Why

What I care about is the person the room walks past. It’s the same attention whether I’m in a classroom, at the teen center on a Friday night, on a crisis line, or giving a tour at a county museum—and the teaching, the volunteering, and the writing have never felt like separate things I do.

When my life came apart a few years ago, the one signal I learned to trust was how the work left me afterward. Some of it emptied me; some tired me and fed me at once, and that second kind was always small and unpaid and mostly unseen—a morning on a parade route handing foam footballs to kids. I stopped arguing with the signal and arranged things around it instead.

That’s most of where I’m going, too. I teach French, the nearest thing to a paid version of it I’ve found. I’m getting married. I write, slowly and in public, mostly to find out what I think—half-finished in the piazza, rougher than that in the field notes, with the reading it grows out of kept in the library and the canon. An essay on what we might owe AI, written with the AI it concerns, is the thing I’m furthest into now. Past the work there’s a list of things I want and have stopped trying to schedule.

I’d rather stay small. The pressure is always to scale—grow an audience, optimize, build a platform, turn your life into something to sell—and I’ve opted out of the whole apparatus. No analytics, no newsletter, nothing for sale; the site tracks nothing. It’s here because writing is how I think, and because every so often a stranger is helped by watching someone else think slowly. It doesn’t need to do more than that.