Words To Live By

07/19/2026

This week’s essay is called Brown Paper Bags.

It is the next piece in Season 2, and a story that took a long time to tell.

As always, thank you for being here.

Link in the comments

07/12/2026

Sometimes we spend so much time wondering whether we’ll ever change the world that we miss the person standing right in front of us.

Today’s essay is about that.

It’s also my answer to a question I’ve been asked more than once:

Why write these stories?

Interlude: That One Person

I hope you’ll read it.

🔗 Link in the comments.

07/05/2026

Gas pumps, candy jars, tired mill workers, old stories, plastic dinosaurs, Saturday-night music, and one judgmental owl.

This week is about an old white building at a country crossroad. It’s all gone now. Even the owl.

Gas pumps, candy jars and the owl keeping watch

06/28/2026

New essay is live:

“On the Wrong Side of the Low Water Bridge”

This one goes back before the stages and the microphones.

Back to Oakboro.

Back to Big Lick.

That is a real place.

Or at least what little is left of the place I knew, and the place that thought it knew me.

There was a church on the hill and a store at the crossroads.

Miles down the road, on the other side of Oakboro, there was a low water bridge that felt farther away than it had any right to.

I grew up where everybody knew who you belonged to before you knew what belonging meant.

Sometimes that felt like love.

Sometimes it felt like being watched.

Most days, it was both.

And sometimes a boy needs somewhere the world will stop calling his name.

The water did not care who we were.

I liked that about it.

I still do.

Before I knew every bridge had two directions.

06/24/2026

Great news to read. Communities coming together to better serve the need.

The work continues. The impact grows. 💙

With a continued commitment to mental health for all, we are proud to officially serve Rowan and Stanly Counties.

While our connection to these communities has been growing for sometime, this expansion will strengthen access to support, education, advocacy, and resources where they are needed most!

06/21/2026

I’m beginning Season 2 of my Substack this week.

Season 1 was about collapse, survival, and the long work of staying alive.

Season 2 goes back before all that.

Back to red clay.

Dirt roads.

County lines.

Last names.

Food stamps.

Mill pay.

Porch swings.

Dinner prayers.

And the kind of silence a child learns to read before he has words for it.

The first piece is called What the Rain Remembers.

It is not the wound yet.

It is the world before the wound.

And maybe the storm already gathering.

The world before the wound, and the storm already gathering.

06/16/2026

Join us this Saturday for a poetry workshop with Nemo Sum on Voices, Verses, & Vulnerability

June 20
1-2 PM
FREE
All ages

Goodyear Arts
301 Camp Rd #200
Charlotte, NC

Free art, poetry & music workshops are sponsored by ASC Culture Blocks— a community partnership funded by Mecklenburg County.