NonFictionEscapism – Nonfiction book reviews, stories, and ideas

The Hedonists’ Checklists

March 29, 2025

I want to show my appreciation to nonfiction editors Sarah Persons and Vicky Oliver at LIT Magazine. They both worked hard to shepherd me through the publication of my most recent essay “The Hedonists’ Checklists“. Seeing potential in the essay, they prodded me to rewrite the ending, and if it wasn’t for their note, the essay may have languished in publication purgatory, otherwise known as Submittable, forever. I’ve now had two excellent experiences with publications run out of The New School in NYC. Christine Ro at The Inquisitive Eater (another New School publication) was equally amazing to work with when she helped me polish “Ready to Gorge” in 2024. Rather than simply publish the essay, Christine provided extensive notes, even recommending the title. It was her suggestion that I pull the phrase “ready to gorge” from the last paragraph of my essay in order to front load the intent of my message and capture more Read more…

My Publications

How I Love You

January 12, 2025

Eric Akoto at Litro Magazine UK published my most recent essay, “How I Love You,” on January 11th, 2025 for the Editor’s Pick, Essay Saturday feature of the website. I’m grateful that Eric and his team provided a home for this essay and I was overjoyed when I read their description of my essay as “a meditation on love, mortality, and existential fear.” The essay is all of these things, and if you take the time to read it, I hope you understand that it is ultimately a love letter written in a strange and discomfiting form.

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 3 – Food

October 25, 2024

Food Food. We need it. We live for it. We love it. Food is an integral part of existence–but it’s not just physical dependence that makes it important; food also plays a significant role in our inner lives, becoming associated with pleasure, pain, joy, and grief. Food fits occasions and colors our moods, and somehow it also identifies us regionally, politically, and economically. The four articles below highlight our strange and complicated relationships with food offering a bit of fun, a touch of heartbreak, and a wallop of intrigue. Overindulgence Two essays by B.R. Meyers, his 2011 “The moral crusade against foodies” and 2007’s “Hard to swallow” look at the gluttony driving popular food culture. Although written more than a decade ago, Meyers’ writing is more relevant now than ever, for in the afterglow of the invention of mukbangs, it’s hard to argue that Meyer didn’t hit the nail on the head when he wrote Read more…

My Publications

Ready to Gorge

June 30, 2024

The Inquisitive Eater, an online publication run by the Creative Writing Program at The New School, published my most recent essay, “Ready to Gorge,” on June 20th, 2024. The essay focuses on beef intestines and other seemingly disgusting Korean meats. Special thanks to Nonfiction Editor Christine Ro for help with this essay. The Inquisitive Eater publishes online year-round. If you like my essay also check out Hannah Walhout’s amazing 2023 essay “Year of The Egg.”

My Publications

Lofty Heights

April 26, 2024

I am pleased to announce that I have published a flash fiction story in the Winter 2023 issue of Janine Mercer’s Corvus Review. I would like to thank her for recognizing my writing and finding a place for it in her journal. You can directly download the pdf of issue 21 here and you can find my flash fiction story, titled “Lofty Heights” on page 33.

My Publications

An Acquaintance with Geumjeong Mountain

January 23, 2024

I should have written and posted this six months ago when the news was still fresh. Regardless of how tardy I am, I’m extremely grateful to have had my writing recognized by the the editors at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. My nonfiction essay, An Acquaintance with Geumjeong Mountain, was published in the July 2023 issue. In addition to my piece, you can read works by other wonderful authors such as Kimberly Hoff and Leslie Carol Roberts. There are too many essays and stories to list here, so please peruse the journal at your leisure. I hope you enjoy reading as much as we have enjoyed writing.

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 2 – Disasters

July 10, 2023

Disasters This week I gathered three articles that highlight disasters. One disaster is entirely man made, and the other two are forces of nature. However, it is the human component of each story that makes them unforgettable. Fallout John Hersey’s (1946) “Hiroshima” gives a vivid account of the horrors suffered by the atomic bomb. This disaster, born out of war, bears scars inflicted by human hands (a scientific-technological elite consisting of physicists, chemists, politicians, and generals), but Hersey’s article focuses on the survivors to put the human toll into perspective. Like no other writer, Hersey humanizes the other and makes their pain our pain. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Wave “The Clock is Ticking: Inside the Worst US Maritime Disaster in Decades” by William Langewiesche (2018) details the disappearance of a cargo ship, the El Faro, after it sailed into the eye of a hurricane. Langewiesche puts together emergency distress audio recordings, interviews with experts, and information gleaned from Read more…

Book Review

Text as Substance and Style in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

October 26, 2021

The style of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not the least bit out of the ordinary for writers of the beat movement, but Wolfe may have captured the pulse of the art better than any of his contemporaries by selecting a perfectly evocative subject matter in the guise of a straight edge reporter following one of North America’s most profound cultural awakenings, or, in layman’s terms, he wrote one heck of a great book—widely acclaimed because of the way it conveys facts on the ground as well as vibes in the air. However, whether you are the aforementioned layman, a psychedelic drug aficionado, or a historian of 1960’s counterculture, be wary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, because you may come to hate it. The warning above is in no way meant to state that the book lacks merit. Instead, the shot across the bow is merely intended to point out that Read more…

Book Review

A Salute to the Trippers in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

October 25, 2021

The story told in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book concerning an experiment to introduce radical ideas about the use of recreational drugs, is generally well-known. It concerns, first and foremost, the now iconic day-glow school bus loaded down for a trip across the continental USA; a trip during which bus pilots Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters became a cultural tour de force as they played new music, produced new movies, and took all manner of new drugs on their travels from California to New York and back again. It is a story that has been woven into the fabric of 1960s culture, and it is a story that has informed subsequent generations, influencing social movements in the 70s, 80s, 90s, aughts, and twenty-teens. But as much as the story has saturated modern American thought and as much as the bus has become an icon of its age, the characters who Read more…

Favorite Articles

Favorite Articles Issue 1 – Exploration

May 11, 2021

When I was young my grandfather stayed in contact through the post, but rather than send letters expressing the personal, he sent his favorite articles clipped out of the Los Angeles Times. The clippings, which arrived in plain white envelopes, were an expression of what my grandfather found valuable: new scientific discoveries, modern engineering marvels, or anything related to space and flight. At the time, I didn’t have the same zeal for those topics as my grandfather, but I later learned to love reading what other people find fascinating, and eventually took on reading as a hobby before making it a livelihood. As such, although my grandfather’s mail never included an accompanying note, the act of cutting out the articles, stapling the related sections together and putting them in the post spoke volumes about the importance of sharing one’s passions. My grandfather’s newspaper-clipping is admittedly old fashioned, but in like manner I would like to Read more…

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