After almost a year away from the Deep South, I’m finally back in North Carolina. I’ll be bouncing around the state for the better part of a week, tearing through the Hold Steady catalogue and conducting small n research for what I hope will be the book proposal that gets me a publisher’s ear in [...]

Comrades,
I’m in a bit of a transition period right now, wrapping up work at one job, training for new responsibilities at another and suffering from a mysteriously potent and lingering amount of residual stress that has stopped me from tending to my writing duties. I hope to be back up to speed with a weekly [...]

When I’m away from Kansas City and in low spirits, I try to envision someone walking up to the counterman at Bryant’s and ordering a beef sandwich to go– for me. The counterman tosses a couple pieces of bread onto the counter, grabs a half a pound of beef from the pile next to [...]

In the southeast corner of Kansas City, directly in front of an impound lot at the intersection of Blue Parkway and coal mine road, stands a small smokehouse named LC’s. It’s the kind of scene that overwhelms the senses: When you open the front door, a tide of smoke washes through the entrance and begins [...]