Articles, Essays, and Other Writing
Listicles and features and essays, oh my!
Copywriting, editing, and strategy work are my bread and butter in my current role, but long-form writing has always been my first love. (Sorry, Kelsey!)
I’ve authored an essay that uses a Stephen King novel to teach philosophy of religion, travel listicles, blog posts about spring at Crystal Bridges, magazine features, advertorials for an outdoor concert by the legendary Wu-Tang clan, newsletters, and more professionally, plus the odd personal essay.
(There’s also a bit of just-for-fun fantasy and horror fiction in that mix, but no human eyes shall ever see those early efforts if I have anything to say about it.)
Check out samples of my longer-form work below, or hop over to Medium to see my latest just-for-fun articles on food, writing, and culture.
Nine Things to do at the Museum this Memorial Day Weekend | CrystalBridges.org
Despite its cultural importance to the area, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is fundamentally a tourist destination. So, in additional to the wealth of topics to discuss in the arts & culture space, our blog content needed to drive attendance during big travel moments.
The editorial program had been dormant (and a little haphazard) before I took on my role as Content Manager in early 2023, so as an experiment for us I drafted a rare listicle-style post for our site.
It was a win-win as far as we were concerned: The content team needed data about what people actually read, it was quick to write, and our audience needed something accessible to help them plan their visits.
The new format was a smash hit. Even a year and a half later, this piece lands consistently in the top ten most-visited posts on the site, beating out ten years of niche art content. It was a great illustration for leadership of what content strategists know well: content needs to be valuable to your audience if you want them to read it.
Read it for yourself on Crystal Bridges’ blog, or download a PDF to take a look at your leisure.
There is No God in Desperation: Tak and the Problem of Evil | Stephen King and Philosophy
When I saw that my friend and mentor Jacob Held was looking for contributors to the next volume in his Great Authors & Philosophy series, and that the volume was about one of my all-time favorite authors, I fired off a pitch centered on Salem’s Lot faster than I’ve sent any email longer than “Thank you!”
It wasn’t accepted.
But while someone else was already doing Salem’s Lot, Jake did love my idea to dig into what “evil” is and the philosophy of religion. So he offered to co-author the lead essay in the book, focused on the lesser-known Desperation and using a quote from the book as the title. (I happily accepted.)
The final piece is an even split between us: Jake wrote an masterful overview of the “problem of evil”, one of the oldest puzzles about God for theologians and philosophers alike, and I wrote a guide to the countless solutions that have been put forward over the ages.
The end result is a tour of one of humanity’s oldest puzzles that any fan of Stephen King could read and enjoy. We don’t take any particular stance on the problem, but instead tease out the ideas lurking in King’s novel and use them to make thousands of years of theology accessible to anyone.
If that sounds up your alley, you can pick up a copy of Stephen King and Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from your favorite bookseller, or read the entire essay as part of Amazon’s sample for the book. (Not an affiliate link. I make no money from the book or Amazon.)
Forget Personal Branding: What a 19th-Century Philosopher Can Tell Us About Great Content | Medium.com
This was a fun piece to write.
What started as a short “Sunday inspiration” post evolved into something really interesting as I explored what felt like an unusual idea : Someone that has been dead for 150 years can tell us something useful about 21st-century content strategy.
By taking Emerson’s lessons about character and translating them into lessons about branding, we can find an inspiring viewpoint on content publishing that feels like the kind of advice Seth Godin or Kristina Halvorson might put out: Let each piece of content speak for itself, and together they’ll speak for you.
The Four Noble Truths of Better Freewriting | Medium.com
Writing advice on Medium isn’t exactly rare. What is hard to come by is advice that goes beyond a surface level look at what makes writing great. This goes double for any analysis of a single part of the writing craft.
Drawing from sources as varied as anthropologist Walter Ong, Anne Lamott, and George Orwell, this piece dives deep into how to use freewriting more effectively, highlighting overused phrases as a major reason freewritten drafts suck and being specific about how to revise freewriting effectively into something you might eventually want to publish.
And, just to stand out a little more, I’ve structured the whole thing in the same way as the Buddhist Four Noble Truths—all the way down to borrowing the traditional opening of a Buddhist sutta.