Sticky Notes - Listen to me speak.

THE SHORT STORY...

Swimming Pools is a piece about ambition and the price we pay for our ambition. I'd describe it as a cross between spoken word poetry and verbal storytelling. You can listen to it on the other side of the black button at the bottom of this email.

THE WHOLE STORY...

I tend to write best when there is a tremendous amount of noise and clamor; enough to drown out all the thoughts in my head that have a way of getting in the way of the words. 

Writing for me has always been something I “feel” my way through rather than “think”. When I start thinking too much about what I’m doing, shit can go awry.

And so I find a song like The National’s “This is the Last Time” or Frank Ocean’s “Self Control” or Lana Del Rey’s “Happiness is a butterfly” or Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” and I’ll just loop that song dozens and dozens of times until it feels less like a song and more like a feeling.

Then, I try to write to that feeling.

This process took shape for me when I was eighteen and my grandmother passed. I mourned her in a church that sat on a hill right outside my dormitory window at Bellarmine University. 

It was open at all hours and I’d frequent it mostly after midnight when it was completely dark and empty. In the loft of the church there was a piano. I knew a few chords and I’d play them and then sort of speak over them. 

This is where I learned to write.

While I occupy a few different genres as a writer –– poetry, advertising (if you can call it a genre), personal essays and short fiction –– I’ve always felt pulled to the spoken word.

I just haven’t known how to do it in a way that hadn’t been done before...

Until now.  

A couple of months back, I wrote this piece in my brother’s studio while he created the melody in real-time. He then gave me the mic and had me speak what I had written to the melody he had created.

What came out was something I can’t say whether or not is “good” or “bad” because I’m too close to it but something that certainly feels different. 

The process of creating it was incredibly healing and it left me feeling as if I had come full circle... as if I had never left that church on the hill a decade ago.

Swimming Pools is a piece about ambition and the price we pay for our ambition. And, well, it'd mean the world if you gave it a listen.