I haven’t posted in a while because a wonderful artist named Stephanie Pehar has been helping me redesign the website. It’s had the same format for many years, and I felt it was time for a refresh. Perhaps a fairly different vibe from the old one, but I really love it, as it gets to that intersection between art and science that I believe is the essence of life, and the backbone of my writing. Thank you Stephanie for helping me through this process! I love where we’ve arrived!
In other news, happy to say that I’ve been longlisted in the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Collective Contest, judged by Danny Ramadan. The piece is called ‘Beautiful Scars’. I won’t even try to describe it, but I will say that I don’t really write creative nonfiction as a rule. I find it difficult and beguiling, and have great admiration for people who excel in this area, such as Murgatroyd Monaghan, who won this contest for “The Train” in 2024! I set out this year to explore this form of writing, and as difficult as it was given that I haven’t exercised those particular muscles, I found myself loving it. If the art part of my brain is separate from the science part, the creative nonfiction component seems to occupy a space adjacent to but different from the area where fiction lives.
Hoping to write more creative nonfiction in the future! Thanks CNF for putting me on the longlist. And congratulations to the eight other longlisters!
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4 Responses
The new site’s gorgeous!
…you’re not using AI generated art, are you?
Thank you, Jones! Yes, had an assist from AI, I just can’t make stuff like this myself.
We’ve known one another a long time, and I think this will be the first time I’ve said something like this to you but: That’s bad. Straight up bad.
Unfortunately, all AI-generated art has been trained on stolen content. It’s like if I fed ChatGPT your whole catalog, asked it to write me a story, and then posted it on my blog like it was mine. It breaks my heart to see you use it.
Can you pay your web-designer/artist to create something for you? There’s a thousand-thousand-thousand people on the internet who’d lose their minds to be paid to create art content, especially for someone like you.
I understand that. And I was conflicted. At the same time, generative AI is something I’m using for work regularly because it’s a requirement. From what I understand, and could be wrong, generative AI is not actually trained on what you give it; but bad players are feeding it stuff in a way to imitate true content. I think it’s like any other tool, it can be used in a decent way or it can be used very badly. I think we are seeing a bit of both out there at the moment.