This Is Everything Else
A new publication for everywhere beyond Maine.
When I’m in Maine, I’m working. Not always actively, but I’m constantly aware, thinking, and paying attention. Switched on. Telling Maine stories is my career—and my passion.
But, I’ve learned that just because I leave the borders of Maine doesn’t mean those creative engines shut down—if anything, they often go into overdrive. A creative reset. A new way of seeing.
Travel has always been more than a passion for me—it teeters on obsession, addiction even. Poring over maps, pinning coffee shops, drawing perfect hiking loops, researching potential photographic overlooks: the build-up, the research, and the planning are key pieces of the travel for me. A few times a year, that obsessive focus turns toward faraway destinations. SD cards full of photos, journals spilling over with notes and idea fragments, essays in the waiting. But none of that work ever had a home. Maine the Way is Maine’s. This is everything else.
I’m not a travel blogger—not really. I doubt you’ll see many swanky hotels or Michelin-star meals. I like seeing a place as it really is—the corner pubs, the street food vendors, the back alleys, and residential neighborhoods. In this 21st century, it is possible to travel the world without experiencing anything new—moving from one uninspired glass-paneled modernist cube to another, McDonald’s and Starbucks at every corner, a Coca-Cola in every vending machine. I couldn’t be less interested in those places.
What I’m interested in is slower than that. I believe a place is more likely to reveal its true self when you’re out wandering the warehouse district on a Tuesday afternoon, in the muddy footprints on a forest trail after a passing rain, in the nodded hello with a stranger on a train. My work in Maine is built around that same instinct — slow journalism, noticing, paying attention. Now, I’ll be turning my lens to everywhere else I happen to journey—dispatches from Bozeman, San Francisco, Tuscany, Mount Kilimanjaro, and New Zealand are on deck, but it’s hard to say where this is all headed next. Wherever that is, I hope you’ll come with me.
JAPAN TO COME!!!!