“Beach Row” in Sonder Magazine (2020)

Beach Row was written in the wake of my encounter with Tom Wolfe and his uniquely journalistic attitude toward writing. With that in mind, Beach Row was an exercise in creative journalism; the setting is real, taking place in my own neighborhood, and is populated by people with behaviors and histories that I’ve been observing now for nearly two and a half decades. In seeking to appear both as a player and observer, the immediacy of present tense has been set inside the perspective of a late adolescent; raised knowing both the comfort and crudeness of coastal California, he is nonetheless harassed by the inceptive sense that life on Beach Row deprives individuals of some serious, existential need. Having been set into motion and then severed from the tested sources of meaning, on this New Year's Eve the dislocated protagonist briefly rights himself from the whorl of nihilism and malevolence, and steps toward the open palm of consolation.

Category: short story