The day after I got back from Amsterdam the sun came out and my mom and I took the dog for a walk in the woods in the nearby town Bietigheim, while the kids went to a circus. All the… Read More ›
William Pearse writer
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez when it’s Easter time, too
I envied Andrew Gabler for all he had that I didn’t have. He wore name-brand clothes, had chestnut-brown hair that shone, was good looking and built, athletic, played soccer better than I did and wrestled (though I always thought wrestling… Read More ›
All the men at the bar bent over their phones
All the men at the bar bent over their phones and me among them, with Jimi Hendrix and sports recaps playing and the dull chatter that burbles and rolls like the tide spitting up their remains, making it all disappear… Read More ›
A clean house does not a clean mind make
When we bought this house I planned to take care of it. It was bigger than any place we ever lived, and the guy we bought it from looked frazzled when he was showing us how you do everything, and… Read More ›
‘Are you a real writer?’
I had to wean myself off the pocket notepads I used for more than 20 years. The pocket notepads went in my back pocket and made an outline of themselves like a tin of chewing tobacco. The pocket notepads started… Read More ›
Just because you put it in a book doesn’t make it any better
On that last day of winter the sun finally came out, and though the cars and rooftops were covered in frost I walked to the far fields with my coffee where there’s still horses, on Rock Meadow Farm. It was… Read More ›
Thinking about writing, talking about writing, and writing
I learned there was an artist in our neighborhood who wrote gothic fantasy stories and illustrated them and his name was Brom. It gave me hope there were other freaks in the suburbs like me. His house seemed normal enough… Read More ›
On the Road, with Robert Smith (1987)
God bless my dad, that summer we drove out west and only had three tapes, two of them mine. We took a train from Chicago to Denver where we rented a car and camped around the Rockies, then drove to… Read More ›
Why Led Zeppelin called that one ‘Presence’
By the time Led Zeppelin got to their seventh album Presence the band sounds tired. Still good, still Zeppelin, but starting to show signs of wear. How could they not? How many bands make seven perfect albums like that? Less… Read More ›
The Last of the Whiskey
Maybe it was the sub-tropically rooted atmospheric river we’re under in western Washington that put me in a funk with all this rain, all this weeping and draining and sagging and uprooting that got me encased in a work-induced death… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 