Each of these photos carries something I didn’t have the language for at the time. A particular light, a certain silence, a feeling that settled into the room before I could name it. They were taken in the pauses—between writing sessions, during long edits, on the days when the words came slowly and everything else felt louder.
There’s a desk I returned to with reluctance. A stack of pages I wasn’t ready to read again. Tea gone cold beside a paragraph I circled five times and still left alone. These moments don’t explain the writing, but they haunt it. Like everything else I keep—they stayed for a reason.
Most of my writing begins while I’m reading. Not for inspiration, exactly—more like resonance. A sentence folds open something I didn’t know was stuck. A paragraph dislodges a memory. I dog-ear pages not because I want to return to them, but because they left a mark. Reading doesn’t fuel my writing so much as it reminds me that language can hold what I thought was unspeakable. That someone else has done it before, and I might be able to do it, too.
The actual writing comes slowly. Sometimes in full sentences, sometimes in fragments I carry around like pebbles in my pocket. I write in layers—emotion first, meaning later. I never know what a project is until I’m halfway through it. The process is mostly waiting. Listening. Circling. Most days I spend more time deleting than writing. The good lines are quiet. They hide. But when they arrive, they settle in like they were always supposed to be there.
Each book, each essay, even each blog post carries a kind of weather with it. Some drafts come easy. Others leave bruises. I keep notebooks full of false starts and alternate endings. None of it is wasted. It all becomes part of the work eventually, even if no one sees it. I write because something in me needs to be witnessed. And I read so I can remember that being witnessed is possible.
I travel with a typewriter—not because it’s practical, but because it listens differently than a screen. The keys are heavier, the words slower. It forces me to think like I’m speaking to a ghost. Each clack feels final, even when I know I’ll tear the page out and start over. There’s a kind of intimacy in writing without the hum of digital noise. I never write full manuscripts on it, just the beginnings—the sentences that demand silence and weight.
Along the way, I take photos. Not of landmarks or smiles. I collect shadows, strange light, crumpled napkins with names on them. Things that feel like stories waiting to be told. A photo of a motel lamp might turn into a chapter about loneliness. A doorframe in Lisbon might become the metaphor for someone I never quite got over. I don’t photograph beauty. I photograph feeling.
These images sit beside my pages as I write. They become moodboards, memory triggers, secret keys to emotional tone. Sometimes they remind me what the writing was trying to say before I could say it. I return to them the way some people return to old journal entries—not to relive anything, but to pull something useful from the ache.
Together, the typewriter and the photos form a quiet kind of ritual. One holds the language, the other the landscape. Neither is polished. Both are honest. They help me write not just what happened, but how it felt to live through it. And that’s what every piece in this portfolio aims to capture: not just the story—but the pulse beneath it.