I'm a writer based in Ohio. I've published four books — Enlightenment and Twin Peaks, A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks, Ey Up! An American Engages With This Is England, and A Children's Book for the Growing Man — and I co-host The Red Room Podcast with Scott Ryan, where we've spent over a decade taking television seriously enough to argue with it. I write Terms of Enlightenment, an ongoing publication on the conditions under which clarity, agency, and meaning are still possible in a culture built to erode all three.

I'm also a Certified Consciousness Advisor Professional, and I've practiced Transcendental Meditation daily for years. I don't lead with that fact because it's exotic — I lead with it because it's the discipline underneath everything else I do. Writing criticism is an exercise in seeing clearly. Writing fiction is an exercise in imagining clearly. Advising people on how to align their lives with their actual best interests — not the version of their interests that culture, habit, or anxiety hands them — is the same exercise, applied directly to a person rather than to a text.

These aren't three separate careers stapled together. They're one practice of attention, pointed in three directions. The TV criticism and the Twin Peaks books exist because I think the shows we treat as disposable are usually doing more work on us than we admit, and that looking at them clearly is itself a discipline worth taking seriously. The advisory work exists for the same reason: it is aimed at a person's actual life rather than a screen. Neither one is decoration for the other.

I didn't arrive at any of this through wellness culture, and I'm not interested in performing enlightenment. What I can offer — in the books, in the essays, and in the advisory work — is the result of doing the actual work of paying attention, for a long time, without flinching from what that attention turns up.

At a glance
— Author of four books, including two on Twin Peaks
— Co-host, The Red Room Podcast (est. 2011)
— Writer, Terms of Enlightenment
— Certified Consciousness Advisor Professional
— Daily practitioner, Transcendental Meditation
— Based in Ohio