Writing
I’m a writer in addition to being an editor and creative consultant, and I began being published when I was a young spoken word poet. Now I write and publish memoirs, travel and music stories, fiction, and meditation pieces. Click on any entry below or on older entry pages to read my work!
Finding Heaven and Hell in Turkey (Travel Memoir)
I was lying on my back staring straight up at a bare light bulb hanging from a long, naked wire. The light was off and the pension room was dark, but I could see the headlights of cars trail across the ceiling and walls around me. I wanted to close my eyes, but every...
Had Myself a Sleazy Seattle Xmas (Music Memoir)
It was Xmas Eve in Seattle in 1992, and I had the night off from working at the Off Ramp. I also had pneumonia, so I invited Boner and Rat Boy over to my apartment to drink Jack Daniel’s. The sun had sunk hours before, but you could still see the city lights...
Jimi Hendrix, My Dad, and Me on the Fourth of July (Memoir)
I’m the child of hippies. Counter-culture, flowingly-bearded, long-hair-parted-down-the-middle, love children from the Midwest. My mother got pregnant with me after my father returned from being a soldier in Vietnam. And I was named after a hitchhiker named Kip...
America Elected the Apocalypse so I’m Listening to The Cure (Commentary)
Dear World, I’m sorry that America decided to elect a fascist president last week. I’m sorry that the country I was born in also voted in a Republican-dominated Congress and House of Representatives for two of our other main branches of federal government. With an...
I Played with the Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco (Music Memoir)
Grove Street was quiet in San Francisco’s Western Addition. The booming bass and smooth rhymes of Snoop Dogg coming from the projects half a block from my house had quieted a few hours before. The fog was nearly burned off as I walked up the hill toward Alamo Square...
How to Swim Across the Mississippi with a Broken Arm (Memoir)
The Mississippi River ran through the center of my hometown, and sitting on the riverside watching it flow was an escape from my small, landlocked city. The river rolled from Granite City to mysterious otherworlds, snaking southward under the giant Minnesotan sky to...
The Story of “Hey Beautiful” (Music Memoir)
San Francisco was a gorgeous and gritty city in 1998, but it was changing. Teetering on the edge between punk rock and gentrification. Between the first dot-com explosion and the vestiges of cyberpunk. The floodgates had opened to people with money on their minds, but...
The Beauty and Danger of Diving in Honduras (Travel Memoir)
We were twenty-five feet underwater when we heard the fishing boat coming. A dive flag floating on the surface indicated we were below, so no craft was supposed to drive near us. But the whir of the engine was getting closer. The other divers started going deeper to...
Working On the Waterfront in Kenai (Travel Memoir)
I was standing in the hold of a fishing boat with salmon and icy water up to my chest. All around me, fish lay struggling, slapping their tails and eyeing me while I waited for a giant vacuum to plunge through the hatch above my head. My feet were frozen and numb...
The Final Time My Father Said, “Come on, Hit Me” (Memoir)
During the last year I lived at home with my family in Minnesota, I was a bad boy. A miscreant. A drunken, drug-addled fiend searching for sustenance in the cultural desert of the arctic Midwest. My punk rock insanity was fueled by a series of traumatic events that...