing a masculine identity, is not the problem. It’s the way these environments can reduce “be a man” into narrow, often self-focused, bands of behavior.

There’s a lot to be said for traits usually ascribed to men: Physical strength. A clear sense of duty, camaraderie. Being courageous, or assertive.

But taken to an extreme — or cultivated without awareness of, or appreciation for, other ways of bonding, building community, and supporting growth — these behaviors and traits can be toxic. For the men who inhabit them, and for the people they touch when they go out into the broader world.

All of which led me to think about the men in my life — my tween son, my immediate circle of male friends, the men in the community I call home.

My culture.

My opportunity.

Paying attention to how I show up — in a meeting, at a bar, in a group text. Letting my son see what strength looks like when it isn’t dominance: asking for help, apologizing, staying in the room when a conversation gets uncomfortable. Listening. For God’s sake, listening.

To my children. To the women in my life.

And it means talking with — and listening to — other men. Not about whether we’re good. But about what we owe our families and communities, and the women around us.

That first week, it was women who put this on the table.

On Tuesday, I’m sitting down with a handful of men to try and start our own conversation about what comes after Cornell.

**If you missed it last week, I wrote a much longer piece about Cornell, and men, and silence.

 NAMING THE GRIEF

In a few weeks, we walk into a midterm election that will leave half the country furious and the other half relieved and everyone suspicious of everyone else.

It’s what I like to call the 21^st century in America. It’s not a new vibe.

We’re living the symptoms of an illness we’re afraid to name.

Eric Liu, the civic entrepreneur behind the Civic University, has a name for it: civic grief.

We know the causes.

An avalanche of social media and the death of journalism. The accumulated weight of decades of inequality. A string of endless, and senseless, wars. A pandemic that killed a million people and gave us a nation of science deniers. And a political culture that has turned every public square into a fight.

We feel it. We don’t name it.

And because we don’t name it, we can’t move through it — we just keep showing up to the next election, or the next Twitter argument, more exhausted than we did the last.

Civic grief.

I’ve been sitting with that phrase this weekend. It feels right. It feels like the thing we need to name, and address.

Which is why I’m genuinely looking forward to something small and specific later this month: Richmond’s first Citizens’ Assembly School, a two-day workshop led by the Federation for Innovation in Democracy. About thirty people — most of whom I don’t know — learning how to create and facilitate inclusive, participatory community assemblies.

So now I’m walking into a room with thirty people I’ve never met thinking about civic grief. And I’m looking forward to exploring ways we can work together, perhaps just in small ways, to begin the important work of repair.

Because that’s the work of democracy, of community, or belonging. And leaning into some borrowed words from the environmental movement, our best play as citizens is simple: Think globally, act locally.

Act here. In my own backyard. My home.

 THE ART OF STAYING

Here’s how things usually unfold:

I see something in Richmond Magazine or Style Weekly and tear the page out. I snap a photo of a flyer on a utility pole, a poster in a storefront. I scan the internet periodically.

And I start to curate my weeks, my months.

Because I have a tween at my house every other week, and a college freshman who still seems to enjoy spending time with us, the weeks look different. Kid weeks have a shape — pumpkins, a movie at Bowtie, a new bagel shop, Golden Glow at Maymont, a slice of pizza from Zorch.

The other weeks are mine, and I give myself more grace, letting my energy and whims determine which sails catch the wind.

A few weeks ago, I gave away two tickets to Violent Femmes so I could take the freshman to check out a Modern Richmond event at the Bryan Innovation Lab. But really so we could have dinner together.

I saw the Buena Vista Orchestra at Inner Ear Studio in the middle of the day with a friend who was also free at noon. This week it was dinner at Kuba Kuba, Style Weekly’s FWD:RVA event at VPM, a two-hour evening walk through Carytown and the Museum District. And then along came this year’s Richmond Folk Festival.

I hadn’t been to the festival in years, for reasons.

So I went Friday night. Arrived early, and solo. No plans. Hoping a friend would make it across the Potterfield Bridge and surprise me. And being surprised throughout the night by familiar face after familiar face. Friends I saw just the day before. Many more I hadn’t seen in weeks, months. Catching up before drifting toward the next stage is sort of magic.

Between people, I found music. A bit of New Orleans jazz, some Cajun, a Sephardic singer. And my magnet attraction — El Khat, a Yemeni Jewish garage band by way of Berlin. I’d seen them at Revéler in Carytown last December. They did not disappoint.

A homemade guitar, dual drums hammering out a rhythmic beat, wailing vocals. They had the crowd on their feet immediately, and the dancing was nonstop.

The magic returned Saturday night. More friends. An all female mariachi band. Seeing my college freshman wandering, doing her thing with friends of her own. A full-on Bomba band from Puerto Rico. Trains running on the tracks above and behind performers. And just walking, and connecting.

I stayed later than I’d planned both nights, and I felt a familiar contentment. I’d gone out to experience something, to connect. Sometimes I get one. Sometimes the other. On off nights, neither. This weekend, I got both.

There’s something particular about this moment in my life in this place.

Richmond is big enough to put a Yemeni garage band — or a dozen Mexican-American women playing songs of love and heartbreak — on a stage by the river and draw a crowd.

And I’ve reached a moment where I can be more open to the surprise of discovery, to the art of possibility.

Surprise and connection in the same night. That’s not a thing you often get by dropping into a city, taking in the sights, then leaving. It’s something you get by showing up, and by staying. And seeing what unfolds.

 SHUT UP & RESET

Here’s the thing. I’m not a YA writer.

I just happened to drag a book that feels very YA out of the intersection of my punk rock past, my deep knowledge of Richmond, and two teenage girls who made some choices on my behalf during the writing process.

Four major revisions and a year later, Ophelia Doesn’t Drown is a deeply felt novel about two girls falling in love in 1987, and figuring out who they are in a world that isn’t entirely interested in letting them find out.

It’s not a different book than the one I crowed (prematurely) about finishing a year ago. But it is a better one. And, honestly, a lovelier one.

And I’m a middle-aged cis man who wrote it.

Which, as it turns out, complicates things. (Surprise!)

It took me a few days to get my head around feedback from two literary agents, and perspectives the surfaced in panel discussions, at the James River Writers’ Conference.

The time to reflect and digest was helpful. So was the time I spent the following week with my writing coach Heather trying to map out an exit door for both Ophelia and Off Belay.

By exit door, I mean getting the novels off my desk and out into the world.

Two literary agents, two conference panels about the state of publishing, a long conversation with Heather, and my own mangled thoughts keeping me up too many nights — all clarifying. Mostly saying the same things.

The YA market is tough. Publishing in general is trying to find its footing (again), and the math of bringing books to market has become increasingly unforgiving. And a middle-aged man writing a love story about two teenage girls presents an additional hella hurdle in a market where agents and publishers are already making difficult choices.

I understand that. I don’t particularly like it, but I understand it.

What makes it frustrating is that some of the people who balked at the publishing dynamics discovered something after reading it — a good novel. A deeply felt novel that treats its characters with compassion, and respect, and love. It’s fast-moving. Fun at times, and poignant at others. The soundtrack is f’ing awesome.

But most agents aren’t reading the novel. They’re reading a query letter. Maybe ten pages of the first chapter. Seeing my name on the page. And making a decision about whether to take on a book that might already be a difficult sell because of optics.

Which leaves me with a choice.

I can keep revising the query, refining the pitch, searching for an agent who sees past the obvious complications to the story underneath. I can spend another year trying to persuade someone that the novel deserves to exist in the world.

Or I can just put it into the world.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

Ophelia Doesn’t Drown will be self-published in the first quarter of 2027. An e-book, a hardcover, paperbacks. On shelves at local independent bookstores and in public libraries. In places where readers — older teens and their GenX parents — will find it. I’m banking on it selling well.

More importantly, I want to have some fun with it.

I want to take Ophelia on the road, visiting independent radio stations and playing the 1980s punk and alternative music that runs through the novel. I want to show up at public libraries and facilitate zine-making workshops. I want to spend time with people who remember the world Kira and Leah inhabit, and people who weren’t even born when that world existed.

There’s something wonderfully circular about that possibility.

A novel rooted in a particular place, a particular time, and a particular music scene, finding its way into the world through the kinds of places and people that made the story possible in the first place.

All of which positions Off Belay as the novel that is going out to agents for consideration in January. Two books, two paths. Happy New Year.

I’ve spent the past year learning how to write better novels.

Now I’m going to learn how to get them into the hands of readers.

It is all men.

That’s what I’m sitting with at the end of the week as I continue to digest the alleged group rape at Cornell. Details of the attack are horrifying, but not surprising.

You know what else is not surprising? The human and systemic failures that ripple outward every time a woman is raped on a university campus, or anywhere else.

Jane Doe wasn’t raped in a dark alley with no witnesses. She wasn’t passed out drunk in a man’s apartment, alone. And once she realized what had happened to her, she didn’t lock it up in a tiny box in her chest forever the way millions of women have done for centuries.

No, hundreds of people entered her story on the night of the October 2024 attack and in the weeks afterward. An enormous apparatus existed, ostensibly to protect her, investigate what happened, and hold people accountable. And somehow the apparatus still produced this outcome.

The first failure is the easiest to condemn, and maybe hardest to forgive: the seven men who allegedly raped her for hours. But the list only starts at seven.

There were as many as 50 group chat participants. And there were dozens of other bystanders in the house that night who heard or saw, and ignored, what was happening.

There were 32 witnesses interviewed after the fact.

There were Jane Doe’s roommate, her sorority “big sister,” her friends.

There was the university health clinic staff. The school’s Title IX investigators.

Campus police.

The fraternity.

The faculty and staff who presided over 12 days of disciplinary hearings.

The district attorney.

University administrators.

These are the component parts of a system that has proven itself — again, and again, and again — incapable of protecting women.

There are almost 9 million female undergrads in the U.S. and there are ~10,000 reported sex offenses on college campuses in a typical year. An estimated 80% of female college students who experience sexual assault or rape do not report the incident to law enforcement. Do the math. It’s a big number.

But it’s not only the attackers. It’s not only the system.

It’s the fifty men who read the message and kept scrolling.

It’s the other men. It is us.

Men like me — like you, or someone you know — who have no direct connection to Cornell? We have every opportunity to do something different because of it. Something more than committing to being a hero, or remembering that “No means no.”

I’m not sure most men I know understand this.

I’ve been talking to some of the women in my life this week. They are furious. Not surprised. Furious. Their grief and anger are palpable. And as horrified as they are about the assault, many of them can’t get past the bigger detail, a sentence I read online that has been rattling around in my head all week:

A woman was being hurt, and no one helped her.

Meanwhile, the men in my life have been mostly quiet. Not one has brought it up to me, although when I do they’re not dismissive or disinterested. They understand a woman was hurt, terribly. They don’t defend rape or violence against women. They don’t even play the “we don’t really know all the facts” card.

At first, I thought it was uncertainty of where we fit in the conversation. But as the week went on I began to wonder if it isn’t actually fear.

The women I know are asking, “Who the actual fuck created this system, this monstrosity we call society, and how do I opt out of it?”

The silence of men suggests we know the answer.

Which is also part of the conversation.

I wrote to a friend this week that “not me” must sound awfully hollow in a world where every interaction with a man can carry some muscle-memory version of a question: Am I safe right now?

That doesn’t mean women never feel safe, or that they believe every man is dangerous. It means they can’t reliably know which men are safe. And when.

I saw a video this week that compared that calculation to the way Black people have to navigate interactions with white people. Not every white person is racist. But they can’t be certain. Not every man is a predator. But women can’t be certain. The cost of relaxing is more than anyone should be asked to pay.

Caution is not paranoia. It is adaptation.

Here’s another layer that this week is forcing me to see more clearly.

Maybe the question women are asking men is not simply, Are you going to hurt me?

Maybe it is also: If another man does, what are you going to do?

That is a harder question. Especially in our current “High-T” culture, where men are spending a lot of time on TikTok yammering about being warriors, heroes, protectors.

Look, most men I know would tell you they are good people. I would say the same about myself. And I would guess that most of the young men in that fraternity would have described themselves that way before this happened. They had families. Friends. Classes. Jobs. People who trusted them. In 96 percent of their lives, they may well have looked exactly like the sort of guys their parents hoped they had raised.

Which is why I do not think it is enough to say we are good men.

“Good” can become an identity we wear instead of a thing we do.

I know what “no” means. I don’t rape women. I don’t hit women. I would try to stop someone if I saw an assault happening. Awesome. But that is an extraordinarily low bar. The harder moral stuff happens before the crisis surfaces, before an interaction becomes so unambiguous that only a sociopath could miss it.

What do we do when a friend makes the joke?

What do we do when someone is too drunk?

What do we do when a guy talks about a woman as if she is something available to him? Or available to other people?

What do we do when a message shows up on our phone that makes something inside us tighten? The inappropriate comment in the work meeting? The inappropriate behavior at the office holiday party?

How certain do we need to be before we risk making things socially uncomfortable?

We like to imagine moral courage as something cinematic. Stepping between an attacker and a victim, or breaking down a door. Fortunately, most of the opportunities we get are much smaller. They’re also much more awkward. They involve telling a friend to knock it off. Taking someone’s keys. Staying with the drunk person. Covering an unattended drink at a bar. Looking another man in the eye and shaking your head no.

You don’t have to be a hero to save someone pain.

Eight years ago, in the early stretch of #MeToo, I was asked to facilitate a conversation among a large group of men at a local advertising agency. This was 2018. Harvey Weinstein had been exposed. Tarana Burke’s phrase “Me Too,” which she had begun using years earlier, had exploded into public consciousness. Men were being asked to reckon not only with headline-making abuse but with harassment, coercion, power, workplace behavior, jokes, assumptions, all of the things that had been normalized for generations.

I remember those conversations as useful. Men listened. We talked. We learned some things. But the focus in 2018 was workplace culture, not keeping seven grown-ass men from having their way with a woman.

And yet here we are, recycling dialogue as the solution when it’s clear that behavior is the problem. When the system isn’t working for half the country.

Adult men have had decades to understand that women move through the world differently because the threat of violence moves through the world with them. But we keep doing the same things we’ve done for decades as generation after generation of women keep telling us the same thing: Stop hurting us.

I don’t think we misunderstood the assignment: examine your own behavior. Make sure you are not the guy doing harm. Learn about consent. Treat women with respect.

All necessary. We forgot to ask if there was anything else.

There was. There is.

The people on that list from Cornell? The administrators, the investigators, the fraternity leadership, the prosecutor? They’d all tell you they are good people. Their wives and partners probably would tell you the same. But, together — together — these people produced an outcome where no charges were brought, and a woman was left adrift to sort it out alone.

That’s what systems do. They let good people produce terrible outcomes, one reasonable decision at a time.

We built it. Men, mostly. We fund it, run it, sit on its boards, write its policies, elect its prosecutors. And we’ve assumed that if each of us behaves well inside it, it will behave well too.

It doesn’t.

If our responsibility stops at our own behavior, we abandon the women we care about and love — and the other women in our orbit.

When they’re with us, perhaps they are safe. If we’ve done the work. If we have built a genuine, trusting relationship. But what happens when they walk out the door to meet a friend for coffee, to see a movie, to go to the grocery store or on a jog? What happens when it’s their name on a group chat message?

Nobody has been hurt yet.

That is where most of the work lives — before the hurt happens.

After the Cornell story broke, I posted something on Facebook inviting men to get coffee and talk about all of this. Nothing formal. No experts. No panel. No elaborate agenda. Just men sitting down together and trying to answer some basic questions about how we fit into this conversation, where we have failed, what we have learned, and what it means to do better.

I made the invitation partly because the women I know are already having these conversations. They have been having them for years.

Over a hundred women responded. Fewer men than I have fingers.

The men were quiet.

And that struck me, because the silence itself now feels consequential.

I am not suggesting that failing to respond to a Facebook post means men don’t care, or is the equivalent to failing to step in when someone may be in danger. They do, and it isn’t.

But I do wonder whether our silences grow from the same habits: the idea that sexual violence is primarily something men need to think about if we are the perpetrator.

If I did not do it, then I am outside the story.

I no longer think that is true.

If another man is crossing a line, I am in the story.

If someone is vulnerable, I am in the story.

If everyone else is laughing and something feels wrong, I am in the story.

If I sit in the rooms where institutions decide what to protect, I am in the story.

And if any woman ever has to calculate whether I am safe, I am the story.

That does not mean men need to rush in with answers. God knows we are good enough at that already. It probably means listening first. It means believing that women understand something about their own experience that we do not. It means resisting the urge to produce evidence that we are one of the good ones.

And then it means talking to each other about the system we built, and what it might look like, even within the limits of our own lives, to work with the women we love to change it.

Maybe that is what I want the coffee to be about.

Not guilt. Not performance. Not a seminar on how enlightened everyone is.

I want to talk about what we owe the people around us when something begins to feel wrong. I want to talk about the things we wish someone had told us when we were twenty. I want to talk about the moments when we spoke up and the moments when we didn’t. I want to talk about what we are teaching our sons, and what we are modeling for them.

Mostly, I want men to stop imagining that our responsibility begins only when violence becomes impossible to ignore. And that our responsibility lives in a vacuum.

Here’s the thing. A woman was being hurt, and no one helped her.

There are a lot of details about what happened at Cornell that investigators and courts will have to sort out. But I understand why that sentence has landed so hard for the women around me.

They are not only asking us not to hurt them. They’re asking if we actually see what’s broken. And when we’re silent — awkward, confused, guilty, shamed, annoyed, busy, whatever — they’re asking if they can count on us.

Right now, I’m not sure I blame them for wondering.

Postscript: This is not a perfect response to the violence women — or, honestly, anyone — experiences in their lives. But is the best response I have in this moment, and like most of my writing it is more directionally correct than perfectly written. That said, I appreciate reactions and additional perspectives. The comment button is somewhere on this page.

And men who live in the Richmond area, a group of us are having lunch on Tuesday, October 13, to talk. Email me if you’d like to join us.

 THE RICHEST MAN IN BEDFORD FALLS

Like many people who had a relationship with him, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Jim Ukrop died this weekend. But I am immensely saddened at his passing.

I didn’t meet Jim when I worked at Ukrop’s Supermarket as a teenager — I simply careened into him. I was skateboarding across the back length of the Chippenham store, a fast dash from one back storage area to another, when a group of old men turned a corner and I wiped out. Fortunately, I didn’t careen into them. Unfortunately, one of them was the owner of Ukrop’s — Jim Ukrop. (By old men, I guess I mean forty-year-olds…)

I was sent home for a week for my shenanigans.

Fast forward to 2008. I was working at Luck Stone, and becoming increasingly interested in and activated by community issues. “You should meet Jim Ukrop,” several people I respected told me. I reached out to his long-time assistant, Ellen, in May or June, and she told me he was available on Thursday, November 13, at 9:30 in the morning, and could I meet at Ellie Basch’s little coffee shop (Savor) in the Corrugated Box Building in Manchester.

I put it on my calendar, and forgot about it.

My meeting with Jim became the second most important thing on my schedule that day — outside of waking up with then-seven-month-old Thea at the crack of dawn. In fact, the whole day was open, as I’d been part of a massive round of layoffs at Luck Stone the day before.

“Were you impacted by the layoffs at Luck yesterday?” Jim asked right off.

“I was, so we can hang out and talk all day if you’d like,” I said. He laughed. Our thirty minute coffee lasted almost three hours.

We talked about Ukrop’s. We talked about Richmond and local politics. We talked about running large organizations with clear and honest core values. He asked how I enjoyed being a dad.

And he tried to convince me to start my own consulting business. I told him he was batshit crazy. Actually, I might have said, “You are batshit crazy.”

After a long conversation, Jim left. I went to get my eighth coffee refill, because I was unemployed and had all day. It hadn’t been three minutes when Jim burst back through the door.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” he said. Then he made another pitch for the go-it-alone approach. (Dude was really keen on entrepreneurs.)

“Look,” he said, “if you decide to start a consulting business, let me know. I’ll hire you for a project I have in mind. You just can’t tell my wife I’m paying you.”

Long story short, I took the plunge. Jim paid me for a few months of work. I never told his wife. I launched Floricane eighteen years ago this winter because the richest man in Bedford Falls saw me in the river and threw me a lifeline.

The next year, he met with Steve Rosser and me to discuss Steve’s vision for Gelati Celesti. The year after that, he reached out to offer to buy t-shirts for the TedXGraceStreet event I helped coordinate. Two years later, he told me to run for school board in Richmond; I demurred.

He always dropped a note to celebrate Floricane’s anniversary. In 2017, he emailed me this note:

A belated Thank-You for your heartfelt greeting in July, wishing me a happy 80th birthday. You are much too kind! I am a fortunate and blessed person to have so many friends, like you, who took the time to send me birthday greetings. It’s hard to believe that it was 9 years ago that we had that conversation over coffee. Congratulations on the current success of Floricane. And thanks for your friendship.

Jim

PS In case you wondered how I celebrated my birthday, I have attached two pictures taken at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, where they have many of the top roller coasters in the world!

The note — and the photo (above) from Cedar Point — may tell you all you need to know about Jim Ukrop. Pretty sure, this is the only remembrance of Jim featuring a photo of him at the age of 80 grinning like a teenager on the Valravn Dive Coaster.

I saw him very briefly earlier this year. He was in the room next to my mom in health care at a retirement community in Northside Richmond. I poked my head in and said hello, we exchanged a few words, and then I slipped out.

I, too, am a fortunate and blessed person to have had so many friends. Friends like Jim.

 EVERYDAY AWE

In a few weeks, I’m chatting with some researchers about awe.

It’s a follow-up to “Finding Awe,” an experience my friend Marlene and I participated in last February at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art.

Awe, Psychology Today notes, comes in different flavors — not always positive, or emotionally overwhelming.

I’ve seen the Great Pyramids, the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, the aftermath of the Mount Saint Helens eruption. I’ve walked the streets of Amsterdam and Cairo and Beirut, San Francisco and New York City. Drove through a hurricane, walked through an ice storm, stood amidst an almost full solar eclipse.

All left an impression. None made me weak in the knees, or set my heart racing in new directions, or made me feel profoundly small or genuinely amazed about the building blocks in my own life.

My version of awe, it turns out, may be smaller.

Everyday awe is the emotional experience we encounter in the day-to-day. The gravity-defying movements of a hummingbird. The trust of a child. The tenacity of someone we love as they age.

I was in awe walking through gallery after gallery of the collected works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Smithsonian with a Russian friend and artist narrating and unpacking the experience. I felt a rising joy as I walked alone through a massive exhibit of Raoul Dufy’s paintings at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy in France.

I have experienced awe sitting knee to knee with a group of World War Two veterans who shared the excitement and horrors of war.

On a deck in the mountains of West Virginia as two mating bald eagles collided in mid air, then plummeted straight down at a speed I could hear, breaking apart at the tree line.

When my oldest child writes me a letter so profound that I can only sit and weep at who they have — somehow — become.

What I might tell the researchers later in October is that the most interesting thing about February wasn’t the awe produced by the facilitated experience.

It was what happened because of the experience. After it.

I think February simply taught me to pay more attention. It gave me a question I carried around for months: What fills me with awe?

The immediate awe as I absorbed a multi-gallery exhibit of 65,000 years of Australian aboriginal art later that same February day.

The feeling of resonance and connection I felt months later across a cafe table with a friend I’d only just met, sharing stories and space.

Unexpectedly finding myself next to a hospital bed this past March when my mother drew her last breath.

 TWO KINDS OF SILENCE

This past week, U2 and I celebrated a milestone — the band’s 50^th birthday and my 40^th anniversary of the band’s musical imprint on me.

My first U2 recording was a cassette tape. “Under A Blood Red Sky (Live)” was just eight tracks, recorded from three live performances. It was, for a time, the least punk rock piece of music I owned — except that it was completely punk rock.

What is more punk rock than defiance and celebration, intertwined?

And what is more appropriate at the fifty year mark than for the band from Ireland, who formed as teenagers in a kitchen, to release a bass-heavy, ragged guitar-driven celebration — and indictment — of silence, and faith?

The lyrics of the band’s newest song, “Silencio,” starts with the quiet of a baby, the hush of a mother, the sound of the ocean (tranquilo). Then a gunshot, and “shut your fuckin’ mouth” (silencio).

Two kinds of silence.

Tranquility, the silence that is calm, serene.

And silence as the absence of sound, but not tranquil. The silence of faith, disturbed. The silence of fear. The silence of control.

It is only in one of these silences that we find “the devil’s rock and roll.”

The song makes me wonder about silences that surround me — and the noise.

Politics. The environment. My life. We talk, we tweet, we post. The volume keeps increasing, and somehow I understand less.

Sometimes noise is its own kind of silence.

The thought leads me back to tranquilo.

The quiet that isn’t surrender. The pause that isn’t avoidance. The moment when nobody is trying to win.

The silence that allows us to breathe.

 I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL

I’d be remiss if I didn’t pause for a second to acknowledge what a tremendously powerful rock group Prabir Mehta has put together.

The five person Prabir Trio raised high the roofbeams at Revéler in Carytown Saturday, and it was absolutely the tonic I needed after a long week. They have a new album out (that rocks) and gyrated their way through Indian raags, a few Beatles tunes, and a righteous casserole of rock-and-roll. The evening made my week.

Here’s the song they opened with this weekend:

 SHUT UP & BELAY

I moved through my protestations faster this time.

My writing coach sent back notes and a lengthy editorial letter for Off Belay, and I only ranted and raved about how nobody understood me for, at the most, three days. And then I put it aside and finished my edits on Ophelia Doesn't Drown. Then pulled it out again.

The good news is that most of what Heather laid out for me is actually right. By right, I mean it is good feedback and guidance that I will probably incorporate. The fast bit was settling on the protagonist — it’s Ellie, y’all. But then I had to figure out how to run a stronger throughline that helped readers see what Ellie and Harrison were each bringing into the story, and why their road trip through their personal histories was so important.

Two tests. Test one is just doing a solid pass through points of view, tone and lens. Test two involves an entirely new opening chapter. I’m hoping test one does the work.

I should be finished this revision by mid-October, so drop me a note (jsarvay@yahoo.com) if you’d like to be a beta reader. There will be homework.

What’s Off Belay about, you ask?The novel follows Ellie, a restless photojournalist, and Harrison, her newly minted college-professor boyfriend, on a six-week trip through the places that shaped them. A sunken boat in the Northern Neck, a pagan music festival outside Harrisonburg, a near-fatal disaster in the mountains of West Virginia, and a return to Harrison’s childhood home force them to confront old stories that no longer work. A proposal in a creek on the campus of the University of Richmond sets the stage for one last leg — the drive to Ellie’s childhood home in Blowing Rock, where she finally understands what it means to hold the rope tight for someone she loves.

 CIVIL DAWN

I went for a walk one morning a few weeks ago. I wanted to get an early start, so I left the house at six sharp — and stepped into darkness.

I was surprised. How had the morning light slipped forward in time so quickly, without my noticing?

Google told me sunrise was at 6:41, but the last thing I wanted to do was go back inside for another 41 minutes. And while I’m sure I’ve always been aware of it, I’d never consciously thought about pre-dawn in the context of time.

Pre-dawn was just what happened as a kid when my uncle woke me super early to go fishing. Or — when Thea woke at four in the morning as a tiny human — the gentle grey light that emerged before the sky truly lightened.

Just another thing present in our world that I’d never quantified. Or had a name for.

That changed last week. I asked Google what the time before sunrise was called, and when it happened.

“Civil dawn,” it told me — the point when there is enough natural light to see objects clearly and begin most outdoor activities.

More precisely, the moment when the center of the sun is six degrees below the horizon. On this particular morning, that was around 6:20.

So Addie and I stepped outside two minutes after six and reached the park entrance a few minutes later. There were no noticeable dawns of any sort waiting for us, but there was a posse of fast-moving runners wearing headlamps.

We walked slowly in the dark along the wide paved road, past the runners and across the Upham Brook dam bridge. By the time we reached the main park trails, the soft light of civil dawn had arrived.

 MISTAKES WEREN’T MADE

In retrospect, an impulse purchase of three two-day passes to Iron Blossom Music Festival may have been an expensive overreach.

I knew last spring that I wanted to see Die Spitz and LCD Soundsystem, and that Jack would be at my house that weekend. I figured Thea might want to go, too.

Guys, the passes were not cheap.

Yesterday was day one. Everyone was tired before we even got to the festival site. Half an hour after we settled onto our blanket, both kids were catnapping. We sat through solid but uninspired sets by Phantogram and Dijon. JMSN rocked a bit, but the set was short.

The weather was absolutely perfect. And still, for half a heartbeat, I wondered why we’d even come.

Then Die Spitz woke everyone up.

They tore through an insanely intense, hard-rocking blast of metal-punk. Thea glanced at me and said, “Oh my god, they’re so free!”

Jack joined us toward the end of the set and bounced to the music in that awkward, unrhythmic way of young boys with no spatial awareness. The band was on fire.

And the moment when my tween leapt onto his older sister’s back, shaking his fist in the air to the driving guitars. Both kids laughing.

That energy carried straight into LCD Soundsystem.

Head banging and hip shaking with both of my kids may have been the highlight of my week.

Maybe even worth the price of admission.

 THE WORLD’S BIGGEST RABBIT HOLE

Given the chance, who wouldn’t spend every waking hour for ten years documenting every action, reaction and connection that might tell the most complete story possible of a single human being through a camera lens?

Right. A lot of people.

I’m not a photographer, you say. I don’t have that sort of focus, you confess. One life cannot possibly be that complicated, you argue.

Besides, what if you miss something?

Enter photographer Taryn Simon, an unidentified FBI agent and New York Times writer Sasha Weiss, who recently unpacked Simon’s decade-long attempt to map one man’s life across more than a thousand photographs, along with video and text, in a slightly insane exhibition at the Guggenheim.

The exhibition is “itself a semi-miraculous act of labor,” Weiss writes — one continuous narrative told across 42 chapters documenting the agent’s career and the lives it touched.

And what a career.

The agent’s work intersected with the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, the Iraqi embassy during the Persian Gulf War and Russian spies.

But Simon kept following the threads.

She photographed the people and places touched by the agent’s work — “in kitchens, in weapons depots, on mountains, in forests, in summer camps, in med spas, in people’s homes”; in Kenya, Russia, Israel, Greece and across the United States.

At some point, the project stops being the story of one FBI agent.

It becomes an alternative history of national security. A story about the people who happened to cross one man’s path. About the places connected to those people. About events that led to other events, which led to still others.

Follow any life closely enough and eventually you arrive everywhere.

Maybe that’s the world’s biggest rabbit hole.

Not one man’s life.

The realization that none of us has just one.

 RELEARNING DEMOCRACY

Things weren’t perfect, but for a while there I thought we’d mostly gotten the democracy thing figured out.

There were Green revolutions and Orange revolutions. People taking to the streets asking for greater freedom and political voice in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Democracy seemed messy and unfinished, certainly, but also like something the world generally understood how to do.

Then the last decade made that confidence harder to sustain.

The first Trump administration. The institutional responses to Me Too and Black Lives Matter. A global pandemic. Increasingly open conflicts over the institutions, norms and assumptions that many of us had simply taken for granted.

The last 18 months have only sharpened that feeling for me.

Somewhere in there, I realized I’d been thinking about democracy mostly as a system.

Maybe it’s also a practice.

“Think globally, act locally,” as my punk rock friends used to shout back in the day.

Which is why I responded quickly to an invitation to spend two days at the end of October learning about participatory democracy and citizens’ assemblies. The training was initiated by the City of Richmond and is being supported by the Federation for Innovation in Democracy, or FIDE.

Basically, I’ll be in a room with about 30 other community leaders for an interactive, sleeves-rolled-up workshop exploring ways to hand the mic back to everyday people.

We’ll dig into what deliberative democracy can look like in practice: how to convene groups that actually reflect a community; how to give people balanced information before asking them to make decisions; how to create space for disagreement without turning disagreement into combat.

It’s going to be awkward! (For me, anyway!)

My main goal is to leave my experienced-facilitator hat at home and show up as a curious learner. I don’t know most of the other participants. I don’t know what they think Richmond needs. I don’t know what they’ll see that I don’t.

Which may be the point.

Maybe relearning democracy begins with sitting in a room with people you didn’t choose, listening long enough to discover what the world looks like from where they’re sitting.

 BRICK BY BRICK JOURNALISM

After decades of attrition, maybe journalism is slowly rebuilding itself anew.

I wrote almost a year ago about the relevance of local news — a deep dive into a new community newspaper in Maine. Along the way I gnashed my teeth about the deterioration of reporting at the Washington Post, which was being editorially muzzled and downsized by Jeff Bezos.

Some of that disappearing talent has resurfaced in interesting places.

One of them is a publication formerly known as NOTUS — News of the United States. Let’s not get too carried away with the creativity there, newsies.

A few weeks ago, NOTUS relaunched as The Washington Sun, with a much larger newsroom and a broader ambition: national politics and policy, yes, but also Washington itself — its neighborhoods, government, sports, food and daily life.

“Why The Sun?” its editors wrote. “You can choose your metaphor: We’re shining a light on Washington. Everything is clearer in daylight. We’d rather light a big candle than keep on cursing the darkness.”

I’d been watching the rise of the Sun for a few weeks, and now that it’s been out in the wild for a bit, I have to say I like the look of it.

It’s lean. You’re not going to find eight or nine deeply reported national and international stories every morning. But there’s a nice combination of congressional reporting, federal agencies, courts, campaigns and local Washington — plus stories that might otherwise remain stuck somewhere along the margins.

This week alone: another congressional push for Epstein records. The legal fight over federal voter databases. The battle over new Postal Service rules for mail-in ballots.

Not necessarily the biggest stories of the day.

But stories someone needs to report.

And maybe that’s the part of the rebuilding I find encouraging.

The old model of American journalism is clearly changing. Some institutions are shrinking. Experienced reporters are scattering. New publications are appearing, sometimes gathering those same reporters back together in different combinations.

Meanwhile, just yesterday, three major news organizations had their reporters turned away from the White House.

Which makes the small acts of reconstruction feel less small.

A reporter hired. A beat restored. A newsroom expanded. Another fact put on the record.

Brick by brick.

 THE MAN IN THE DARK

When I become a part-time dad/part-time bachelor two years ago, one of the biggest puzzles I had to solve was how to spend my time every other week.

Specifically, how to avoid the couch, a television and a bag of chips.

Somewhere along the way, my friend Jerry Williams became part of the answer.

I’ve known Jerry for a long time, but I’ve probably spent more time being silent with him over the past two years than I have with anyone else. Except maybe my dog.

Mostly we sit in dark movie theaters together.

Sometimes we see very good movies. Sometimes we see weird CGI-heavy semi-biographical movies about British pop singers. Sometimes we see things neither of us particularly needs to see again.

So I was happy to take a walk down memory lane with Jerry recently when RVA Magazine sat down with him and traced a career I knew mostly in pieces.

Jerry arrived in Richmond in 1967 to attend what was then RPI. He did progressive-rock radio. In 1972, he started reviewing movies for Channel 6, where they nicknamed him “The Man in the Dark.”

From there: video production. Richmond Public Schools. Corporate work. Tales from the Grips, his early online clearinghouse for Richmond’s film community. Sifter. Podcasts. Movie reviews. And eventually Dirtwoman, his feature-length documentary about one of Richmond’s more singular cultural figures.

I met Jerry when I worked around the corporate video team at Circuit City Stores, then hired him to produce videos for me during my Luck Stone days.

I spent weeks with Jerry gathering interviews and b-roll of quarry workers, stone being dumped into crushers, dump trucks driving out of quarries. And hour after hour with him editing the footage into something resembling good corporate videos.

“I was a video guy,” Jerry tells RVA Magazine at one point.

Which might be the simplest way to say it.

Jerry has spent most of his adult life moving alongside the media itself — radio to television to video to the web to podcasts — making things, watching things and telling the rest of us what he saw.

There’s something I love about that.

Two years ago, I was mostly trying to figure out how not to spend every other week alone in front of a screen.

Jerry’s solution, entirely by accident, was to get me in front of a much bigger one. In the dark. With somebody else.

Turns out maybe the couch wasn’t the problem.

Maybe it was the alone part.

 SHUT UP & PITCH AGAIN

A year ago, I prematurely pitched the first draft of my new novel, Revolution Summer, to a dozen literary agents.

Most of them never responded.

The space between pitching and realizing I was pitching into the void did nothing to diminish my absolutely naïve confidence as a book-industry neophyte. I expected to be signing a contract before Thanksgiving and touring the country signing copies in 2026.

Sometimes, I crack myself up.

The space between that disappointment and today has been focused on doing the work. Or, the work after the work.

I found a writing coach by accident last November, and she agreed to work with me on a revision. Which became two revisions. Then three. And finally four.

(I also wrote first drafts of four other novels and navigated some other significant life events along the way.)

Now, here we are eleven months later, and Revolution Summer is now Ophelia Doesn’t Drown.

Same book. Same bones. Significantly better.

As I prepare for this weekend’s James River Writers Conference — my first! — and an editorial call with Heather the following weekend to discuss revisions to Off Belay (technically book five?), I’ll also be sending queries to an initial list of agents.

This time, I know a little more about what I don’t know.

The confidence is still there.

This time, I’ve really done the work.

 OH RATS

In retrospect, it makes sense that the dog had been spending the past few weeks hovering around her food bowl.

She knew she was the target long before I figured it out.

It wasn’t until I heard the constant sound of wood being gnawed in the laundry room of my rental house that I took a hard look behind the washing machine.

A scattered pile of Addie’s dog kibble mixed with larger-than-rice pellets of rodent poop, and a fist-sized hole chewed through the baseboard.

Gemini was reassuring when I uploaded a photo: These are almost certainly mouse droppings, not rat droppings.

Gemini was lying, or at best misreading the size of the droppings, but it helped me get through the first night of, Oh my god could this rental house please stop with the curve balls already?

Todd was more direct when he swung by the house. “You have rats,” the biologist and gentle pest control dude in a tie-dyed shirt told me the next day. (Cue my inner Roy Kent.)

The good news about catching rats? You need a few days, maybe a week, of not trapping them in order to effectively trap them. (That’s really not good news FWIW.)

A week of jokes with the tween about pet rats. A week of Addie’s claws scrabbling at the hardwood flooring as she gave chase. A week of restless sleep. A week where the anxiety of having my throat ripped open in my sleep by a rat dropped from ~30% to almost zero.

A week is a long time. Or it is the longest week of Addie’s life.

She began her nights on the couch while I wrote and watched bad television. Every twenty-three minutes or so, she’d leap off the couch and charge across the living room, through the dining room and into the laundry room. I’d hear the sigh of canine disappointment as she made her way back to her perch.

When I went to bed, she’d position herself on the floor of the living room with direct line of sight of the laundry room. Physically blocking the hallway to the bedrooms.

A week of waking at two in the morning to see her silhouette down the hall. Sitting, staring, waiting. Teetering with exhaustion. A week of gently leading her to the bed, telling her she’s a good girl, rubbing her ears until she finally gave in and slept.

 START LIVING IN THE FUTURE NOW

When I bought my first house in 2003, I wanted to plant blackberry and blueberry bushes. I wanted an asparagus patch.

Oh, I thought, I probably won’t stay here more than five or six years. And it takes forever for asparagus to really flourish.

So, for 21 years I bought my blackberries and blueberries and asparagus from the farmers market.

In 2024, I had to move.

Finding an affordable, comfortable, three-bedroom rental in Richmond two years ago was not easy. When I found a brick rancher in Lakeside that had been recently renovated; that only cost $500 more than the mortgage of the house I was leaving; that was close enough to the kids’ schools — well, color me relieved.

I had a simple goal: make the place loosely comfortable as quickly as possible. I wanted to minimize disruption for the kids (ages 10 and 16 at the time) who were already being significantly disrupted. Let’s all take time to readjust, I thought, and then I’ll make it more homelike.

The rental house became my asparagus.

The routines of a new life, the challenges of an aging mom, the financial realities of running my own business.

It hasn’t been a bad house, once you discount the two hottest weeks of 2025 with a broken HVAC. Or the two coldest weeks of 2026 without heat. Or the rats.

Last week, I hit an inflection point: stay or leave?

I had a couple of good options. A few less good. And a catalyst — right, the rats — to really sharpen my thinking.

It boiled down to money and time. And maybe intention.

I could spend an additional $10,000 over a year — twelve months of rent, plus packing and moving services — for another rental in a better neighborhood with its own set of surprises. Or I could stop treating the house I was living in like next year’s home, and invest in making it more comfortable, more livable, more mine.

15 paintings that I haven’t hung. I’ve measured for the rugs, the hallway runner. Addie would be overjoyed for her makeshift pen to be transformed into a more expansive place to bark at the neighbors.

And two chairs, asparagus green, in the front yard where the tween and I can sit and unspool his day, or where he and his wayward college sister can reconnect, or where I can sit with friends and feel like I’m at home.

 THE WOW! SIGNAL

I have a friend in California who has been a human Wow! signal for most of my adult life.

Bob and I knew of each other in high school, had common friends when he was at William & Mary and I was at VCU, and stayed peripherally connected by odd overlaps and two significant, shared relationships. We had our first one-on-one adult interaction just this spring after decades of emails, club shows and group gatherings.

Bob’s Substack is ostensibly about music and writing. Or religion and punk rock. Or, more honestly, about belonging and home.

Belonging and home.

It’s sort of the throughline for the people I grew up with.

We were a wayward bunch. A lot of our parents were workaholics, divorcees, alcoholics, emotionally closed — honestly, humans but invested in a system.

We wanted a hug. An authentic experience. A place where we could breathe.

And for those of us who embraced punk rock, we found it in the scene.

That’s where Bob’s latest Substack picks up the thread. It’s an ambitious piece that starts with Moby Dick and names the fight that “every kid, period” is fighting, and gives readers a lived snapshot of virtually every punk house in early ‘90s Washington DC (except the Suspects house, because ska).

In a house where no one fits, everyone fits.

At their best, punk houses were oases from the harsh Darwinian wastes of America—a nation purporting to be “God’s country.” The term implies a broad benevolence, a recognition of human value that’s unconditional. But in fact America’s conditions for value are strict and merciless: Be whiter, straighter, maler, richer, bougier.

And the onus is on you alone, kid, to bootstrap your way to the top of the food chain. Even if the system is rigged against you. Especially if. That’s the American Dream.

But maybe there’s a different food chain, Bob suggests. A better one. Not the same mythology propagated by our parents. An idea that embraces the notion that every kid — and every adult who emerges from those gawky adolescent bones — has inherent value.

And then, because Bob, the piece goes bigger. Toward faith, but mostly toward what it means to rebel from a place of personal value — a belief that you matter. And the more expansive belief that if you matter, so does everyone else.

That’s the view from the front porch of some random punk house in Oregon Hill, circa 1988. September 3, as a matter of odd fact. It was a Saturday, and Charlie O’Donovan had an early release of Metallica’s …And Justice for All. A group of us gathered in a circle with Black Label and Milwaukee’s Best and probably nothing else, and listened to the opening guitar chords of “Blackened.”

For six minutes and forty-one seconds, we listened to a song about environmental collapse, nuclear war and the end of the world, and we felt like we belonged.

 FAMILY TIME

I got lucky this Labor Day weekend.

One kid has been a freshman in the dorms at VCU for three weeks. She doesn’t have classes on Friday, and Monday’s a holiday. The other just wrapped their first two weeks of middle school, also no school Friday and Monday.

With a kid in college, the way we are able to spend time together as a family has — again — irreversibly changed.

So I deliberately found a place — a small Airbnb in Ware Neck outside of Gloucester, Virginia — where we could be quiet together, check out quirky shops, walk some beaches.

Not a vacation, a friend noted.

Not a vacation indeed. Ice cream. A 375^th town anniversary celebration. Looking at old vacation photos over breakfast in town. Walking the amazing gardens at Brent & Becky’s Bulbs. Browsing at Nuttall Country Store (since 1877, y’all). Exploring Mathews. Walking beaches on the bay.

A family restoration, then.

 SHUT UP, LINE EDIT & STAY FOCUSED

A four-way editorial collision happened last week.

Here I was, carefully tending to my writing as both kids launched into new schools. I had 20,000 words of a new book (Down to the Sea) drafted, and was about eight chapters into the 50-chapter final round of edits of Ophelia Doesn’t Drown.

And then my book coach drops an email about Off Belay: I so enjoyed reading this! I used to live in North Carolina and love being in VA, so this was a real treat to hang out in the region again. Attached to the email: the manuscript with tons of notes, questions and suggestions, and a long editorial letter that struck the careful balance between enthusiasm, kindness and schoolmarm redirection.

Of course, I immediately pivoted to her editorial letter, and began scribbling notes to myself about how a revision of Off Belay might take shape. I got overwhelmed, so I scrolled through the first pages of Down to the Sea and stopped and started reading Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao. And her book got me thinking about another skeleton of a story — with a magical realism bent — that I mapped out last winter.

That was Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. And major work projects. And a middle schooler. Ridiculously hot weather.

Thursday snapped me awake.

Ophelia first. Finish the edits. Finish the query letter. Get the queries out to my list of 50 agents who are most aligned with this novel before the month is out. Go. Go. Go.

Then revise Off Belay. I know what the shape of the revision looks like, and I can get those bones set fairly easily. That’s next. Get a final first draft by the James River Writers Conference at the end of September.

And the other two — the 20,000 words of Down to the Sea, the magical realism skeleton from last winter — get parked until autumn. They’ll keep. That’s not the same as not planting them.

 FRIENDS ARE NICE FOR BLUEBERRY PICKIN’

I was eight, maybe nine, when my mom — at the edge of divorce — recruited me to be her plus-one in a bit of musical theater at Dogwood Dell.

She played the role of Madame Butterfly, and I was a turtle, and the play was about a bear and a bird who were setting off for Broadway. Every song from that production — written and directed by the amazing Jack Glover — remains glued to the synapses of my brain.

Friends are nice for blueberry pickin’ / Friends are nice for the mudpies made / Friends are nice for follow-your-shadow / Friends are nice for sitting in the shade…

For some reason I was thinking of this song as I drove home last Thursday night from a soul settling hang out in the East End with a friend and her college-age kid. I’d had a thing on my radar for Thursday, and my friend countered with a pop up at Giorno in Church Hill and a visit to Celeste Farms out in the far East End — because, she said, I just had to see it.

And now there I was: driving home from a thing someone else had discovered, and introduced me to, and I was happy.

That shouldn’t be an odd thing. But it is.

For years — too many, honestly — I was the planner. A weird combination of relationship anxiety, a mind that likes new landscapes, and a tendency to over-organize. “You take us interesting places,” is roughly the thing both my children have said to me with appreciation this year.

Give me an open week and a map, and I’d fill it with too many things that I felt other people would really enjoy. Emphasis on “too many things” and “felt.”

It’s not that I was often wrong, but over time adventures became too curated. Less shared. Less fun — for everyone. Me included.

Something began to turn last year, and more recently in the last few months.

“Give me a list of places you want to explore as a family,” I told my kids last Christmas when they badgered me about presents I wanted. The Blue Ridge Tunnel. The National Arboretum. Planet Word Museum in DC. Harpers Ferry. We’ve been chipping away this year. Mostly hits. A few misses.

Did I say mostly hits? What they were are adventures that I never would have found on my own.

Here’s a thing that I’m rediscovering this season: Sometimes, one of the best things I do is let other people take the wheel.

Celeste Farms. The last day of an amazing Aboriginal exhibition at the National Gallery of Art late last winter. Coffee at Le Petit Morceau, a little bakery tucked on the corner near Studio Two Three. Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Ice cream. The new film noir series running this fall at the University of Richmond. Dinner on a rooftop in Charlottesville.

None on my radar. All on my 2026 playlist, curated by friends.

Don’t get me wrong — I still have plans of my own. Adventures in the works with the tween, and with the tween and college freshman, this fall. A dozen shows and music festivals on the horizon. Zine Fest. Fine Arts and Flowers. The Impressionist Revolution.

But leaving more space. Space for reflection, or writing, or work. Space for friends. For surprises. Space for connection and exploration that I don’t want to anticipate. Just experience.

Another summer night in Dogwood Dell. A recent one. The twilight sky was grey and purple. The lights came up on stage, casting us in silhouette. A flock of geese cut across the waxing moon, flying low. And the music of Diana Ross — not my jam — washing over the crowd.

Another night in Dogwood Dell that I hadn’t planned. Another night I’ll remember.

 HOT ANALOGUE SUMMER REDUX

The summer of reading assignment I gave myself has been all over the place.

It was clear from the get-go that the exceedingly clever antics of Carl and Donut would begin to feel like the second season of a gooey sitcom that caught my attention at the wrong moment. I got through five books — some 600,000 words — of Dungeon Crawler Carl before my brain basically surrendered.

Fortunately, Whistler, by Ann Patchett was waiting for me.

Two chapters into Patchett’s latest and the doubt crept in. Oh, god, I thought, she’s going to take the predictable turn. I could see so clearly the six very specific tropes that were going to turn what initially felt like an interesting novel into the sort of disastrous summer beach read you wish you’d never picked up.

I was wrong. So wrong. And reflecting on the first novel of hers I read, Bel Canto, I never should have doubted.

Whistler, at its heart, is four stories — about marriage, parents, horses, and the ways small moments change everything. Even when we bury them deep in the recesses of our memory, and are surprised when they arrive four decades later to show us exactly when everything changed.

A woman and her husband encounter an older man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He appears to be following her. It’s the man who was her stepfather for one short year — when she was nine. The man who drove off a cliff one snowy night with her sitting in the front seat. They both survived, of course. But the cost — and the cost beneath the cost — is high. The gifts, born of their late-life encounter, are precious.

Next up: Someone on my socials flagged Water Moon, and I’m finally starting it. I mean a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets? Sign me up. In the queue: Eradication by Jonathan Miles. And I think I’m going to give These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home) by Bayo Akomolafe a go this week.

 SHE’D BE 87

Last Sunday would have been my mother’s 87^th birthday; she died this past March, unexpectedly.

The tween and I took flowers to Hollywood Cemetery, and as we drove through the maze of odd streets and granite markers, he said, “When I die, I’d like to be buried in a park. With a bench nearby.” (We had a clarifying discussion about timing.)

My middle sister has been in Florida on and off for the past several years, and when she texted me — How do I find mom’s grave? — Jack said, Oh, is she here? I told him she was in Florida, but three minutes later she pulled up.

In addition to bequeathing me the stupid art of containing my emotions and always seeking out the next interesting thing, my mom was a case study in resilience. If not genetic, it was a trait beaten into her by her family growing up at the end of the Great Depression. By trait, I think I mean attitude, and maybe an affliction — I remember her mother and aunts and uncles as wonderful, loving people who said things to her like, Here’s a dime for the streetcar in case you want to flee the church before the wedding. Put it in your shoe. and You should never expect to be happy. Just occasionally satisfied.

Inspiring stuff, that.

The memory I was sitting with last week was a summer afternoon on a strip of sand that sat between Beach Creek and the Rappahannock River. I was probably five. My mom, my two older sisters, my aunt, my two older cousins, all dropped off on the beach while my dad, uncle and grandmother took the boat out fishing.

A tremendous thunderstorm swept upriver without warning. When it was clear that the boat was not returning until the storm ended, my mom and aunt rounded up the kids and pointed us north and west. The narrow spit of sand ended and we waded through the driving rain and choppy waves — rocky cove after rocky cove. My mom carried me on her hip because the waves were over my head.

An hour later we hit a country road. Four miles from my uncle’s cottage. Hitched a ride, I think. The storm had ended by the time we got back to the house, and my dad and uncle were getting ready to take the boat back out to pick us up from the beach. (This part of my memory makes sense, and also doesn’t. Who leaves their family hanging out on a beach only accessible by boat through an insane storm? No wonder my mom and aunt both divorced their husbands not long after…)

What I really remember is how brave my mom seemed. What she remembered was being terrified but having no choice but to continue on through the waves with five crying children and her sister-in-law. And I think we actually remembered the same thing: how to push forward when all you want to do is stop. Which feels a lot better than carrying a dime around in case you got cold feet.

 SHUT UP & CREATE A BOMB-ASS BOOK TOUR

Next week, my friend Ebony Walden hurls herself (for perhaps the fiftieth time) into the arms of an uncaring universe.

She will do this with the full confidence that the universe is not what it appears to be, and that it is in fact a deeply caring place. I think Ebony knows that the universe is powered by the emotional energy of other people, and that we navigate it by acting, not drifting.

This particular leap of faith she’s making is one I’m watching closely. Because I am one of her many fans. And because I’m learning from her.

I always do.

The first time I saw — I mean really saw — Ebony was when she worked with several of us on a Floricane project in Charlottesville back in 2019. We were working on the development of a Black-centered community plan in the historic Starr Hill neighborhood. Watching her then helped me better understand the tension between action and reflection. She knew how to hold that tension in projects.

She’s demonstrating that same ability — holding the tension — with her book launch.

She’s kicking off her book tour. Her “Bomb-Ass Book Tour” to celebrate Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents.

She’s not just swinging from town to town reading excerpts. If you know Ebony, you’re well aware that she doesn’t roll with that sort of low-key vibe. At least not when she’s fully expressing herself.

It’s a full-on 90-day sprint she’s developed that takes her to places she’s called home, and to brand new places, to tell the stories of just one chapter of journeys that has helped her become more fully herself.

She’s kicking things off next Tuesday, September 8, with a bit of visual storytelling as she takes folks on a virtual journey of five continents, and what I’m sure will be a vibrant Q&A. You can enjoy the virtual book launch from home. Register for the “Around the World in 80 Photos” event.

Then she rolls right into an evening of storytelling, poetry, music, photos and videos — and of course Ebony connecting all of her travels to the idea of belonging, what it means to uncover and embrace identity, how to become more honestly in this hectic world.

And then it’s Charlottesville, DC, Long Island (we know it as “New York”), Manhattan and Brooklyn (same), California and Oregon, Mississippi and Arkansas. Not just readings. Also conversations, and panels, and salons, and food, and more. Three full months of travel and exploration, storytelling and connection. Which pretty much defines who Ebony is.

She wrote a 14 point Bomb-Ass Book Tour guide for her substack, which you can read and find a link to her website to explore more.

She helped me think differently about consulting seven years ago. Now she’s giving me new ways to think about publishing.

 KIND ENOUGH TO EXPLODE

In 1980, Carl Sagan famously took the world’s breath away with a reminder: We are made of star-stuff, he said.

Almost 30 years later, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss pushed Sagan’s truth further — a little more poetry, a little more science, a little more secular:

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements — the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution — weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

You don’t have to discard faith to appreciate the physics, but the raw reality of cosmology is staggering enough on its own.

Your body is built from seven octillion atoms (roughly a trillion trillion packed into your pinky finger alone) drawn from countless distinct stellar furnaces across deep time. You are a cosmic assembly project of dead suns that had no intention of creating you. Humanity wasn’t the goal of the universe; we are simply what happens when the debris of dying stars is given enough time to wake up and think.

Sit with that for the week, would you?

 HOT ANALOGUE SUMMER

I will forever owe apologies to authors I’ll never meet.

Most recently this would include Marilynne Robinson and Gabrielle Zevin — for not being able to wrap my head around their novels during this long, hot analogue summer of mine.

I was distracted by two very different ends of the literary food chain — Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and… well, the literary equivalent of Pringles.

No apologies for my foray into the lower brow Dungeon Crawler Carl rabbit — or, more accurately, kobold — bolt hole. I fell into that particular hole last week after my friend Sam mentioned that he was on the eighth novel in the series. Four books in, and I can say that there is still room in my life for well-constructed, well-written fluff. Lines like, “Did we really just start a meth war between the goblins and the llamas?”

Carl aside, I’ve turned a corner, entering the weekend with Ann Patchett’s Whistler, having last encountered her with Bel Canto. And waiting for Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt and Water Moon to be released from my library wait list. Related: overdue library books! Sorry to whoever was waiting on me!

 THE 25-YEAR LETTER

The sweetest thing I’ve read in some time is this piece about a young girl who once wrote a letter to an amazing musician whose music spoke deeply to her — and then he killed himself, and she grew up and built a life.

Then she stopped writing. Because life.

The artist was Elliott Smith. The girl was Kirby.

“I try to write my own songs and make them as unique and personal to me as your work is to you,” Kirby wrote Elliott in 2000, when she was seventeen.

Elliott Smith never wrote Kirby back.

Well, that’s not exactly right.

One day the person working on a biography of the artist found Kirby’s letter in a box. Along with Elliott’s reply. That had never been sent.

She found the grown up young girl and read her letter and his reply to her over the phone, and they both wept.

“I’m glad you see creativity in yourself, the world needs as much of it as it can get, so go out and kick ass!” Elliott wrote 17-year-old Kirby in a letter that Kirby didn’t hear until she was in her 40s.

She’s now writing again. Thanks to Elliott Smith, and a long-delayed response.

 THE RUDEST BARISTAS ON THE INTERNET

Another of my favorite things on the Internet are the weekly video shorts in which Thyme and Kale deadpan behind the counter of an aggressively non-hip coffee shop.

Writers Pooja Tripathi (Thyme) and Darryl Gene Daughtry (Kale) are brilliant. And Cosmo India just ran a spotlight piece on Tripathi that’s a good intro to the Brooklyn Coffee Shop concept, and a fun read:

There is a woman in New York who does not drink coffee, yet there she is, standing behind the Brooklyn Coffee Shop counter, reading a provocative book — a different one every time, there is no world in which she’s actually finished any of them. She is full of disdain, has a vocal fry, and she is mean.

The brilliance of the show lies in who walks through their doors. There’s the customer who attempts to out-wake and out-hipster Thyme and Kale (episode 34) with a shout out to the stolen land once inhabited by protons and neutrons. And the deeply anxious customer who turns her coffee order into a therapy session, dissecting her messy dating life and “spiraling because her situationship hasn’t texted back in exactly 25 hours and 19 minutes.

Tripathi plays the permanently perturbed Thyme well enough that when she recently posted headshots of herself smiling, fans flooded the comments. “This is AI,” they wrote. And “I’m disturbed by this.”

Related: I may be the penultimate situationship girl.

 WAITING ON FUGAZI

There are always rumors. There have been for decades now.

Ever since one of the most influential, and invisible, post-punk bands in the world called it a day — they played their last show on November 4, 2002, in London — rumors have percolated about a return.

Drummer Brendan Canty, who still plays with bassist Joe Lally, in the instrumental jazz band The Messthetics (coming to Revéler in September), recently added fuel to the “Fugazi should totally get back together” fire.

“Do I wish we could keep playing? Yes,” he said in an interview with Heavy Consequence about his career scoring films. “I wish we could all be out there playing now. I love those songs. I love writing with those guys, but we’ll see.”

Translation: probably not. But in the land of wishful thinking, I keep going back to their 1993 Concert for Justice performance on the National Mall. And in the current political environment, I’d love nothing more than to see them set up on the Mall again — preferably near the Reflecting Pool — and declare a day of independence. And then play for five hours straight.

That’s what Fugazi should do. If they have a reunion show.

 A LITTLE ITALIAN KIDNAPPING ADVENTURE

Since it doesn’t appear to be headed to a theatre near me, I am ready to pay to watch a movie at home — with a director Q&A.

The movie? The Kidnapping of Arabella, or in the Italian Il rapimento de Arabella. It’s a stylized comedy by Carolina Cavalli about two lost souls, and an attempt to rewrite the past.

The film features a delightfully deadpan performance by Benedetta Porcaroli as a disillusioned 28-year-old convinced her life hit the skids when she was a child. She meets Arabella, a rebellious eight-year-old trying to escape the orbit of her father, a self-absorbed author. Antics follow. Chris Pine apparently steals the show, or a scene or two, as Arabella’s father — entirely in Italian.

I’ll be enjoying a little quarter-life crisis and celebrating Hollywood royalty committing to obscure Italian indie cinemafrom the luxury of my couch later this week.

 YES, COFFEE WITH FRANKOPAN, PLEASE

I’m sure you’ve read The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. Or, maybe you’re like me and you haven’t.

Maybe you’re like me and have never heard of Peter Frankopan.

It was a gift link to a Bloomberg News interview that my friend Matt sent me that moved the British historian and writer onto my Breakfast with Interesting People list. (I’m linking to the full interview on Hvylya.)

The interview starts with some fundamentals. Wars of choice are terrible, and they’re hard to win. Iran and Ukraine are exemplars of this — just as Putin and Trump perfectly illustrate what feels like the real thesis of the interview. It arrives about midway:

Powerful men often miscalculate and think their muscles and brain power are stronger and better than anybody else’s.

…we see Putin micromanaging the war. We see Trump opening the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to charge tariffs on passage by volume of cargo, and then changing his mind 24 hours later. Both of them blow in the wind. Neither stays on target, defines the goal and then works out how to get there. That is a bad way to run a war.

Frankopan pivots toward the end to the state of global politics in 2026 — shaped, not surprisingly, by global warming. Heatwaves. Droughts. Wildfires. Crop failure. And unconscionable levels of inequality. For generations, both the United Nations and the United States carried the ball in humanitarian and disaster relief. Today, neither has the capacity or the leadership to fill the gap.

Frankopan stops here. I’ll push on with half a thought, and try to connect a dot.

It’s true that both Ukraine and Iran are poorly managed power moves. But the misfires don’t stop there.

The U.S. strong-arming Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland.

Russia in aggressively meddling in Moldova, the Central African Republic, the Baltics.

Let’s not forget that China is on the board. Frankopan notes early in his interview that the deals struck between China and Russia have essentially made Russia a resource colony, as Xi scours the world to sustain his empire. China has absolutely locked in on Africa as a major economic spoke in its global engine.

Three large nations. Three leaders who consistently value systems of control over systems of care.

In the next decade, instead of finding global approaches to help seven billion people navigate a complicated and perilous future, we’re going to back our way — eyes wide open — into a world of walls.

God help the five billion people who live on the other side. Because — I’m afraid — the United States will not.

 SHUT UP & JUST TAKE A BREATH

Well, I got Loch and Cassie to the swimming hole outside of Carrboro (also known as roughly 20,000 words into Down to the Sea). And then I paused.

I had work. A kid to move into the VCU dorms. Long walks and ice cream and listening to Donna Summer on a summer night with a friend. So, for a few days, a week perhaps, I am letting myself exhale, put down the pen, and step out of fiction.

When I return to it, I need to briefly get everyone back to Wilmington and then point Christopher and Andrea west on Interstate 40 headed for Scottsdale. That’s when the Appointment in Samarra and Anabasis begin to subtly shape the very difficult second, third and fourth acts — racing west to avoid fate, the inevitable, and then the long march home saddled with hopelessness and despair. Home, to the sea.

Thalatta, indeed.

 A SIMPLE PRESENT FROM MY KIDS

This time, I really tried.

As a Christmas present, the kids gave me a list of places they wanted to visit with me, experiences they wanted to have, this summer. Thea had an additional request: Let’s not do everything in one trip.

This past week we took two mini-trips. I tried to make each one digestible.

First, we took Amtrak to DC on Monday. We stayed in Alexandria. And went to Project Word, a museum centered around language and words that Thea uncovered. Then we had dinner with some family friends. Tuesday morning, we schlepped out to the National Arboretum. Explored the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Stumbled into an exhibit at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. And then loitered for too many hours in Union Station before taking the Amtrak home.

Wednesday, we drove to the Blue Ridge Tunnel near Afton and hiked — picked some flowers, then continued on to Harrisonburg to see our friends, Tom and Judy. We had dinner, stayed overnight, then took a morning hike with them and their dogs (ages 13 and 16!). Thursday, we took back roads home with a stop at the Market at Grelen, and a sad bonus: feeling overwhelmed by the sheer size of a data center being built in Louisa as we drove past.

Friday was recovery day.

What I mean to say is it was a really good week. And slow enough that I was able to see something I already know and appreciate more clearly. My kids are easy, smart and fun to be around.

I really appreciate the gift of seeing my tween and a college-bound teen in ways both new and old at the end of the long week of exploration and boredom.

As dinner wound down with my friends Matt and Kristen, Thea leaned over and whispered that she was going to take Jack for ice cream, then back to the hotel. “So you can have some adult time with your friends,” she explained, casually.

The next day, when we were all tired of walking and I suggested we check out Palmer Alley in City Center, Jack stretched and immediately said yes. Which led us to the crazy animal statues of “A Wild Race Against Time,” and then the MLK Library exhibit. No one was jaded. No one checked out.

“Let’s not,” Thea saying as I suggested one more thing Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s,” Jack saying at a different moment.

Jack’s quirky, off-hand comments. The two of them walking ahead of me, comfortable with each other. Thea pulling Jack playfully along when he was completely done at the Arboretum.

Rebounding quickly from a case of the grumps. Suggesting adjustments. Tolerating shitty hotel rooms (major fail, Harrisonburg). Zoning out during the last leg of the trip.

My kids are smart. They’re fun. They’re resilient.

And they really love each other.

That’s the present they gave me.

 ONE BIG AWKWARD DANCE

I’d like to believe that my fundamental orientation toward people is to move toward them. To reach out. To share a thought. To initiate.

Unsolicited this summer, both the teen and the tween named this as one of the things they like about me: You have a wonderful ability to make life feel full of invitations and You take us on adventures. (Their words.)

You can’t get more clarity than that from two people who know you deeply and authentically.

I have another fundamental orientation that is anchored by decades of insecurity. It’s something along the lines of, Maybe you’re not enough, or maybe you’re too much.

I spent a number of years of my adult life getting tangled between these two orientations in a sort of social and relational paralysis. I’ve spent the last two years exploring what it looks like to lean harder into outreach and initiation. Trying to surrender the insecurity (or reassure it at least).

As I work on a new center of gravity to carry me through this next chapter of life, I’m beginning to realize something else.

Maybe we live in a world where it is natural — for reasons — to wait to be moved toward. One big Sadie Hawkins Dance.

And as I do on every dance floor, perhaps I have spent most of my life misreading almost everything about other people.

 WHAT DESERVES A WALL

I’ve acquired a lot of artwork this year. It’s all leaning against various walls in my rental house.

I still wonder how people decide where (and how) to hang their favorite art. Now, having accumulated all these things during a time when I’ve been dismantling and rebuilding a life, I actually have to decide where they belong.

I’m sharing them here because I think they’re all differently lovely. The images above are six of my favorites right now:

• I spent hours combing through my friend Judith Anderson’s paintings earlier this year before settling on these three abstract pieces.

• Jack spent six weeks at VCU art camp, and I asked if I could have this oil acrylic he did of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.

• The color and composition of this room in Philadelphia caught my eye, and reminded me of Raoul Dufy. It’s by Katie Pape, who runs an art collective in Saxapahaw, North Carolina.

• Katie also did these three small watercolors of the Haw River.

• I bought this effervescent moose print when my friend Kitt and I went to see Walter Salas-Humara at Chilton House last month.

• My mom painted this spray of yellow flowers more than fifty years ago, and it was headed for the trashcan when I grabbed it. It deserved a frame, and a place in my home.

 OCCUPYING MIND SPACE

Creating and sustaining relationships, still. What my life will look like this fall with one kid in college, and Jack and I not just staring at each other across our computers every other week.

Aging dogs. Figuring out how and where to hang all of this artwork. How to keep my life feeling like it is full of invitations, both extended and accepted.

Some major projects that just landed in my lap at Floricane. Novels, reading and writing them. New bands I want to discover and love.

Misogyny and politics (and music, and business, and education). Michigan and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Ukraine and Russia and NATO.

How we can possibly rebalance artificial intelligence without breaking the global environment, our global and local cultures, the global economy, and our ability to think and learn critically.

Little things.

 SHUT UP, START EARLY & GO SLOW

I had this idea that I would start a new novel in October, and then July happened.

I’ve been taking it slow. Actually working on plot, thinking about characters, sketching chapters before I start writing them.

Scanning the first ~12,000 words of Down to the Sea makes me think that I’ve got a pretty solid novel in progress.

Nothing seems broken yet.

 TRUE UP UNTIL NOW

Years ago, I went to Cape Cod for a week to hang out with older, smarter people and learn things.

Our instructors at the Cape Cod Institute? Charlie and Edie Seashore, who were among a small group of people in the 1950s who did breakthrough work in organizational psychology in Bethel, Maine. They spent their careers transforming others.

I often describe them in larger-than-life language, because that was my experience with them.

Charlie projected a bit of an aw shucks Midwestern vibe. A big man with a big grin, he wore his hat high on his head and his pants pulled high to his waist.

Edie was smaller, an easterner who favored black, and pearls, and who facilitated with a bottle of water (and later told us that she used to sip from a water bottle filled with gin to calm her nerves in front of groups).

They were profoundly influential — individually, and as partners in work and life for more than 50 years. They changed the profession of organizational development, and in the course of several days they changed me.

I’ve been thinking about feedback this week. Not the kind you don’t want to get at work, but rather the endless cascade of signals we receive every single day that tell us something about ourselves, about others, about the world we’re passing through.

In Cape Cod, Charlie threw out three pieces of feedback jiu-jitsu that took me three days to process.

1. Feedback is just information. Just data.

2. Feedback tells you more about the giver than it does about the receiver.

3. When Charlie is giving feedback to John, there is no John. Only the John in Charlie. And when John is receiving feedback from Charlie, there is no Charlie. Only the Charlie in John.

Or in the vernacular, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

Sometimes I feel like I’ve received more feedback in the past three years than I can possibly absorb. The end of a marriage. The death of a parent. Two children growing through changes they couldn’t anticipate. My work as a consultant. My work as a novelist. Navigating and sustaining relationships, old and new. Buckets of feedback, data, information.

Not all of it required action.

And not all of it was about me.

How do we stay open to signals when some of them are brutal? What do we do with information that feels weaponized, intentionally or not?

We often treat feedback like a verdict. Something chiseled in stone that has been handed to us to hold forever.

But it’s not. It’s an invitation. Brutal or generous, accurate or hateful, it asks something of us — even if all it asks is that we set it down and walk away.

Edie had a move.

When someone said I don’t believe that or I can’t do that or that’s just how I am, she’d reframe it as something that was true up until now.

I just received information. About something that was true. Up until now.

Because what I do next changes everything.

 THE NOSEBLEED SEATS

A week ago, I took my soon-to-be college freshman to In Your Ear Studios in the middle of the day to see The Hotpants play a fast but furious live-in-studio set for WNRN’s 30th anniversary.

We sat in comfortable chairs with 30 other people and enjoyed a rocking show. Then we went to Millie’s Diner for lunch — a first for her.

Turns out, it was a week of firsts, old favorites and things I’d been waiting years to do.

The next night, I went to the National to see Pavement. The last time I saw them, Thea was with me — a high school freshman. The show was outdoors on a warm summer night in Raleigh on the heels of an amazing Alvvays set.

I can still remember listening to an early release of their first album when I was her age. Scratching my neanderthal punk rock head. It was sonically discordant, a little snotty and precious, damned catchy. It took half a second.

Musically, the National show was great. They hit the right notes. They almost appeared to be enjoying themselves (especially Nastanovich, who always seems to be having fun). But after five songs I traded the sardine-packed floor and other people’s endless beer spilling for a nosebleed seat in the balcony. Enjoyed another hour, including two favorites, “Shoot the Singer” and “Frontwards,” and went home happy.

The trifecta closed at Chilton House.

The Silos were one of the few non-punk bands in constant rotation in my room my freshman year at VCU, and I’ve never seen them live.

So when singer Walter Salas-Humara locked in a date at Chilton, a house venue in Westover Hills, I grabbed two tickets. I went with a friend — a recent refugee from Charlottesville, still getting her Richmond bearings. We played pinball, bought two of Walter’s paintings, and enjoyed the hell out of the show. Sitting in two of the six comfortable chairs in the house.

We even enjoyed the shenanigans of the very drunk woman next to me, who had no filter, no social awareness and no volume control.

There was something deeply satisfying about hearing Salas-Humara stalk through a few Silos tunes and a collection of his own songs. He knew how to use his voice. He had amazing range. He belted through a repertoire of great songs. Perhaps the best show of the week, and my favorite Chilton House performer to-date.

Three great shows in a week. A daughter on the edge of college. Bands that have followed me for decades. Seats comfortably away from the beer-spilling crowd.

I know it’s only rock-and-roll.

But I like it.

 GREETINGS FROM RICHMOND

It’s been a week of vanishing and reappearing murals in Richmond.

And while I’m more interested in the new mural that nods to Bill Martin eight months after his death, I can’t help but start with the other one.

It was, perhaps, the cutest mural in Richmond. It just happened to be on the large exterior wall of a sex shop. And to carry a bit of innuendo.

Yes, I’m talking about the beaver mural on the former Taboo building on Midlothian Turnpike, out near NBC12.

Karri Peifer has the sexy update at Axios: The “Feed Ur Beaver” mural that drew outrage, jokes and international attention when it went up more than a decade ago, is being painted over with a new design.

The replacement? A woman playing with a cat. With a feather toy.

New mural. New innuendo. Hopefully still adorable.

The more somber mural news comes from Sabrina Moreno, who has the story of the return of the “Greetings from Richmond, Virginia” mural at 311 West Broad Street. First there was the original, with images of the city tucked inside the block letters. Then came the 2020 update, which folded in the protests and the community takeover of Monument Avenue. That one was painted over, and nobody ever explained why.

Now it’s back. Less controversially. As a tribute to Bill Martin, the longtime director of the Valentine — and the face of Richmond to so many people. It’s a quite visual nod, but one that will resonate strongly with people who knew Bill.

The most direct nod is a silhouette. Artists Mickael Broth and Ross Trimmer painted Bill in his signature pose and tie, with “In loving memory” just below it.

Everything else is deliberately oblique. The new mural honors Bill’s his lifelong mission of getting people downtown — to appreciate Broad Street, to watch the city thrive. The form is the tribute.

Then the hidden ones. Each letter holds a Broad Street landmark across time, from the streetcar era to the Science Museum — with St. John’s Church inside the “D” because Martin lived nearby, and newer landmarks like the VPM building marking the corridor’s ongoing change. And tucked in somewhere is the parquet floor pattern from the Valentine’s Wickham House.

Two walls. Three changes. Evolution, not dilution.

Public art at its best.

 THE MELODIC SHAPE OF YEARNING

Just before the pandemic dropped, Danish musician Carl Martin wrote a melody. He thought it was beautiful. And he thought it was original.

The tune rises, and then it falls, and then it rises again — circling back to the start. Four simple notes.

“I thought this is the best thing anybody in the history of music has ever written,” Martin, now 27, told the Washington Post. “I was just waiting for the record labels to come knocking.”

And once he wrote it, he couldn’t stop hearing it. Not his own melody in his head — but the melody he thought he’d discovered in a Bruno Mars song, in pop songs, in a song by Danish heavy rock band Volbeat, in a song by Italian singer Damiano David. Everywhere.

The more he looked into it, the more he realized he hasn’t invented anything.

He ultimately documented more than 500 songs that were built on this simple melody. It’s a deeply emotional melody, one that projects what he calls a “yearning quality.”

Maybe that’s why it keeps resurfacing: not because musicians lack originality, but because yearning has a limited number of shapes. (Truth.)

Okay so everybody’s copying everybody and they are basically doing an interpolation of this melody. But who made the melody?

Clairo pops up. Her hit “Sophia” contains the melody, and the melody gained traction not long after she released the song. Martin followed the music — back to 2010 and Lady Gaga. He kept digging, all the way back 2004 where he found the oldest use of the melody.

Martin eventually traces it back to 2004. I’ll let him reveal the originator.His YouTube video provides the better pleasure of hearing the melody travel across two decades of songs, changing just enough each time to feel newly discovered.

 SHUT UP & QUERY

Finally.

I had the last call.

Heather Demetrios and I chatted this past week about Ophelia Doesn’t Drown; we’ve been working on it together since February.

The book is done — not perfect, but so much better. The focus of our call was on what happens next.

What do you do with a story that poured out in a matter of weeks, and was beaten and hammered into a purer, clearer shape with six months of developmental editing?

First, you learn. I still hate structure. I still fight structure. But I’m learning to use structure to write better the first time.

My old impulse: dive in and write, and trust the story will show up.

My new impulse: dive in and shape the story — the arc, the characters, the point-of-view, the broad roadmap to a final destination — and then write, and know the story will show up better.

Second, you go sell the book.

Heather and I spent most of the hour on positioning, which is its own puzzle. She says it reads YA, because there’s too much heart in it to be anything else. But it isn’t a coming-out story, exactly. Leah and Kira’s world doesn’t fracture because of who they love — their friends don’t turn on them, their families don’t implode. It’s a story about a group of people moving through a stretch of their lives, and the love is inside that rather than on top of it.

Whether I can find an agent who knows what to do with that is one question. Whether that agent is enough of a unicorn to know what to do with me — a fifty-eight-year-old cis man writing two teenage girls in love — is another.

I’ll have to answer that one out loud at some point.

So, I identify the literary agents, and I write the query letters, and I wait.

And in the meantime, Heather’s reading Off Belay, so we’ll start revisions on that as I’m pitching Ophelia Doesn’t Drown. And writing Down to the Sea. And getting Thea to college, Jack into middle school, and rolling my sleeves up for one of Floricane’s biggest project lifts in several years.

I probably need more structure in my life.

 STEALING TIME FOR MYSELF

When I was a kid, summers were slow.

We didn’t take family vacations — just occasional long weekends at someone’s cottage on the Rappahannock or Piankatank. Swim practice most mornings. Swim meets, unless it stormed. Football in the lot behind Southern Bank. Slurpees after we scoured construction sites for recyclable bottles.

I read. A lot. One hundred and thirty-five books one summer. I marked each one off on the Bon Air Library’s summer reading contest sheet.

I had all the time in the world.

Today, slowing down sometimes feels like I’m stealing from myself.

I careened into last weekend with some force, despite the smoke-filled skies. (Thanks, Canada. Also, I’m so sorry.)

Author interviews and art openings and poetry readings had rolled into seven events, two books I wanted to finish, the usual household chores, and a yard to cut if the smoke and heat cooperated.

And then I gave myself a break.

I skipped Shut Up & Write. Canceled something else. Sat around reading for most of Saturday, then had dinner with a good friend.

Sunday, I slept in. Skipped an online writing conference. Had coffee with another friend. Saw two bands. Slowly wandered my way into the work week.

I didn’t slow down because I wanted less of anything. I slowed down to take a breath.

I’ve known for years — since the first time I lived on my own — that putting something on the calendar does not obligate me to become the person who can do everything. A plan is not a promise. An opportunity is not an assignment.

But I used to treat them that way.

Then I realized that most of the time, I’m the only person who knows I didn’t go to the movie, or the nature walk, or show up to make Moon Spell Jars.

Going or not going matters mostly to me. Increasingly, that means going more to the things that matter mostly to me.

Throttling down doesn’t mean I have to disappoint anyone. Not even myself. It’s just making room. To read a book or binge a TV show. To walk the dog when it isn’t a hundred degrees and the air no longer resembles Mordor.

This coming week is interesting.

Three days packed with Floricane work — client interviews, a self-awareness workshop, a strategy session, and planning for a project that may well destroy all my myths about work-life balance.

Three more filled with lunches and movies and walks and lectures and music with friends. Plus a lot of writing, and a meeting with my writing coach.

On the seventh day, I’ll rest.

Because the following week, I’m taking the kids on vacation.

 HOT ANALOGUE SUMMER: YOU’LL NEVER CATCH UP

I envy Monica Hesse many things — her semi-steady job as a journalist; her many books, her almost Pulitzer.

I don’t envy her responding individually to more than 700 Washington Post readers who wanted details.

In her essay last week about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, she mentioned that she cut three paragraphs about linguistics. And then wrote, ‘please email me if you would like to hear’ the details.

They did, natch. More than 700 of them. (I thought about it at the time, but demurred.)

You know what that means, right? You’re correct, and she wrote about it a few days later.

Since I’d promised to write back to everyone directly, I wanted to write back to everyone directly, and I have just emerged from 16 hours of doing that.

I appreciated her commitment to her readers. But what I really enjoyed was her take on a dodgy older man who berated her for not reading Homer in high school or college. Then noted he was just starting Pride and Prejudice.

She had some spicy things to say in return about who reads Jane Austen in high school, versus who might read Homer.

What caught my eye was her suggestion that reading is not a competition, not a game.

Books are not a timed exercise, a game you are only eligible to play between the ages of 12 and 18. The literary canon is not a puzzle with a set number of pieces that perfectly interlock and must be picked up and put down in a certain sequence. You can’t read everything, and it’s never too late to read something.

It’s never too late to read something. It’s never too late to be inspired to read something. It doesn’t matter why you walk through the open door of a book, or what inspired you to take the step. You’re never behind. And you’ll never catch up.

When I scan the NYTimes’ list of ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century,” I realize there are plenty of literary fish in the sea. And that’s just 21^st century fish. And, being fully honest, I’ve only read 8% of them. (Note: I’m surprised to see Elena Ferrante listed three times.)

Which is why I stayed home last weekend and read comic book icon Frank Miller’s take on his life and his craft. Finished I See You Called in Dead by John Kenney. Re-started The Iliad, and have Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt and Whistler and Water Moon on hold. It’s why I bought Thea a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird last week. Not because they were on the list. But because I want to read them, or share them.

Hot Analogue Summer continues this week. It’s time to finally crack the spine on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

 THE SILOS. GREG DARDEN. PAVEMENT. TULSA DRONE.

My musical dance card has been coming up handsome in recent weeks — and decidedly heavy on the XY chromosomes.

Which is funny since my daughter mocks my playlist — thick with women-fronted bands from the British Commonwealth.

July has inadvertently resurfaced a series of long-deferred musical crushes on Richmond (and Richmond-adjacent) musicians. Turns out they all share similar characteristics.

Let me explain.

The Silos released their second album, Cuba, when I was starting college. It parallels This Is the Sea by the Waterboys, released two years earlier, as one of the more genuinely complete albums of my younger life. Singer and artist Walter Salas-Humara founded the band in New York City. Their Richmond connection is through co-founder Bob Rupe, who settled in Richmond years back and recorded and played with House of Freaks, Sparklehorse and Cracker.

I never got to see The Silos live. But this week I’ll see Salas-Humara live and up close at Chilton House.

Last week, I managed to slow down just enough to dodge a thunderstorm and see one of my oldest Richmond friends play a brief set of ambient/experimental electronic music. It was a treat to see Greg Darden, one of Richmond’s dreamiest (and maybe least visible) musicians doing what he loves.

Tonight, I’ll resurface my boy crushes on Steve West and Steve Malkmus when I squeeze into the National to catch Pavement’s return to Richmond. I first fell for Steve West when his band Contoocook Line released their only album — honestly, I had a crush on the whole band, John Smith, Hanby Carter, Rob Williams. West went on to join Pavement as their drummer, and that band had already been on my radar courtesy of my prescient then-girlfriend Chesley, who lived with half the band during her UVa days.

The capstone? Discovering this week that Tulsa Drone — another Richmond band formed around lean stature, chiseled cheek bones, cinematic vibes and musical brilliance — is releasing its third album. Scott Hudgins, Jim Thompson, and Bobby Donne all would have made my wall of alternative-adjacent boy band posters if I had ever thought to create one.

I hadn’t really thought about a gender throughline to these bands I’ve loved over the years. But there it is. It’s still about the music first — these are all bands whose music broke through my American hardcore teenage brain, softened its edges. They’re all extremely competent with a deep commitment to their art, their craft. And they’re, individually, some of the kindest men I’ve known — some long and well, others on the margins.

I’m enjoying spending these last weeks of July with music crafted along a spine of competent, creative and kind. My kind of guys.

 THE SPIDER LADY OF VIRGINIA

A recent Facebook group chat — the Richmond Counterculture group — surfaced a fun trip down memory lane, and the imperfection of what we think we know.

For the longest time, if you had asked me where the old ‘Richmond spider museum’ was I would have hemmed and hawed and pointed generally in the direction of Route 360 north and toward Mechanicsville.

Wrong.

Does anyone remember the Spider Museum? It was run by a woman on the outskirts. An abandoned house with no windows. Spiders on display. A path in the woods with webs and the species labeled.

I remembered. So did the Washington Post. And their 1982 story about araneologist Ann Moreton told me far more than I remembered about the museum, including its location in Powhatan (south and west). And much more about the woman who left her adult life as a wife and mother in Mississippi and turned in a new direction:

I came from a large family, and I married into a large family,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know if I had the ability to live by myself. You know, just say ‘good morning’ to people and then take care of yourself the rest of the day.’ She sought her answer about isolation in the Everglades, and after two weeks photographing spiders there, as Christmas rolled around, ‘I didn’t want to go home.

Moreton spent the next five years on the road, chasing spiders in 50 states. In time, her photographs were published in encyclopedias and placed on the walls of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and Washington’s Smithsonian Institution. Now, she says, ‘I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s life in the world.’

Moreton was 71 when the Post interviewed her — 44 years ago. The museum went to the Math and Science Center in 1979. Her live spiders were later donated to Harvard, and her photos to the Smithsonian.

Moreton’s life is so much richer now that I’ve moved past “Does anyone remember?” to “Tell me a story.” I wonder what I’d chase on the road for five years, through 50 states…

 SHUT UP & THINK IN COLOR

A week into book six.

A deep dive into The Iliad, and an Appointment in Samarra, and Anabasis. Character sketches that tell me nothing useful about what the five main characters look like, how they dress, what they eat — but everything about how they emotionally and socially navigate the world.

When I was writing Off Belay, I was struggling with behavioral consistency. I wanted to make sure that Harrison and Ellie, especially at their most vulnerable and intimate, were acting in ways that were really aligned with who I thought they were, and who they were becoming.

Thank you, Carl Jung.

I’ve spent most of my consulting life facilitating thousands of people through conversations about their personal preferences and behavioral styles (using a tool called Insights® Discovery).

So when I thought about how Christopher and Andrea, the guy who builds jetties and berms in coastal North Carolina and writes villanelles and his wife, the emergency room doctor who hunts for sea glass in her off hours, would navigate a serious health crisis and its impacts on his adult daughter and their teenage son, I turned first to the Insights® color wheel.

He was, I thought, an introverted feeler. A dominant sensor. Lime Green on the Insights® wheel. A supportive helper in Insights® language. A man who needed to chew on something until it made deep sense. Hence the repetition of the villanelle. The knowledge of tidal charts that lived in his bones. His reliance on Andrea as a catalyst to unmoor him, get him moving.

She was a deeply intuitive feeler. But equally a strong extraverted thinker who pivoted fast, acted before she fully knew a thing. Orange. A directing motivator. The emergency room. Her assertiveness within her family. Her reliance on Christopher to add dimensionality to her motion, to bring the periphery to her vision.

That was the first week, and now I’m in it. Just a few thousand words. But it’s already a different story than I first expected. Because that’s how writing life — well, life — works.

 CONVIVENCIA IN GLEN ALLEN

I went out to see some art at the Cultural Arts Center of Glen Allen last week.

Part whim, part responding to an email from Culture Encounters, a Richmond non-profit that’s focused on building bridges through cultural experiences.

And I discovered the amazing artwork of Alfonso Pérez Acosta — a handful of images from the exhibit (cropped to fit Substack) are scattered throughout this issue. I had a chance to chat with Alfonso briefly, ran into Noah Scalin, and had a cookie.

 15 WAYS TO SAY NAIL

Years ago, I spent a long month in Cairo with my friend Matt.

While he was in class, I passed the hours in run-down cafes — wandering tribes of cats playing at my feet and jumping into my lap to nap, a cup of Lipton steaming in front of me — trying to teach myself Arabic. I practiced the alphabet, letter by letter, in careful script. I wrote words, transcribed sentences. I silently repeated sounds over and again in my mind.

Old men wandered by, paused and praised my written script — in English, once they realized that despite my excellent penmanship I had no verbal mastery of their native tongue.

I berated myself, frustrated by my slow pace and the distance that was not closing at all between where I started and mastery.

One evening, Matt and I were walking through one of the city’s beat-down old neighborhoods. He asked me to wait while he ducked into a small hardware store crammed into a concrete nook. He emerged fifteen minutes later, grinning like a kid.

“I just learned fifteen different ways to say ‘nail,’” he said.

I liken what Matt was doing in that hardware store to Shoshin, the Zen concept of beginner’s mind. Approaching a subject or a practice with openness, eagerness, a lack of preconception. Matt walked into that hardware store not just knowing that he didn’t know, but believing that it was entirely fine to not know.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is Shoshin’s more outcome-focused cousin — an apprentice mindset. Its attributes are not dissimilar: humility, curiosity, and a willingness to start at square one. But less about belief. More about effort.

Ego gets in the way of belief. The scorecard gets in the way of the work.

Matt walked into that hardware store an apprentice. I sat in those damned cafes with hubris and a red pen.

When I reflect back, I’ve spent most of my life as an apprentice — dating, college, journalism, raising tiny humans, leadership development, nonprofit strategy, more dating, tiny humans becoming larger humans.

There’s little in my life that hasn’t demanded I do the work before I get good at doing the work. When I allow myself to just do the work — humbly, and without keeping score — I get better at it. With effort. Over time.

And when I get better at being an apprentice, I sometimes find myself drifting toward Shoshin. Because they’re not sequential, these approaches — they’re adjacent.

The last two years have felt different. Somewhere between Shoshin and being an apprentice.

I approached the first six months of living alone and coparenting as a project, because it’s what the moment demanded. Or maybe it was the only skillset I brought with me from my old life. Whatever. It worked. It created stability, continuity, a rhythm that helped me find a stride most days.

But variables change in every project lifecycle.

A rental house. Two kids. An aging mom. A bored cattle dog. Too much and not enough work. Too much, if there’s such a thing, writing. An evolving social circle.

At some point, improvisation became more important than management.

Meal planning. Calendaring. List making. Consistency. They didn’t go away. They just became gentle tools, not permanent constructs.

If Jack wanted hummus for breakfast, I set the scones I baked aside. If I didn’t want to see a band alone, I’d buy two tickets and invite Chris or Jim to go. If Jerry texted about a movie, I’d check in with myself first. If I saw a friend when I walked Addie at the park, our path would change.

Every moment becomes a choice, not a rule.

 PICK THE RIGHT CLOCK, CONGRESS

It’s funny when the smallest things get us fired up. Funnier still how rarely we learn from the past.

Maybe funny’s not the right word for it.

It was just over 50 years ago that the Nixon administration inked a law making daylight saving time permanent — a two-year experiment, largely driven by the era’s energy crisis.

It lasted a few months. That Americans hated sending their kids to school in the dark was something of a national lightbulb moment.

And now, here we are again.

Last week, the House passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent. And once again, people are screaming (on their social feeds and Substacks) about kids going to school in the dark.

They’re not wrong. They’re just under-arguing it.

Having a consistent clock year-round is not a bad idea, most biological scientists say. Just pick the right clock.

The ranking, according to sleep researchers, goes like this: permanent standard time first.

Why? Our bodies operate on a 24-hour biological clock. We call it our circadian rhythm. It’s triggered by sunlight, not by the time on our iPhones. And standard time is more closely synchronized with the sun.

The map I’ve shared shows you (light purple) the countries that have abandoned time change for a permanent standard time.

Our current system — the one where we all grumble twice a year about the lost hour and the microwave that stays wrong until June — comes second.

Permanent daylight saving time comes last. That’s the House bill that’s now going to the Senate. That’s right. The bill on the table manages to lock in the one option worse than the thing it’s fixing.

Later sunrises are bad news for our brains and our bodies. Morning light tells the brain to wake up — and quietly sets a biological timer that helps us fall asleep that night. Push the sunrise an hour later, permanently, and you’ve unplugged the timer.

Hopefully the Senate wakes up and votes no.

 STILL READING. DESPITE THE HEAT, SMOKE, STORMS.

Hot Analogue Summer continues.

I read a good chunk of Fab 5 Freddy’s autobiography when I was in Norfolk three weeks ago. Last week, I got distracted in Shafer Court by my friend Ben, but recovered by muscling through the unwieldy first chapter of “I See You’ve Called In Dead” by John Kenney — a lightly poignant exploration of grief and connection. Sort of my wheelhouse.

The Internet, it turns out, struggled with the same first chapter I did. Bud Stanley has non-dramatically hit rock bottom by the time we meet him, and it’s hard to believe that will change once he walks out of his apartment. And I sort of didn’t want to invest in a novel where the main character doesn’t look like he’s moving.

But I did. And he does.

Accepting a meh narrator at the front door of a novel is a hard ask. It’s also the point. Once Bud’s friends Tim and Clara arrive, Kenney’s rhythm as a writer shows up more fully — and Bud’s flatness turns out to be the thing the rest of the book is quietly repairing.

This coming week is a kids week, but I’ll be back at it the week of July 27. Reading an actual book by myself somewhere in public.

 MAKE THE NEWS

A piece on Threads caught my eye in the middle of the night last week.

It was about the concept of Robin Hooding — shining a light on how systems are stacked against people, and on ways to slip past the gates.

Maybe a better way to think about it is as a form of subversive literacy — understanding the gatekeeping well enough to turn it into a tool for self-defense, survival or success.

Most of the posts were really just professional tips on navigating systems.

The one pro tip I appreciated — reading as a former journalist in a city thick with alternative news outlets — was about proactively reaching out to local reporters to talk about whatever the heck is going on in your life.

It started: Some people have gone their whole lives without having met a journalist.

Which is crazy, and probably true.

When I was managing editor at the Commonwealth Times at VCU, I spent a solid chunk of every day showing up. Board of Visitors and Faculty Senate meetings. Press conferences. Dropping in on faculty and administrators — people like Murray DePillars and Cliff Edwards and Mike Brooks and Grace Harris — just to chat. I wanted to talk to everyone, all the time. Keep my finger on the proverbial pulse.

Reporters do less of that these days. Or more of it digitally.

Either way — old gumshoe approach or browser-driven reporting — it’s still a one-way street. The journalist finds the source. The journalist cultivates the relationship. The journalist shapes the story.

What if, the Thread suggests, we — average people with careers and kids in school and problems with food deserts or water pressure or potholes — flipped that? What if we believed that sharing our story, or experience, or observation might make for good news — news that feels good to read, or news that helps others living in the same community we call home?

Here’s the pitch — the Robin Hood move — this journalist on Threads suggested: Just call your local reporters. It doesn’t have to be a big fancy phone call, either. It can be “Hey, just want to let you know who I am and what I’m working on, because you might be interested...”

Do a Google search for your favorite local news site’s reporters, or contacts. Drop them an email or text. Buy them a cup of coffee. Let them see Richmond through your eyes.

 SHUT UP & MARCH

Dammit.

What is love worth when it can’t rescue anyone?

That’s the throughline on a new novel I just concepted and began mapping this week. Because I’m an idiot, and cannot stop.

It gets worse.

The first half is inspired by The Iliad — the household under doom; the scene of Hector, Andromache and Astyanax; love cannot control mortality.

The anchor in the middle that forces everyone to change? An old Mesopotamian fable, “Appointment in Samarra.” We meet our fate on the path we take to avoid it.

The second half? Anabasis by Xenophon. The expedition that fails far from home; the death of the general; the long march as the army shrinks. Finally, the sea.

A family in Wilmington, North Carolina. A death in Scottsdale, Arizona. And a 2,200-mile drive that changes everything. Iliad. Samarra. Anabasis.

 WHEN THE UNIVERSE OPENS A DOOR

When I moved out on my own two years ago, I strategically (right?) mapped out the rhythms of my life.

Work. My kids. My mom. The dog. Walking. Friends.

A lot has changed in two years. The rhythms have changed.

And as I sit at another magical Lagrange point in life, I’ve been thinking about what to let go of, and what to pick up.

Some decisions get made for us. My mother died. My oldest is off to college.

Some emerge unexpectedly and grow. The writing, obviously.

And then sometimes the universe knocks. And knocks again. And again. Not impatient, but persistent.

Maybe it started with the pinched nerve in my neck. The one I ignored for a week, until the pain along my neck, my shoulder blade, and my right arm was screaming.

“Have you had this before?” the physical therapist asked. (Lydia at Ortho Virginia is an eminently practical magician, y’all.)

“Maybe in my twenties,” I said. “I’d just ignore it until it got better.”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. I heard her not say something out loud about my graying — okay, gray — hair.

Four weeks later, back to my normal, comfortable and inflexible body. Not passive, but not building.

So, the universe?

Lydia encouraged me to add in something more focused.

I’ve been mulling over what that might be. Strength training? More intense core work? Return to yoga after a century?

I looked at classes at the Northside YMCA.

I ordered the book Mind Gym, about the mental side of athletic performance.

And as Addie and I walked through the shops at Lakeside on our morning walk, a door opened.

Literally. The door opened and a calm, gentle face appeared. It was Deepak, owner of and instructor at LimberRVA. His small yoga practice had moved recently into its own space.

We chatted. About yoga. Addie. His pending family vacation. And some more about yoga. And then he went back inside to prepare for his 8:30 class.

I kept walking with Addie. Slowly, as I added the 5:45 Monday evening yoga class to the calendar on my phone.

Mind Gym was sitting on my front porch when we got home.

 DIFFERENT WAYS TO GET TO ITHACA

I decided to get ready for Christopher Nolan’s three-hour journey into Greek history and mythology by reading Emily Wilson’s recent, and excellent, translation of Homer’s epic poem.

Well, reading at it.

Jack, unaware that Nolan’s cinematic gesture was on the horizon, started his own journey at about the same time. Naturally, his voyage happened on his iPad. And it was oriented around EPIC: The Musical.

EPIC also retells the story of Odysseus, but as a concept musical. Puerto Rican singer and actor Jorge Rivera-Herrans (Jay) crafted 40 songs over two years, releasing them one by one on TikTok.

A legion of artists created digital, animated storyboards for every single song. Out of their work, an animated movie, of sorts, that rivals Nolan’s film in length.

Watching my youngest take a deep dive into Greek history — inspired not by the popular Percy Jackson novels, but through song — is encouraging.

Jay’s musical retelling is a direct homage to the Odyssey’s origins, sung by generations of bards three thousand years ago before it was finally written down in the 6th century BCE. I’m reading the text. My kid’s hearing the story, sung.

In a few weeks, we’ll see Nolan’s film together. And then maybe we’ll read The Iliad…

 BRING A BOOK. BRING ME COFFEE.

What started as a commitment to periodically reading outside my house has turned into something social.

Not social-media social. Social as in rubbing elbows with, listening deeply to, and experiencing the same stories as other human beings.

My Hot Analogue Summer commitment to head outside every two weeks to read an actual printed book continues this week.

Tuesday evening, I’m headed to VCU’s Shafer Court — or what’s left of it — to start on “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” After hearing Rachel Beanland discuss HER new book The Half Life Launch, at VCU Libraries.

The rest of the literary week: Open Mic Poetry Night with Strangely Spoken. Shut Up & Write at the VMFA. #FamReading Social Hour at Fountain Bookstore. And a timely, half-day online conference put on by Reedsy — Layer by Layer: How to Edit Your Book.

Grab a book and meet me in Shafer Court this Tuesday. Around 7:30. (And bring me an iced coffee, no sugar, no cream.)

 AN OCEAN OF ROOMS THAT NO ONE BUILT

It turns out that thinking needs a place to gather.

That’s the conclusion I draw from recent Anthropic research, which found that Claude (the AI model) has an unexpected, and small, internal workspace. A place where a handful of concepts can be held, examined, stretched like taffy. (It’s seriously worth a read. Fascinating.)

Here’s what surprises me (and maybe others): An AI agent draws on an almost limitless volume of data, centuries of stored knowledge. A chat, or conversation, may engage thousands of discrete data points. And yet somewhere in all that automatic processing, a small space formed — a place to set a few thoughts aside, to ground and shape the discussion.

Researchers can watch words light up in that space. Words Claude never says out loud.

It’s easy to dramatize, or worse, anthropomorphize. Claude’s she-shed. Claude’s meditation grove. Smaller, even. A nook beneath the stairs.

But listen: Nobody built the room.

The researchers didn’t design it. The engineers didn’t plan for it. It emerged, on its own, during training. Because better thinking, quite possibly, required it.

As humans, we sometimes build rooms (metaphorically). Sometimes we close them off. And sometimes rooms just show up without intention or design, out of necessity, in anticipation of something flickering at the edge of our mind.

Two years ago I mapped out the rhythms of my new life — work, kids, mom, dog. Writing wasn’t on the map. At all. It arrived anyway, and it’s now one of the largest rooms in the house.

This all makes me think about the medieval art of memory. A historiography class at VCU. Dr. Messmer assigned us The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. It sort of blew my mind.

Memory palaces are frameworks that allow us to mentally store vast amounts of information, data, memory. Priests and scholars in the 16th century — probably for centuries before then, but I only know what I know — would picture a familiar building (or invent one).

Each room, each object within a room, held an idea, a fact, a personal anecdote. Usually in layers. A study for writing, perhaps. On the desk, an Honor Role CD storing all my thinking about my punk rock Richmond novel. In the corner, a cello for Lagrange. A small dish of candy brings up memories of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

To remember, we walk into the room and approach the objects we stored there to surface the information we need. Bit by bit, as needed.

Claude has essentially discovered a new room in its own memory palace. One that arrived more than it was designed. A studio where work happens around a finite set of important thoughts.

Here’s something crazy: When researchers tell Claude not to think about a thing, the concept lights up anyway. The white bear problem — trying to relax makes you tense, trying not to think about a thing makes you think about it more. Clowns, at midnight.

Crazier: When the forbidden thought breaks through, other words flicker alongside it in Claude’s little room — it basically says, Damn, I blew it — as though it notices its own lapse.

A machine, alone in its she-shed, muttering self-incriminating thoughts like a boss...

And here I am, muttering as I sort through the poorly designed rooms of my own memory palace — the kitchen, the back yard, the study, the workroom, the living room. Trying to map out the chores, the activities, the punch lists. What to throw out. Which curios to add.

Muttering about a room that needs to be completely reorganized. It’s a mausoleum, or a rolodex, or a library, or perhaps an actual palace set inside of my own memory palace. Where the people from my past are aggregated, where they gather together.

Muttering about the future.

 FALLING IN LOVE WITH UNREALITY

I probably know three things about poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

How to spell his name correctly. His poem “A Coney Island of the Mind, 20.”

I have this poem in mind every time I walk into a candy store, including the one time it was raining and a girl did run in. (That’s the third thing.)

It was the opposite of raining last Thursday when the kids and I stopped by the last soft opening day at the new candy store on Strawberry Street. Trolley Car Sweets and Treats was elbow-to-elbow as the kids worked their way down the color-coordinated containers of (mostly) Scandinavian and European candies — a lot of chewy and fluffy stuff. Bags filled, they left happy.

Limited purple palette, according to one observer on the car ride home. The next morning, one bag (left unsealed by the front door) had become a veritable ant farm.

But the store is exactly what Strawberry Street needed again. A place to fall in love with unreality, to run breathless into the little room.

 SHUT UP & DON’T DROWN

Hello, Ophelia Doesn’t Drown. Goodbye for now, Revolution Summer.

Six months of surgery. Two massive editorial letters. Three working Zoom calls with my writing coach, Heather. Major POV changes. Major plot rewiring. Several precious darlings killed. And two major character arcs successfully completed, as Kira finally learns to be still. And Leah finds her voice.

Along the way, it became clear that the book’s title really needed to be Ophelia Doesn’t Drown, which is a nod to Leah and Paige’s screen printing politics and to Leah herself, surfacing back into her own body as the story draws to a close.

Over the past year — I started the novel last summer — I’ve probably written and rewritten 300,000 words to get to the 87,000 word final draft. And when I look back at my initial notes with the story hopping between Chapel Hill and Richmond and DC, between race and sexuality and politics, between 12 characters with their unique points-of-view…?

Well, let’s just say I’m really glad that I found Heather.

Our last call on this novel is at the end of July. The primary focus is taking it to market and effectively shopping it. Or just launching it as a self-published work complete with 1980s Spotify playlists and Pinterest fashion boards for each character…

Ophelia Doesn't Drown July 2026

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The final, pre-shopping for an agent version of my novel Ophelia Doesn't Drown. I'd love to know what you think.

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 A GOOD PLACE TO REST

Last weekend, I took the kids on a semi-last minute, ultra fast trip to Saxapahaw, North Carolina.

For more than twenty years — roughly my tween years to mid-30s — my dad and stepmother lived just south of the old mill town at the top of Greenhill Road, a two lane country road that dipped down over a small creek enveloped in kudzu, slipped past farmhouses and barns and brick ranchers, and ended — for me, anyway — at Chatham Friends Meeting. I had memories here, and the gravesite where my dad, then my stepmother, were laid to rest.

It’s a good place to rest.

And it’s a good slice of America, one of many diverse slices I’ve found over the years. This one is generally more conservative, absolutely more rural, rooted in Quaker tradition, close-knit and neighborly. It was a good place to transition from awkward tween to punk rock teenager, and for a young man to say goodbye to his dad.

Since my stepmother died in 2003, I’d been back exactly three times. This time, I brought both my kids. Returning to a familiar place but creating new memories.

 TAKING A BOOK TO DINNER

I recently made a commitment to find a space outside of my house to read actual books printed on paper.

Last week, I was in Norfolk for work, and took Fab 5 Freddy’s biography to dinner with me. I saw the waitress side eye me as she glanced down at the book I was carrying — a vibrant blue cover with a close up of a cool Black dude in a fedora and shades.

“You know him?” I asked, handing her the book. She shook her head, and skimmed the back blurbs.

“He was a graffiti artist in New York in the late 70s. From Brooklyn,” I said. “I remember when he used to host Yo! MTV Raps back when music videos were a thing.”

“I’m from the Bronx,” she said, handing the book back. “If you finish it during dinner, you can give it to me to read.”

I didn’t finish it. But I should probably mail it to the restaurant when I’m done.

This week’s a kids week so I’ll be reading closer to home. I’m still moving through “Everybody’s Fly” by Freddy, and starting “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson. Next week, I’m going to hang out in Shafer Court after the Rachel Beanland book launch and get started on “Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. Bring a book of your own, and join me.

 THE 1976 GREAT AMERICAN CAKE FAIL

What started as an interesting article about a baker in New York who decided America needed a birthday cake — because the weirdo in the White House and his Freedom250 slush machine didn’t think about cake — took me down an America’s birthday rabbit hole.

Specifically, a what in the world was Baltimore thinking back in 1976 time tunnel. Or the Great 1976 American Cake Fail.

The headline on the 2016 Baltimore Magazine article was all I needed:

Forty years ago, rain and rats ruined a 35-ton cake and nearly wrecked Baltimore’s bicentennial. Then, the tall ships came.

The set up involved a 35 ton cake shipped in by barge. Two hundred candles. The sale of 153,000 slices of cake to a celebratory public would pay the bill.

It was a disaster.

The 69,000 pound cake was made by squeezing 153,000 small sheet cakes (made from boxed cake mix, because it was 1976, America) into a plywood map of America. Before it was even completed, a rainstorm washed 3,000 pounds of icing into the Baltimore Harbor, and by July 7 a combination of citizens, rain, rats and summer heat had completely wrecked it. It ended up in a landfill.

Fast forward to 2026. The Freedom250 committee bought a commercial swimming pool for a baptismal font — the traditional Fourth of July Baptism is not to be missed, y’all — and the congressionally established American250 organization had only received ~15% of its funding. New York cake artist Grace Pak, fresh off a 250^th birthday cake for the U.S. Marine Corps, was determined that America would have its cake, and eat it, too.

The NYTimes deconstructs the whole amazing journey, but the cake uses flour from the grist mill at Mount Vernon, currants soaked in Kentucky bourbon, Granny Smith apple slices. A ribbon around the base of the cake holds 56 squares of chocolate — one for each state and territory (and the District of Columbia). Virginia’s features tiny ships and naval aircraft that Rep. Jen Kiggans (a former naval helicopter pilot) helped sculpt.

Maybe we’d be a little less nationally sour right now if we’d gathered together with people we didn’t know well to bake a semiquincentennial anniversary cake for whatever version of America we could agree on. Something lemon, definitely.

NOTE: The America250 cake was unveiled at the Library of Congress yesterday. Indoors. Well-protected from rain and rats.

 THERE’S A DOORBELL FOR FISH

In case you think social media is a door to nowhere, I give you — courtesy of a random tweet on the cursed site — Visdeurbel, the fish doorbell.

And while the doorbell is closed for the season, it’s a fascinating collision of man, nature and technology.

The bones of it: Fish in the Netherlands migrate. The historic locks in many cities aren’t always open, which can block migrating fish. An underwater camera allows viewers anywhere in the world to ring an actual doorbell when there are fish waiting at the lock.

This past season — March through June — brought 900,000 people to the site, and the doorbell rang 263,331 times. Twelve different species, thousands of fish.

“Thanks to you, thousands of fish were able to continue their journey,” a canal spokesperson told NL Times. “The fish migration season has now come to an end, so the Fish Doorbell is taking a break. The camera is off, the doorbell is silent, and the fish have reached their spawning grounds.”

The doorbell returns to duty next March.

 FLYING CARS MAY FINALLY GREET YOU AT AMERICA 300

I don’t remember what I was promised in 1976, but I’ve been waiting for my friggin’ personal jetpack most of my life.

And now — just as jetpacks are an actual thing — science writer Joel Achenbach comes along to pull a bait and switch, and kick the future down the road.

That’s just how the future rolls, he says: “It’s sneaky, disorderly and can’t be tamed.”

But then he places some bets anyway. After reminding us that the “digital age” that has dominated the past 50 years wasn’t even a phrase in 1976, Achenbach throws down a gauntlet: the rise of the robots. His loose predictions? AI may solve climate change, make working for pay optional, and turbocharge the surveillance state. Then he shrugs, reminds us again about the futility of predictions, and hands the mic to Robert Wright, who gives us roughly a decade to figure out global governance before the whole thing dissolves into chaos. Or not.

Thanks, Bob.

Achenbach’s been writing about the future for about as long as I’ve been reading the Washington Post, and he hits some solid notes — AI, the science of not dying, telescopes hunting for Earth 2.0, either a climate fix or decades of catastrophe, all on the near horizon.

But the detail I keep coming back to is the one he saves for last. Maybe it’s because I spend my life on a laptop and a phone. And my handwriting has become complete garbage.

He ends with a Silicon Valley historian who makes her students take notes by hand. No laptops, no phones. She follows her own rule, and she’s noticed her handwriting is improving.

Fifty years of the future, and smart people are putting their money on a pencil.

Attention must be paid. And then neatly transcribed.

 SHUT UP & WRITE

At the end of May, I wrote that perhaps I’d hit a wall. Written myself into exhaustion. Was, impossibly, at a loss for words.

Which is why I look at the intersection of a holiday weekend and wretchedly hot weather as a gift. For the past several days, I’ve been clearing the cobwebs. Email inbox cleared (ish). Bills paid (ish). Chores, sort of done.

And on America’s national day of freedom, I sat down and got back to it. In addition to some serious editing work on Revolution Summer, and some line editing on Lagrange, I began chipping away at a new novel. A stranger one than the others, but essentially a love story.

What would it be like to have vivid dreams, and to build a career — as a greeting card writer, a ghostwriter for Nashville musicians — only to discover that the dreams you have built a career around are the last conscious thoughts of people who love you? And that there’s a cost. If you don’t trace the dream back to the person who left it, pieces of your world literally vanish. Buildings blur. Streets go soft. The people you loved fade from photographs. The city you inhabit is slowly filled with metaphorical dead zones, places you can — literally — no longer see.

It’s a deadpan, quietly surreal portrait of a man who has spent his life unknowingly harvesting love while it erased his world. And suddenly realizes the cost.

It’s complicated, and may break my brain before it’s done.

Rumor is you can’t go home again. Which may be why my most recent return to the North Carolina of my younger years was less halcyon than previous visits.

Maybe it was better because it was less wistful, and less sad. Maybe it was because I wasn’t trying to return to a place long since lost to me.

I was creating new memories.

When I was younger (and depending on who I was talking to, circa 1982 to 2005), my dad and stepmother (Amy) lived in her father’s old house on Greenhill Road, or just across from Treva and Leonidas, or near Snow Camp, or just a bit south of Burlington, or Saxapahaw.

The last one because it just felt exotic, though it just means “hill” in the language of the Sissipahaw tribe that lived along what is now called the Haw River in Alamance County.

I’ve probably driven Old Greensboro Road a thousand times heading to Chapel Hill — and beyond that, Richmond — or back to the 37 acres I considered a second home growing up. And with apologies to the tiny village of Saxapahaw, I never once thought to turn down Whitney Road.

I’d driven past Saxapahaw hundreds of times and never been.

Now I was going to visit. And I was taking the kids with me.

My compass had been pointing toward Saxapahaw for a while.

A pinched nerve had canceled our first planned vacation of the summer. I’d wanted to see the Saturday market for years. My novel is set in a fictional Haw River town, and I wanted to compare imagination with reality. My dad and Amy’s neighbors weren’t getting younger.

And I’d only visited my father’s grave three times since Amy died.

It felt like the right time for this particular road trip.

It was fast. Seven hours of driving, because Route 360 of course. Eight hours of restless sleep. And about twenty hours of hiking, petting sheep, talking up cute shop girls, and exploring the humid edges of Saxapahaw. With a side excursion to Greenhill Road to leave flowers on a grave, and visit with Treva and Leonidas.

The drive south was unremarkable. Lemonade in South Boston, followed by gales of surprised laughter as we passed a quirky patch of real estate — a vast, rolling field with maybe an old car on a mound of dirt, perhaps a playground, possibly a water feature, scattered like ideas on a landscape. Rooster’s Run read the sign. The one that kept us from detouring.

We sailed past Mebane, the best branded town in North Carolina, and in short order pulled into TerraStay Farm — rows of blackberry vines, a field of asparagus gone to seed, a dozen or more sheep. And four tiny houses in a row, the first of which we had the access code to. Settled in and decided to drive, not walk, to Saxapahaw.

If you took the time to draw Saxapahaw on a napkin, there’d be room to pen a love letter. Which is pretty much what Jack wanted to do by the time we left.

It’s sort of small town you can really get your arms around. An old mill turned music hall. A coffee shop. An island crisscrossed with trails. A restaurant. The general store. A vinyl-and-art collective.

By the time we’d had dinner, browsed the indoor farmer’s market, bought drinks and flowers at the general store, and flirted with the cute woman at the art collective, we were ready for bed. Back to the tiny house we went for a late evening stroll down to the river, and some quality time with Bigfoot, the six-toed Hemingway farm cat.

And after a night when no one slept well — the snoring, the air conditioner, the creaky rollaway bed — I walked into town for my morning coffee. (Thea and Jack followed in the car.) We hit Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, then raced back to the farm for a tour and a lot of aggressive sheep cuddling.

Then it was a quick dash up to Graham, then back down 87 to Chatham Friends Church (formerly Chatham Friends Meeting).

As we got closer, I narrated my childhood, my teen years. The punk rock kid being welcomed into a Quaker farming community.

We drove over the creek where I’d gone frog giggin’ in a flat-bottomed boat. The red clay mud pond where we’d swum. The stretch of trees where I’d tagged along on an actual raccoon hunt. (The raccoon won.) Dad and Amy’s house. Kermit’s barn. Scott and Linda’s house. The barn raising.

The cemetery.

There amid a tidy field of granite markers — mostly McBane’s, Newlin’s and Guthrie’s — a single stone stood out. SARVAY.

John Faris “Jack” and Amy Hutchison. An engraved river stone and a crystal resting by the base.

We placed some flowers on top of the stone. Stood quietly for a minute. Then got back in the car and drove down the road to visit with Treva and Leonidas, and their son and daughter who were my friends and playmates long ago.

I waited all day for the lump in my throat. The rising ache in my chest. Tears, or a sob that I’d choke back, but none came.

Not because I wasn’t sad, but because for the first time I was returning to a place without asking the past to become the present again. Simply introducing my children to the places where some of my stories happened.

Now they have a new story.

Driving north toward Richmond through torrential rainstorms, I realized that Saxapahaw was also theirs now.

 BON AIR HARDCORE

For suburban kids in the 1980s (and 1990s, and apparently last week), the most essential element of a strong punk and alternative music scene was arterial.

If you hung out with me back in the day, you know that the Huguenot Bridge and Powhite Parkway were essential capillaries that gave us relatively fast access to the action downtown.

For a long time those two roadways, and the University of Richmond radio station, and Plan 9 Music helped keep the blood of eclectic kids in Bon Air and Midlothian oxygenated.

It looks like nothing’s changed.

My conclusion after stumbling upon an article about the band Gaffer. Gaffer is made up of four high school students in Chesterfield who played their first real breakout show at the Greenfield Community Center off of Robious Road. Now they play downtown.

And like all the bands and musicians with Southside roots that came before them — Graven Image and Honor Role, Aimee Mann and The Dads, The Others and the Eccentrics, and Pavement stalwart and hype man Bob Nastanovich — they found their way downtown as soon as someone’s learners permit allowed.

It wasn’t unusual to cross the Huguenot Bridge a half dozen times in a day — Plan 9 after school, then driving everyone to a show, then driving someone with an early curfew home and heading back downtown for the headliner. Then driving home again.

But back to Gaffer, the emo band from Southside. Their first album has just been released on Ephyra Records, and a recent profile in Idiot EQ magazine tips the hat to both their suburban roots and their emergence downtown at spots like Gallery 5 and Black Iris. And their origin story doesn’t feel too different from the bands that came before. Same arterial network. They just have email now:

Richmond’s the kind of city where this band makes sense without much explanation. Eli’s uncles were all in Richmond bands. Henry’s dad was in tons of them. The four of them grew up around instruments and shows.

Most of Gaffer’s gigs they book themselves, the way Eli booked Ephyra, sending emails all day from school to spots like The Camel and Gallery5, usually splitting bills with other high school bands.

Selling shirts at a show on a Saturday and seeing them in the hallway on Monday is one of the parts of being in Gaffer that keeps coming back up. “When we sold shirts at our last show, we went to school the next day and saw so many Gaffer shirts,” Eli says. “It was a really awesome feeling.”

The bands change. The music changes.

And the Huguenot Bridge keeps making the connections.

 HOT ANALOGUE SUMMER

I had an idea last week, and true to form it got bigger, then smaller, and then I discarded it, and then I breathed life back into it.

And then decided: one step at a time.

The idea: Hot Analogue Summer. I put away my TV and laptop. Set aside my phone and Kindle. Pick up a paper book and go outside while it’s still light out. And then I read until it’s dark. At least one night every other week — when the kids aren’t with me — until the end of September.

What my brain did: Took the simple front yard reading idea, and expanded it into a sort of Moveable Feast (of words and ideas) that hops around to various spots in town to read. And then it snowballed. Invite friends to join me or announce it on Facebook, and see who shows up. And not read because everyone will talk, my brain interjected. And then my brain asked why I needed to announce anything to begin with. And quickly replied to itself that I like spending purposeful time with my friends and random interesting people. And finally, exhausted, I turned my brain off and said, never mind.

I’m doing it anyway.

The first week is ready. I’m going to be in Norfolk for a few days for work. Hotels are traps after a long day of work. Zero social pressure. The laptop and TV make for easy evenings. Empty calories for the brain. So I’ll find a spot on the Elizabeth River and crack open “Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture” by Fab 5 Freddy of the Fabulous Five.

The next week will be the week of July 13. Date and place TBD. I have “Exit Party” by Emily St. John Mandel, “Ransom” by Daniel Silva, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders, “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson, and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin in the queue.

The Norfolk trip gives me a secret door to trick my brain. The week of the 13^th will be interesting as my introverted mind and my social heart wrestle for the map. I’ll keep you posted.

You might want to pick out a good book. Just in case.

 GETTING READY FOR THE 253^RD

Word on the street is that the 250^th IllumiNATION at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture was a standout event.

“A really unifying moment,” a trusted source texted me.

Jack and I went on the first night, this past Thursday. Because me, we arrived early and scored parking — and were first in line at Timber Pizza truck. It was hot. We circled the building exterior twice, saw some friends, listened to some fife and drums. And then Mr. Wake at 3:30 in the Morning (Jack) realized he was tired.

So, we got ice cream from Westray’s Finest and headed home. And missed the big illuminated wall.

On the way home, we talked a bit about America’s 250^th birthday celebration. His YouTube news and culture sources have left him a bit jaded, but he’s also been disappointed by our two semiquincentennial events to-date.

“Maybe the 252^nd will be better,” he said. “When we have a new president.”

“253^rd,” I said, adding, “the new president won’t be in the White House until 2029.”

Silence from the back seat.

“Maybe we’ll have a funeral if Trump doesn’t leave office,” he said.

 PROOF

I didn’t get what I expected, or thought I wanted, from a New York Times column about divorce this week.

But it did get me thinking about memories. And reminded me why I write this weekly newsletter.

The first Christmas after I was separated, I gave each of the kids a small box with 100 tiny photos. Mostly different photos. A collection of small moments from birth until that difficult autumn to remind them that they came from a family, that they were loved, that over the course of their lives they each had moment after moment of happiness alone, with their friends, with each other, with their mom, with me.

Proof.

That small moments, ordinary moments, matter. They accumulate. They persist.

And they never truly go away.

The boxes were for them. But they were — obviously — about me.

Proof that I had accumulated a great deal of joy — often in small doses, but real and significant. I had artifacts, and photos. Tangible images that confirm my memories of the journey. (Except the DC trip that the kids and I remember; their mom doesn’t; we have no photos of. Did it happen? Who knows.)

Documenting the past keeps me from spiraling out into space. That’s what this newsletter does. It grounds me in the moments. And it helps me to remember — my mom, Bill Martin, Jack’s funny moments, Thea’s graduation. Evidence that love never dies — that our relationships, even with those who are dead and those we haven’t met yet, will remain alive for as long as we can remember.

Trails of breadcrumbs. Small boxes of tiny photographs.

 SHUT UP & KEEP EDITING

Revolution Summer is ready to be sprinkled with pixie dust and shared with agents and publisher — and Off Belay is going under the editorial microscope in July.

I’m heading to Saxapahaw, North Carolina, with the kids this weekend. My dad and stepmother lived just south of the town in the middle of a small Quaker farming community. We’re going to visit family friends while we can. But also to walk the Haw River Trail, explore the town and its farmer’s market, test the geography.

The town (thinly veiled with a different name) and the river are the physical spine of my fourth novel, LeGrange, which is next up for editorial red ink. Perhaps by early fall. A taste:

He paused once more, listening. The two-syllable whistle of an Eastern Towhee rose from a nearby branch. Beneath it, lower and further off, the mourning dove. A piccolo and a cello.

That’s when he saw it from the corner of his eye. Something grey and vertical that hadn’t been there on a thousand other mornings.

He left the trail and made his way to the river bank, studying the cairn as he approached. It was rougher than the ones he knew from out west — stacked layers of slate-blue volcanic stone mixed with chunks of black basalt and bright white quartz. Two dozen rocks, hand-sized and smaller, nestled in and rising from a tangle of sycamore roots. A weathered hand cradling a wish-making stack of stone.

He settled onto a nearby trunk. Listened to the murmur of the water. Let his mind wander north along the watershed. Swepsonville, Graham, Altamahaw, and beyond. A thousand-mile system of trails stretching from the western mountains to the Outer Banks.

 IT’S THE FLOOR WE STAND ON

It’s a Friday night in June.

I’ve finally seen a doctor about the pinched nerve in my neck, but my shoulder blade is on fire. Writing hurts. Watching TV hurts. I’m standing in front of an open refrigerator thinking about dinner.

But I’m not really hungry.

What I want is connection. Another human being across the table carrying curiosity and stories. Maybe a bad joke.

I open Facebook and start composing a post in my head. “Anyone want to grab dinner tonight?” Then I roll my eyes and close the laptop without typing a word. It’s the kind of thing people post when they want to look spontaneous but are really just taking a census.

I stare at the dog side-eyeing me from the other end of the couch. She is completely indifferent to my existential crisis.

By most measures, I’ve got a solid relational circle. The week behind me had been full despite the shoulder: a work trip, dinner with a friend in Charlottesville, drinks one night, a drive to Norfolk for Echo & the Bunnymen, lunch with Sam, long walks with Addie, long walks with friends.

I don’t lack community.

And yet here it is again — that familiar ache. The quiet desire for another human being to lean forward over the table and tell me about their kid’s first year of college, or sketch their vegetable garden on a napkin with the kind of enthusiasm that only makes sense to them. Someone who texts back, “Sure. See you at seven?” Probably with a really stupid emoji.

For most of my life I’ve believed every yearning has an object, every ache a cause. That there’s a treatment plan for every longing. My consulting work is built around root causes and finding new paths forward — “creating a future that’s different from the past.”

And don’t get me started about parenting.

But sometimes the thing beneath the thing is just more of the thing. Not another answer. Not another diagnosis. Just a human feeling asking not to be solved quite so quickly.

A friend recently pointed me toward an essay that introduced me to a line from Sufi mysticism I haven’t been able to shake:

“I was a hidden treasure, and I wished to be known, so I created creation that I might be known.”

It’s attributed to God. God wanting to be known.

I don’t know what I believe about God on any given Tuesday. But I know something about wanting to be known. Seen. Heard. And I know the feeling of treating that want as a problem — a thing to diagnose, to craft an origin story for, something to repair.

But the water below the waterline is just more water. Different water. The garden on the napkin is just a garden. A different garden.

Perhaps they don’t need to be more than what they are.

Jack asked me recently what we might see if humans had twenty-three kinds of cones instead of three. We made a list together: ultraviolet light, gravity, ghosts, other dimensions, love, loneliness…

Hidden treasures.

Another line from that essay that stuck with me: May the heart stop mistaking its depth for damage.

I’ve spent years assuming the ache itself was evidence that something was broken. That if I understood it well enough — if I traced it back, named it, repaired it — it would finally disappear.

Maybe that’s true sometimes.

But perhaps the ache is just pointing at itself. A treasure that wishes to be known.

And maybe that’s why we tell each other stories.

 I SHALL WEAR MY TROUSERS ROLLED

** not Nick Cave pictured above…

I’ve been living life with the addled confusion of J. Alfred Prufrock recently, sparked by the occasional moments when I look across a table mid-conversation and realize I’m sitting on the hinge between mid-life and end-life.

(I mean, I hope I’m on the hinge and not beyond it.)

This morning I sat down to write and my pinched neck mess — which has descended from probably a 9 to a 2 on the Pain Crescendo Threshold™ over the past two weeks — flared up.

But because I am youthful, I persevered.

Wincing.

Then musician Nick Cave, who at 68 remains both wiser and significantly older than me, perfectly captured the strange comedy of aging in a recent Red Hand File:

“This morning I wake feeling great. … I stand before the bathroom mirror, my piercing blue eyes looking vital and dangerous, and my hair sleek and black as a fucking raven’s wing. I bound out of the hotel … [but] up ahead, two old people shuffle towards me … saying unbelievably depressing things like ‘We’ve been fans for half a century’ [and] how her mother used to love me, her fucking mother! … Then, I suddenly realise … the worst thing about being an old rockstar is that the old rockstar’s old fans don’t know how to work their fucking phones. The couple stand there, jabbing uselessly at their screens … and I try to help them, but I don’t know how to work their phones either.”

I laughed out loud.

I also felt seen.

Not completely seen.

Give me another decade.

 FIND YOUR PEOPLE RVA

There’s a new place to go on the inter webs to find ways to connect in RVA.

It’s called the Social Connectory, and I have to admit I didn’t really get it when Risa Gomez first told me about her idea sometime last winter on our way into a Many Hands (aka Mindful Mornings) morning event. She said [something coherent and clear] and I heard another online event calendar.

It’s not that. Not at all.

The Social Connectory is exactly what its tagline says: FIND YOUR PEOPLE. SHOW UP.

Or an online hub that gathers a gajillion events, clubs and gathering spaces in an organized way so that you can find the people and places and activities that light you up. And then tear yourself away from your socials and go out into the light of day to engage with human beings in a multi-dimensional way.

There’s a simple directory. There’s a simple search feature. And when you find something that taps your inner chime, go check it out. That’s how I found Butter & Filth Pole and Aerial and decided that my comfort zone lived in a different reality — like maybe Goat Yoga RVA.

Anyway, literally dozens of organized pathways to light up your life — a place where your existing passions can be amplified, or a new passion can be explored. Go forth and connectory.

 SHUT UP AND WRITE

I have good news, and I have more good news.

My writing coach said very nice things about Revolution Summer in her latest editorial letter—a mix of critique, guidance, direct feedback, and assignments. Which, oddly enough, is exactly what you hope for from a good editor.

Even better, we had a banger of an editorial call this past week and identified two key adjustments that will make the novel ready for prime time.

Which is to say: ready to begin earnestly pitching literary agents and independent publishers.

Heather may also help me tighten the final seams of Off Belay, the novel I somehow wrote in two weeks back in early May.

That means I have a very clear target.

Two novels ready to pitch at the James River Writers Conference in late September, after the Hopscotch and Iron Blossom festivals, natch.

Unbelievably, the 27th running of the JRW Conference will be the first one I’ve attended. (Something something courage.)

A simple blocking and tackling update: Two novels deep in revision with a goal to have them ready to pitch before summer bows its weary head. Fifteen months after I started writing my first novel.

 ONE LESS WAY OF KNOWING

When the global ecosystem finally fails, it’s likely going to happen in the Atlantic. But we may not know about it until it’s too late.

Now that the Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of 900 deep-sea and surface sensors, it’s increasingly likely that we’ll all be very surprised when the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) finally stops circulating.

The Amoc is a system of Atlantic Ocean currents that move heat from south to north, regulating climate the way a good circulatory system does. Like any good system, it benefits from continuity. And when its gets overloaded — say by too much cold water, or disruptive circulation from neighboring systems — it falls apart.

It last fell apart 12,000 years ago. It took 1,000 years to reset. And in that long window of time — 40 generations of people — Northern Europe, parts of northern Asia and North America were glacially cold, while the southern hemisphere baked.

It’s the sort of climate event that happens fast, once the current shuts down. It’s already weakening, and the chance of collapse is increasing. And now we have one less way of knowing what’s really happening.

 PHOTO GUIDE

- Agecroft Hall hosted Elsewhere Shakespeare, a raw, stripped down, and completely delightful company, for “Much Ado About Nothing.”

- If a tree falls in Bryan Park and no one is there to remove it, is there still a path? Yes. Yes, there is.

- Noah Scalin and the League of Space Pirates at Shockoe Sessions Live!

- PlanRVA and the Richmond YMCA hosted a showing of the documentary “Join or Die…” at the Richmond Library. There were snacks.

- Addie can stare at a turtle paralyzed by fear for days, I suspect.

- Trump on a toothpick stuck in a pile of dog poop on a trail in a public park is the metaphor I have been looking for.

- Blackberries are almost here.