Thoughts from Places: An Introduction

For the last three weeks or so, Hank and I have quietly started a series of videos called Thoughts from Places.

As many of you know, I’m really interested in finding ways to write for people that do not involve ink and paper. Reasons for this include:

1. I would like to find a way to give my writing to people for free while still becoming fantastically wealthy. I think free is an excellent price for stories, but it is also a difficult price, because even under the current system wherein writing is not free, authors are pretty poorly compensated.

2. I want to reach people who may not think of themselves as readers, and also people who don’t think of themselves as YA readers.

3. I think Youtube could use a little more writing, and I think books could use a little more Youtube. Writing is very good at slowing us down and leaving us, however briefly, with that rarest gift of the Internet age: a quiet, contemplative moment. Youtube is good at calling us to action and bringing us together.

So the idea is this: Thoughts From Places will be a series of 100 visual essays, each exploring an encounter with a place and the people we meet there. Sometimes these places will be very small (my old high school, a bison range in Montana) and sometimes they’ll be very big (Munich, London). We hope you enjoy the series (and that you’ve been enjoying it, even if you didn’t previously know it was A Thing). Your comments, as always, are appreciated.

Here are the first five videos:

Lust and Folly in London and Edinburgh

Family, Love, and Bison Attacks

Looking for Alaska at My High School

Umbrellas Amuse Me: Observations from Munich

Life in a Day: Missoula