Collected non-music writing from elsewhere (essays, articles, columns, et. al) (2014 - 2020)



A little less than a year after Anhedonic Headphones was launched, I was provided the opportunity to write a monthly column for a free publication in the Northfield, Minnesota area—the Southern Minnesota Scene magazine. Plunked on the back page, it was conceived as an ‘observational humor’ column—but I quickly realized that things aren’t always funny, and the pieces began sliding further away from ‘observational humor’ into dark and kind of depressing personal essays or creative non-fiction.

I left the publication during the summer of 2017; the editor I had been working with—who had given me the chance with the magazine in the first place—was abruptly let go as a cost saving measure for the company that owned the magazine, as well as the local newspapers I had written for from 2014 to 2016.

There was a spectacularly botched re-launch of the Scene website that also took place over the summer of 2017—meaning that everything I had contributed to the publication for over three years was not so much gone forever, digitally speaking, but the content was not migrated over to the new site. It’s still out there, housed via the content management service used for the newspapers—so every piece I wrote for a free publication is now guarded by a paywall.

I mean, it may as well be gone forever.

With that being said, there are bits and pieces of my work for Scene that you can still access, though regretfully, what I consider to be some of my best work, or at least work that got me attention I was not anticipating, are not easily accessible.

The Bearded Life:



Additionally, I had a second piece featured in the July, 2017 issue of the magazine about shelter cats. 

Beginning in June of 2017 (there was some overlap) I began writing a new column for my editor’s newly minted website, The Next Ten Words. The column served as an extension of the work I had been doing, but with slightly more creative freedom, as well as a little more leniency with the word count.

I tried to put together two of these columns a month—though that didn’t always happen, and these should all still be online in their originally published form, though I always linked to them through posts on here. There are apparently 32 posts that I have tagged with The Column of Disquiet, so rather than list them individually, please click right here to see them all  UPDATE (DEC 2020) - thanks to continued negligence from my former editor, who was still maintaining The Next Ten Words as a website up until at least September, the site is 'suspended' and has been taken down, meaning all of the pieces that I published are now just word processor documents on an old laptop. 


Other Magazine Writing:

Additionally, I have had the opportunities to contribute, as I am able, to two publications printed in Southern Minnesota—River Valley Woman, and The Wagazine.

River Valley Woman:


The Wagazine:


- photo credit: Mieke Strand, 2018.

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