joshua chamberlain

Category: life

  • things I did this year

    New Year’s Eve always puts me in a reflective mood. I’ve always felt this is a day for looking back to remember the previous year while preparing for the next trip around the sun. A few years back, I started compiling a list of things I’d done in the previous…

  • recent musings

    It’s been a busy couple of weeks. A few highlights:

  • no hard drugs, no superheroes

    A friend of mine recently pointed to a word of advice Leonardo DiCaprio once gave Timothy Chalamet: “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.” As far as advice relating to self-control, both with regard to the pursuit of pleasure and every artist’s relentless quest for validation, this is solid gold.

  • opening the cabinet

    I recently received a notice that I’ve been running my Tumblr page, “The Beginning of Your Meaning, Friend,” for ten years. The original idea was for my Tumblr to function as an “artist’s playground,” a space to accumulate the raw materials that would inform my writing and artwork. Even the…

  • don’t dream it, be it…

    For three years in college, I played Brad Majors in an annual production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The production, mounted in a seedy bar on the edge of campus, featured full-scale musical numbers and played host to a slew of University of Dayton-specific callbacks, Easter eggs, and references.…

  • head down. mouth shut. (or “discretion if the better part of valor”)

    I’ve never liked how I worded number three on my list of rules to live by. When taken by itself, the phrase “head down, mouth shut” seems to imply looking the other way in the face of atrocity (much like the German baker in Band of Brothers, who claims not…

  • be fearless

    A few years back, I wrote a blog post about how scary the world had become. One paragraph in particular went a little something like this: The food we eat is poison, the water we drink is laced with chemicals, and the air we breath is toxic. Every day, we’re…

  • two new stories

    visit my medium page for two new short stories: all the little things and taking flight

  • you are enough

    I suppose there’s an irony to the fact this is first on my list of “rules to live by,” as it’s something I’ve struggled with for much of my life. We could blame parental trauma. We could blame late-stage capitalism. We could blame debilitating insecurity, creative resistance, the desire to…

  • rules to live by

    When I was twenty-four, I started working at a theater company. In an attempt to remind myself of where I’d been and everything I’d learned along the way, I made a list of twenty “Rules to Live By,” and taped it up inside my locker at work. While some of…