Among the many gifts I got early in high school was an F I got on a paper from an English class, a paper that the teacher said was too poetic. What he didn’t mean by that is that I had written great poetry in the wrong place. What he meant really, in large part, … Read More
I don’t remember the exact details surrounding my introduction to Gregory or his work. I do remember that upon my first reading, I was captured. In fact, one of my favorite live performance moments ever was sitting with my friend David dark, who’s also been a guest on this podcast several times, at a reading … Read More
On most Sundays, I get the privilege of gathering in my house with a group of preteens and reading through bits of the scripture and talking about them. And then praying together, it’s a thing we call the good news Club, which borrows from a tradition we’ve gleaned from. One of my favorite parts of … Read More
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel them both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth, you might recognize that as the opening stanza to the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. … Read More
Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I’m your host, Justin McRoberts. I’m recording this on December 21, 2022. It is the winter solstice, the day where I live that features the least amount of light. The night is longest. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not feeling great. I don’t know if I quite … Read More
I’m recording this introduction a few days after Thanksgiving. And if you’re listening to this when the episode comes out, it’ll be roughly a week, maybe a week and a day or so after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is to say this is the holiday season. And between Thanksgiving and maybe some things that happen … Read More
In 2002, I wrote and recorded a song called love. And I’ve been waiting to write some kind of follow-up to that song pretty much since I released it. It was a song that meant a lot to me at the time because I was trying to publicly and personally redefine the word and my … Read More
I’ve long lived with Seth Godin’s suggestion that art is anything you make that forges a connection between people. Over time, and in that light, I’ve also come to recognize that the depth and sustainability of my professional art life has a lot to do with the particular people I am connected to in/through my … Read More
It used to confuse me when, as people talked about relationships, romantic or otherwise, they would refer to the relationship as, like a third entity, there was the person and a person, or a few people. And then there was the relationship that they’re in like it was this other thing. You, me, and then … Read More
The loss and the disintegration of the religious community I called home for nearly 20 years came with a long list of complicated analyses and reasons, and diagnoses. It was ideas and methodologies. Over time, the need or the desire to make sense of what had happened took a backseat to the deep comfort of … Read More
