Most people (myself included) engineer elaborate systems that prevent them from doing the very things that would give their lives meaning. Think of your go-to time sucks: overwork, drama infused relationships, that television show you just can’t afford to miss. You choose all of that. What do you think would…
Ventnor Terrace
Someone lights up two tables down. Kools. Their peculiar scent never fails to transport me back to her musty old house on Ventnor Terrace. My mother would leave us there for a week each summer. I can’t say we were difficult children, but I suppose she was entitled to a break.

Faster
We spent our summer vacations at the beach. There were carnival rides at the end of the boardwalk, back behind Marty’s Playland. At night we skulked around in the blinking electric light with fistfuls of tickets, crushing peanut shells and cardboard cotton candy centers under our flip flops as we…
The creating life
Listen: can you hear the siren song of the creating life? What is creativity? To me, creativity is the impulse to change other people’s hearts and minds by shining a new light on old ideas. To heed this impulse, we use many different tools: a paintbrush, a camera, a computer…
The secret creative
Are you a secret creative? Do you have a pile of ideas for novels or paintings or films that you never get around to making? All too often, this stems from fear – the fear of being rejected, or praised for the wrong reasons. The Accidental Filmmaker Recently, a friend…