To bike tour, one needs a bike

A journey occurs when the rubber hits the road. So I need rubber. When I started thinking about this bike tour, I thought for a while about what I would be riding all the way to St. Louis. I had two bikes; a Trek FX 7.2 and Raleigh Merit 1, though neither were really optimum […]

So how do you fix a bike?

The journey begins first with an education. Travel’s on my mind. In hindsight, I had no idea what I needed to know to be prepared for a bike tour. The concept seemed simple enough; have a bicycle and a few bags, and then just ride! But what about if something goes wrong? What if I […]

I’m going on a bicycle tour

Libations with friends has ways of instigating both love and danger. If I recall correctly, the idea to go on a bicycle tour first started late last fall, after my friend John returned from a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He had recently found himself on some crossroads of life, so he decided an adventure […]

Happy 2017!

It’s finally over! 2016 is out for good, never to return! Sure, the turning of the new year means that the past 365-day period of political strife, cultural-icon deaths, and the election of Donald “I can’t contain my childish impulses and will therefore inevitably wage a nuclear war” Trump has come to completion, but I […]

The scope of our stories

I do love superhero movies, particularly the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The overarching creation of these united films into a single storyline is undoubtedly the foundation of a new mythology that will likely last for generations, an epic poem of godly heroes who give us hope and tickle our ethos when the casual nature of […]

The transgender bathroom question

Despite my better instincts, I feel like I need to weigh in on the matter of transgender people needing to use the bathroom. In fact, I’m not alone: despite everyone’s better instincts, this has become a nationwide topic, no doubt to the embarrassment of basically every transgender person who has ever been out in public […]

Drunken theology

Early on in the process, there were some logistical issues that needed to be worked out on just how an atheist and a Christian would collaborate on a stage play about an atheist and a Christian working out their theological differences. About a month ago, I wrote about how my theater comrade, John, and I […]

Tamir Rice in an English class

I’m currently in the midst of a two-week substitute teaching job in an English Literature class, talking to high school juniors and seniors about the finer points of William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” respectively. And before the teacher took his temporary leave, he had also handed out a […]

Thoughts on poetry this auspicious month

Most of my active writing life the past few years has been journalistic nonfiction and plays; between my job at a small-town newspaper and my involvement in the same small town’s theater community, there was little time for much else. That’s one of the perks of poetry though. It can be easy to dabble with […]

Looking for a voice

Every writer – hell, every artist – is in the business of finding their own voice. Artists know what this means, but such a statement might sound like white noise to anyone who isn’t in the business. So in short, the voice is like their fingerprint, the stamp of personality that bleeds red ink into […]