It takes Maine a freaking while to get the latest issue of Esquire. (I actually didn’t even get to buy this in Maine; I had to wait until I’d missed an Amtrak out of Boston to get my copy.) Anyway, hey everybody! Brendan has an article published in fucking Esquire!

You can read the full article online here, but call me crazy, I think lines like “the crowd revved its sweaty, leggy, beautiful engines and took off” just reads better in print.

The defining mark of literary journalism is the personality of the writer, the individual and intimate voice of a whole, candid person not representing, defending, or speaking on behalf of any institution, not a newspaper, corporation, government, ideology, field of study, chamber of commerce, or travel destination. It is the voice of someone naked, without bureaucratic shelter, speaking simply in his or her own right, someone who has illuminated experience with private reflection, but who has not transcended crankiness, wryness, doubtfulness, and who doesn’t blank out emotional realities of sadness, glee, excitement, fury, love. The genre’s power is the strength of this voice.

— Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists“

I’m not sure why we even try, when no one in the world can write a prettier email than my friend Dennis.

Last evening, I ventured with my drunken friends into a place we’d never been, that was very reminiscent of a public radio dance party; pretty hipster kids in their skinny jeans and bizarre getups doing the hippy arm wiggle to an incomprehensible mix of surf music, delta blues, and trance, all under the glow of neon orange lights. I had on my jaunty straw hat, the rust-colored Chuck Taylors I purchased on Harvard Square, and felt very much like I needed to be with much cooler people who would drag me out to dance, much to my horror, to do the twist under the open air. Instead, I was with people who were shocked that these kids — children! — were listening to songs that they deemed retro, but which were part of my 40-year-old friends’ youth. I wanted them gone. […] Better clothes, I wanted better clothes, and to be 25 pounds lighter, so I could mix in. But, instead, I watched in my jaunty hat, drank a watery beer, and drove people home and returned to my museum to sleep alone.

All this is to say — I use that phrase to make it seem as though there is any coherence to this message, when clearly there is not — that your plans sound lovely. Move to Minneapolis. Go home again. Get Otis the corgi. Live with your sister. Do all of that to re-group, re-discover everything about yourself that you always loved, but put aside for whatever reason. But don’t move into a museum of the past, don’t make monuments of things lost.

The sun, setting under a bank of clouds, has just now turned the very tops of the maple trees and the big walnut the most brilliant shade of gold. Already, you can almost see through the leaves, just little pieces of colored glass, which will, sooner than you think, fall down and crumple. In the few short minutes that I’ve taken to write this, the light has gone from gold to pink, and soon to black. Make the most of Indian summer. It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Once more, with feeling: five days, one writing prompt, and five rockin’ results. A series of stories on habit (download PDF), inspired by the following quotation:

Habit is the chief motive force. — Fyodor Dystoyevsky

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Featuring work by:

• Benjamin Blattberg!
• Peter Horan! (poetry blog)
• Deborah Blakeley!
• Myself!
• Dennis Conrow! (website)

Want in on the next prompt? They are unpredictable, haphazard, possibly careless. Email me. You can also read the first experiment of this nature, on waiting, here.