Chad Aaron Hall

Permission assets are everything. All my success as a writer, right down to this bookstore, has been rooted in the email lists and social media accounts I have built. When you have direct access to people who like what you do, everything is more affordable and more scalable. When you don’t? Everything is harder and requires so much more luck.

Small and rural towns across America are increasingly faced with the opportunities and challenges that come with settling new immigrants. In nearly 3,000 rural American towns, the immigrant population grew by 130 percent since 1990. While immigrants are increasingly credited with bringing growth and stimulus to small town America, their arrival can... See more

A journal is an artificially permanent record of thought and inner life, which are invariably transient — something the most prolific diarist in modern literary history articulated herself in her elegant defense of the fluid self. We are creatures of remarkable moodiness and mental turbulence, and what we think we believe at any given moment —... See more

And that’s the point. Eero Saarinen, the building’s architect, once said: “Once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message.”

Writers should heed this principle.

So often we... See more