Thank you for tuning into the latest and greatest from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

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Before we dive in...

This might be the kind of thing that only I notice, but I'm a day late on this edition of the newsletter. I usually push these out on Sunday nights, but I was bone tired when I got home to Georgia.

I also figured it might be nice to serve this newsletter up with shot of espresso instead of a Sleepytime tea, and that more of you might be at leisure to read on the morning of Memorial Day than on the usual Sunday night.

Regardless: happy long weekend and thank you for spending your morning reading with me.

Travel Updates: The Great Northeastern Reunion Tour

More than half of the last month was spent traveling outside of Georgia. The sixteen days of living out of a backpack and suitcase took me to...

The Berkshires (Western Massachusetts) to attend a writing workshop led by Cheryl Strayed (which didn't live up to expectations, but was still a valuable experience for a few reasons. Patreon subscribers: stay tuned for a longer piece on this).
Northern New Jersey to hang with my mom, and for the opportunity to train with a really awesome grappling coach, Mike Trasso (for subscribers who train: if you're trying to incorporate some slick wrestling into your BJJ game, Mike puts out some excellent content on "The Merge").
The Jersey Shore to see my grandma, my half-brother, and as many other family members as possible for the first time since late 2019. And to get my fix of Italian ices from The Lighthouse, the summer institution that inspired my college admission essays back in 2007 and will be the subject of a writing competition I'm planning to enter in June.
Princeton for my 10-Year College Reunion. That experience deserves a longer-form essay, but for the purposes of this newsletter, I'll keep my description short: it was orange, black, and very boozy.
Boston for book-related interviews, seeing friends, training, and prospecting potential job opportunities. May brought me to the unpleasant realization that I need to re-up my bank accounts in order to continue investing in my writing and all the things my writing needs to succeed (among them: a good editor as much as a good therapist).

Pictured below: the view from the writing workshop campus (Kripalu); me and Mike Trasso; my go-to Italian ice order at The Lighthouse (vanilla, peanut butter, and blue raspberry); me and one of my favorite college professors, David Miller, after his Reunions panel on faith, ethics, and business; Bug eating a hoagie from Princeton's legendary Hoagie Haven; and one of my favorite view of Boston: the bridge that takes me to Broadway Jiu-Jitsu.

Writing Updates: Queries, Writing Partners, and a Wellspring of Inspiration

I sent out my first query letters at the beginning of the month. I got one form rejection, one personalized rejection, and am waiting to hear back from the other five literary agents whom I've contacted for potential representation. I'm aiming to send out another round of queries this week with a target of querying twenty agents in June (five agents/week).
Though the writing workshop with Cheryl Strayed was generally disappointing, I met a few fellow attendees who were down to form digital or in-person writing groups, two of whom were based in Atlanta. So I made some friends (at best) and accountability partners (at worst).
My traveling in the last few weeks, though exhausting, gave me a ton of experiences worth writing about. I expect the writing will revolve around the themes of home, identity, and potential. I'm excited to dive in. Stay tuned.

Training Updates: Competing, Motley Drop-Ins, and Recommitting to Judo

I completed for the first time in a while at the IBJJF Atlanta Open, and even though I only ended up having one match, there was a lot for me to be proud of in my performance.
While traveling, I had the opportunity to drop into two new gyms (Trasso Jiu-Jitsu and Wrestling in Glen Rock, NJ and Asbury Park Jiu-Jitsu in Neptune, NJ), and to drop into my old stomping grounds at Broadway Jiu-Jitsu(South Boston, MA). It's gratifying to see how my game performs (or breaks down) in unfamiliar rooms and to watch old training partners continue to grow and evolve. I was especially happy to be in Boston to watch some of my favorite training partners get promoted from white belt to blue belt. If you're reading this, Erica, Keely, and Nick, I'm referring to you. Congrats again 🎉 )
Now that my jiu-jitsu training in Atlanta has been figured out (training with Bruno Frazzato at Atos Atlanta, not to be confused with this Atos Atlanta), I'm hoping to investigate some judo classes later this month. I haven't been consistent with judo since the road trip began, and seeing my old judo coach back in Boston reinforced my desire to persist in judo alongside BJJ.

What’s Been On My Mind: Words from Writers I Look Up To

I'm notorious for reading (or half-reading) a bunch of books simultaneously. Here are a three thought-provoking clips from my current rotation.

Philip Roth, Patrimony: Philip Roth is one of my all-time favorite writers. Though he's mostly known for his fiction, it turns out he's got a handful of memoir-ish pieces. Patrimony is one of them, and it'sa particularly heavy-hitting one for me as it talks about Roth's preparation and coping with his father's imminent death. As I try (again) to write a good book chapter about my dad and his demise, this line from Patrimony hit me so hard, in which Roth processes the news of his father's brain tumor:

I was alone and without inhibition, and so, while the pictures of his brain, photographed from every angle, lay spread across the hotel bed, I made no effort to fight back anything. Maybe the impact wasn't quite what it would have been had I been holding that brain in the palms of my hands, but it was along those lines. God's will erupted out of a burning bush, and no less miraculously, Herman Roth's had issued forth all these years from this bulbous organ. I had seen my father's brain, and everything and nothing was revealed. A mystery scarcely short of divine, the brain, even in the case of a retired insurance man with an eighth-grade education from Newark's Thirteenth Avenue School.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba The Greek: I first discovered the author by way of an interview of Apolo Ohno, who swears by Return to Greco as a work that inspired him in his Olympic speedskating career. Zorba The Greek is probably the best work of fiction I've read in years and I'm surprised I didn't read it in school or sooner. My favorite chunk of the book so far is this exchange between Zorba and an old man:

An old fogey ninety years old was planing an almond tree. 'Hey grandpa,' I say to him, 'are you really planting an almond tree?' And he, all bent over as he was, he turns and says to me, 'My boy, I act as though I'm never going to die.' I answered him in turn, 'I act as though I'm going to die at any moment.' Which of the two of us was right, Boss?

Rachel Friedman: And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood: Friedman is a writer I discovered recently and whom I'd love to buy a cup of coffee one day. Her book on following her peers from art/music camp and seeing how they all lived up to or made peace with their relative creative potential is spectacular. As someone grappling with the weight and loftiness of her own expectations for her adult life, and specifically her creative life, I loved how Friedman articulates the purpose of her book alongside her own story:

This is my story of being a former musician who never fully made peace with quitting and a current writer unsure of what her future holds. It is a book for anyone who has given up a childhood dream and grappled with that loss or with late-night what-ifs, for anyone who has aspired to do what she loves for a living and had doubts along the way, and for those of us somewhere in between emerging and established in our careers. It is also a love letter to the artistic life in its various forms. It celebrates our infinite creative potential as adults in all its beautifully complex and incomplete glory.

Closing Out: Keep Breathing, Keep Hoping, and Keep Racin' in the Street

Some timeless and timely words that emerged in my recent interview of JC (my first BJJ coach who—in addition to being synonymous with "home" when I think of training and Boston—also shares a love of Bruce Springsteen):

Some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racin' in the street
—Bruce Springsteen, "Racing in the Street"

I may be going back to work this week, but you better believe I'll still be going "racin' in the street" once I've clocked in the 40 hours/week on the contract gig I've signed in efforts to extend my writing lifeline.

When it comes to the creative dream, I think of the Latin adage, Dum spiro spero: "While I breathe, I hope." With a little money coming in, I can breathe and hope, knowing I can meet my needs for healthcare and for the resources that will enable me to complete the most important writing work of my life so far: the kind of writing that I want to exist in a book on a shelf or an e-Reader, not in Slack messages or slide decks.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed Issue #11 of this newsletter.

May your Memoriall Day Weekend be positively memorable and if May knocked you on your ass, in the words of another New Jersey-based songbird, I hope you'll be "back on top in June,"

EZ

PS: In the spirit of "cross-training" my writing while helping out the local businesses that I've visited on my journey, I've really enjoyed writing Google Reviews. You can check out a few here. Most of them are about gyms, but some are about other kinds of businesses and services (though mostly bougie coffee shops). If that's your cup of tea, if you enjoy my writing, and/or are headed on travels around Texas, California, Georgia, and the Tri-state area, you might enjoy a few of them.

Issue #011: Zen in the Art of Fighting