Summer 2016 Preamble

The Law of Epic Adventures states that 1) all epic adventures begin at the beginning, and 2) only at the end of an epic adventure can it’s beginning be known. Today I leave Philadelphia for a month long artistic residency at The Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSM). Even now there is a pre-beginning to the beginning that I cannot yet see (And is surely not today. Too obvious.) and the pre-beginning to the epic adventure of this Summer is to thank my sister, Lisa Hayden, and one of my best friends, Carrie Martinelli, for being the kind of writers who have inspired me to keep a blog. Well, not so much keep as give away.

As you may know, I write in a journal every day. It is an ineloquent chronology of daily events and broad strokes of how I feel about them. It is not a creative pursuit but it is the process by which I give space to the numeric/boxy/OCD/microcosmic impulses of my brain in order to free up space for creative connections. I have never shown them to anyone. I have also never shown anyone the four novels, dozens of short stories, poems, and sketches I’ve composed. There will be much about this trip that I won’t share, too, but what I do share I will endeavor to be thematically honest about because it struck me recently that even in my own notebooks, intended solely for myself, I am not always honest about the things that matter. Perhaps, being a performer, I require an audience to be vulnerable. I don’t know. We’ll find out together.