Writing
Alongside being a musician, creative consultant, media professional, and developmental editor, I’m a professional writer.
Click on the entries below and the pages that follow to read some of my work. You’ll find memoir and creative nonfiction, travel and music stories, fiction pieces, and articles about meditation and personal transformation.
Singing Solo at Oakland Coliseum (Music Memoir)
I stand alone on the shimmering green grass of Oakland Coliseum, between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. Blazing bright floodlights pour down through the night sky and illuminate the field. My legs quiver when I look up anxiously at the rows of people in the...
Down the Bayou in New Orleans (SUPing Story)
Bayou St. John in New Orleans is a beautiful, mysterious, and murky length of water that runs through the city to Lake Pontchartrain. Its milky green color hides what lurks beneath, and when I navigate down it, I stay perched above the warm, swampy liquid on my...
My Life Was Changed by a Mysterious Health Issue (Memoir)
I used to run and I loved it. When I was seven years old, I watched the very first televised Iron Man on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The race was broadcast from Hawaii, and after I watched Dave Scott swim, bike, run, and win, I wanted to be a triathlete. It was...
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...
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...