Understand the stories around you. Author the one you’re in.
It was 4,200 meters up in the Himalaya, climbing an exposed ridgeline still slick with rain, in the dark, with steep drop-offs on either side, clambering after a love interest I’d followed across three continents, that I wondered: How did I get here?
Not for the first time, I retraced my steps.
They led, as they always did, to a discovery I’d made while helping my parents move.
A disturbing drawing had been buried in an old box, showing a flag torn in two: Stars and Stripes on one half, a crested crane on the other.
Beneath the flagpole, a stick figure gushes blood.
The date on the drawing maps to the week my family spent at Glen Eyrie Castle, in a re-entry workshop for missionaries returning from the field.
It is unmistakably the work of fourteen-year-old me, but I don’t remember it. Nor do I remember how I felt in the US after a decade in Uganda as a missionary’s son. All I remember is staring out the car window at the roads and manicured lawns, wondering where the potholes were and why no one had built walls around their houses.
I grew up a “Third Culture Kid,” a term for children who spend their formative years outside their parents’ home country. Author Ruth Van Reken notes that it can create a sense of rootlessness and restlessness, where home is “everywhere and nowhere.”
That sense hounds me. It’s why I’ve spent more than half my life abroad, and it has shaped a career in the arts largely devoted to people caught between worlds.
After studying Film & TV at NYU Tisch, I worked as a travel videographer through Asia and Central America, edited documentaries in NYC, and directed Lights Film School, where I helped thousands of filmmakers around the world develop their craft.
Now I write for the screen on commission and on spec. My work has been recognized by the Austin Film Festival (Finalist), The Black List (Staffing Book), Nantucket Film Festival (Winner), Fantasia Frontières in partnership with Cannes’ Marché du Film, etc.
What is this place?
I also run The Lighthouse, a publication that brings restless spirits together so we can figure out WTF is going on in the worlds around us and inside us. Here, we explore how stories shape us - and how we shape them - across three arenas:
Stories in media. Film, fiction, and emerging media analysis that sharpens insight, empathy, and craft, helping us see how stories explain a culture to itself.
Stories from new places. Dispatches from my life lived across borders, offering new lenses on creativity, culture, and identity.
Stories from the day-to-day. Essays on the thresholds we all face, exploring creative blocks, life pivots, endings, reinventions, and the choices that define us.
Because story isn’t just entertainment. It’s how we make sense of our lives - a force that can ground us, reorient us, or, if we’re not careful, swallow us whole.
In a world where story shrapnel are attacking from all directions, with each one attempting to bamboozle my brain into attention, it is very soothing to listen to your gentle invitation to share in your experience… With what feels like a sincere and humble empathy… you reveal small and simple, yet rich and often overlooked, experiences which remind us of how big and round the world is, and how little I really know of it.” - Danielle C.
“Somehow you are writing and thinking about the same things we have been wrestling with… I believe we human beings understand and process life through story, and that we need stories to keep understanding it better. Thank you for your work!” - Victoria B.
Curious? Start here:
Stories in media
We need to talk about HAMNET. On cinema, emotion, and what art is for.
Beginning HOUSE OF SNOW. Deciphering a (cursed?) journal I found in Nepal.
Stories from new places
Exploring the Roof of the World. A travelogue through the Himalaya.
The Best Fabrics for Travel. A nomad’s guide to packing light and in style.
Stories from the day-to-day
The Search for the Ninth Path. On finding a way of life that makes sense for you.
Waking the Wind Fish. Finding the courage to let go.
“BUT YOU, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed. Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.”
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Retracing my steps, I wound up on that ridgeline because I was chasing a sense of home. I’d forgotten that, for me - “restless in rest” - home isn’t something I can pin to a person or a place or a faith. It’s something I find as I go, through story.
Maybe that’s what it does for all of us.
