Each evening I sit cross-legged before the gas fireplace of my Pasadena apartment and read a story to my son as though we’re huddled around a campfire. He may not be ready for ghost stories or forest folklore, but he has graduated from picture books to fables, the sort that imparts morals on the sly. Right now he’s into The Tortoise and The Hare. He requests it almost nightly, so rapt while listening I’m left to wonder whether he takes comfort in the familiarity or believes the outcome might miraculously change, somehow, someway. I have a hunch it’s the latter, that he’s rooting for the hare. But who can blame him? Don’t we all want to “get there” faster?
Rereading it often gets so rote I let myself slip out of body, reeling back to my youth on the outskirts of Nashville long before the suburban sprawl. I grew up in a neighborhood on the edge of the woods and was my son’s age, give or take a year, when I crossed over into the Narnia that was to become the Walden of my adolescence, treading a bootlegger’s trail as I came and went, first with juice boxes, later with six-packs. There the ground lay studded with Civil War munitions and even older arrowheads, each an untold story taken to the grave. There I scavenged for such clues, spinning a yarn that might string them together. A severed rabbit’s foot, an empty turtle shell. Reminders that the real race is with time, what I dare say Aesop meant to teach us.
Thanks to the oral tradition of the South, I learned to follow the thread of a conversation just as carefully. I spent many a summer night on my grandparents’ porch shelling crowder peas for tomorrow as a low moon rose and retreated, the shadows eclipsing our visages until nothing but our voices remained. I listened to my relatives embellish memories that would take on lives of their own, some outliving even the teller. A stranger once commissioned my late grandfather, who laid sheet metal for a living, to build a copper moonshine still. My grandfather obliged but soon regretted the decision, convinced the ATF would one day come a-knocking. Though that day never came, the thought of it drove him into a psych ward. Such is the power of the stories we tell ourselves.
I took the woods with me when I moved out West, initially to the desert where I studied psychology, then on to Hollywood where story reigns supreme. Eager to earn a byline and make the porch dwellers proud, I enrolled in USC’s creative writing program and put pen to paper each day, even when I didn’t have much to say. Scribbling down every flight of fancy, I would parch a Bic by the end of an all-nighter, hiding hollowness behind pace like a shell game on the Star Walk. In need of inspiration, I hopped the pond for more hallowed literary ground—that of Cambridge. During my single semester there, I found my footing and completed my thesis, and upon earning my degree returned stateside to join the USC faculty, where I taught (and still teach) a range of courses, from first-year composition to graduate seminars.
I apprenticed myself to teaching as one does in the early stage of an academic career, yet should a lull fall over office hours, I would pull out one of those hollow pieces and attempt to fill it in, having lived more life by then. Some weren’t worth the effort. Others I managed to salvage, soon to be procured by the likes of ZYZZYVA, The Pinch, Los Angeles Review, and so on. Still others have been anthologized in the US, the UK, and Canada. I’m as surprised as I am proud to say I’m a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Lit/South Award, and a finalist for the Ninth Letter Literary Award, the Third Wednesday Flash Fiction Award, and the Moon Meridian Novella Award.
With a steady paycheck and some publications under my belt, I set my sights on a novel, a feat I had undertaken thrice to no avail, each manuscript more hurried and desperate than the last. After several false starts came the full circle moment in which I returned to Tennessee, holed up in a cabin, and went to work in earnest, vowing for once to take my time. Instead of bringing the woods to the coast, I brought the coast to the woods as a kind of undercurrent. To write a book imbued with the spirit of both, I had to become a patient prospector of land and water. A tortoise, as it were.
The Watersmith will be published by Regal House in the Summer of 2026.
