Blog Posts
Discover a path to greater well-being.
Chad Prevost’s blog offers a compassionate and insightful exploration of personal growth. Through the lens of the Enneagram, you’ll find practical guidance to navigate life’s challenges, unlock your potential, and cultivate a deeper sense of self. Explore a wealth of wisdom-filled posts designed to inspire and empower you.
Being Alone Together and Loving it?
"Live together, die alone." The famous quote from our hero, Jack, in Lost. I thought the quote came from someone famous but I can only find Jack. Well, he is famous (if fictional). So are our Facebooked and Twittered lives, you might say. You might also say that Lost...
Word Count: Helpful Tool or Insidious Device?
When it comes to a first draft, for me there’s nothing like a good Word Count taskmaster sitting at the bottom of my Word document, chiding me to push on. Word counting, however, has become ubiquitous and I'm starting to wonder if it's more a sign of our uber-chatty,...
In Search of the Lost Wackys
It all happened innocently enough. The year, 2008. The day, Saturday. The family had nothing to do. With time on our hands, and nothing to eat in our fridge, we decided to make a mid-morning foray to Aretha Frankensteins, known for their killer breakfast burritos and...
High-Speed Rail or Where We Would be Today if They’d Only Seen My Ten-Year-Old Drafts
Did you know that Japan has had a bullet train since 1961? I kid you not. Eight years before America sent a man to the moon. Two years before the British Invasion. In Europe, high-speed rail started during the International Transport Fair in Munich in June 1965, when...
The Rich Behave Differently?
When I was somewhere in that blurry, ego-development state between 7 and 9, I remember thinking that if I was king of the world things would be different (sort of like Max in "Where the Wild Things Are"). I just knew. I would be good. I would be tolerant. If they'd...
Renaming Jazz to BAM = Bad Idea
I'm no jazz aficionado, just a fan, a lifelong fan. I know a fair share of jazz's history. While I've taken some jazz guitar lessons, learned some scales, and know first hand the complexity of this rich and varied music, I claim no special expertise. So, why is it so...
Delayed Happiness
Hanging Chad had a radio interview on Chattanooga's local NPR station (88.1) yesterday. Mike Miller and I sat down for over 30 minutes, and he's edited two segments to air on Around and About. This is a clip of the first one, which is about taking some leaps of faith...
I Used To Be A Sparrow’s Debut
Paperwings Records asked me to consider doing a review on the recently released debut album of italian-swedish band "I Used To Be A Sparrow." I listened to them and was impressed enough to agree to help spread the word in the form of this small post. The duo is...
Listen! Techniques to Improve Your Mind…and Relationships
Does pop music "ruin" your brain? That seems a little extreme, but the days that I listen to music (pop or otherwise) for long stretches, whether it's driving or sitting in my office and writing with something instrumental playing in the background, after a while the...
The Self-Pub E-bubble: Coming to a Reality Near You
Happy Ides of March! Have I got some prophetic news for you today! Want to make a million bucks? Want to break down the publishing hierarchy's gates? Want to get that book out worldwide to millions of people in the whisper of a few short button-pushing moments? All of...
The Big Deal about Blurbs
Where did the funny little word get its start? 1906 in an essay collection by humorist Frank Gellet Burgess, "Are You a Bromide?" Is it ironic that the word bromide actually means "a conventional, boring, or trite saying?" Probably not. Actually, Burgess invented...
Resonance and Richard Jackson’s Associative Vigor
Richard Jackson's latest collection of poems, Resonance, was quietly released from The Ashland Poetry Press in 2010. Why "quietly"? It's not that poetry collections, as a rule, generally get a lot of fanfare. It's just that for someone with Jackson's writing,...
The Fear of the Countless Others
No matter how progressive people think they are, we're generally afraid of change. Okay, that part is understood. We fear the unknown and all that. But my question today has to do with digital media and the great fear and resistance to it. Do we fear the sheer amount...
What Can Authors and Publishers Learn from the Music Industry?
May you live in interesting times, purported to be an ancient Chinese curse. For the publishing and music industries, it might not be too much to say that times have never been more interesting since the beginning of Gutenberg and the invention of the electric guitar....
All in a Friday Night at JJs: Christabel and the Jons, Ashley and the X’s, Stagolee
When they get the sound right in the oddly-shaped rectangular venue at JJ's--as each band did on Friday night--you get the makings of a magical night. While it may not be the premier spot for acts in Chattanooga that it once was, JJ's Bohemia serves an important niche...
Jack White is Coming to Town. So Why Do I Have the Blues?
Why? Well, it started out like any ordinary teacher-student-conference Friday "holiday" morning. I had my almost-three-year old Lennyn all day. My boys would be out at 11:30. No big deal. Daddy day. I just accept the fact that I won't be getting much writing done. Go...
For the Love of a Typewriter: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media
It's a double-edged sword this social media stuff isn't it? We really can't do without it. Not only because we have this kind of fetish for being connected, but it's just such a powerful tool--literally transforming the world. It's also a lot of fun, right? Not always...
Defamiliarizing the Beatles: Revolver (1966)
1966? Wow. I've always pretty much just "liked" The Beatles, which is why I've lived in such ignorance about one of the highest ranked rock albums of all time, I guess. But recently, I've "discovered" something in Revolver, the band's seventh album, that is as...
The Stars and a Full-Moon in Midtown: Tom Lux’s and Poetry@Tech
As Billy Collins says in the video below at a reading at Poetry@Tech, "It used to be kind of oxymoronic the idea of poetry at Tech. It's great to be a part of the infiltration of poetry in the precincts of civil engineering." And with the creation of endowed chairs...
Burning from the Inside Out: Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann recalls the moment when his own father-in-law barely escaped from the World Trade building and came straight to his house on the day of the 9/11 attacks. He got out from the second building literally with just minutes to spare. At first, McCall's...
Dickens After the Party
What with the recent passing of his 200th anniversary, have you had enough about Dickens lately? All kinds of things have floated through the media the past few days about Dickens. Everything from his prodigious imagination, incomparable energy and drive, to the nasty...
Is Joining The Grid Really Joining The Dark Side?
If you're reading this blog, it's likely you're on the The Grid enough that it's a safe enough bet you also have a Facebook page, perhaps a Twitter account too? Not a stretch to say you may very well have (or have had) your own website or blog? Porter Anderson...
Did Someone Say Free Wood?
So, early afternoon on Super Bowl Sunday, my buddy and neighbor, Brian Carisch and I hopped in his truck to drive a couple miles over to where we'd heard there was an "endless" supply of chopped wood that the "guy was just giving away." We didn't know exactly where...
Is there a golden key to the endless video game saga?
It has happened again. Eliah and Lucas were playing downstairs quietly. Too quietly. I noticed the iPods (gifts from Santa) were missing from the kitchen counter where we've asked them to keep the devices. Were they sneaking some extra video game time...again? We'd...
Is Wilco’s The Whole Love Boundary Pushing or Endearing?
In some ways--a lot of ways--rock is the very genre of boundary pushing, so what does it mean when album review after album review of an artist's work is analyzed and assessed by the degree to which it's "pushed boundaries"? Take, for instance, the latest (eighth)...
Joe Meno Does His Thing in The Great Perhaps
Joe Meno broke onto the literary scene at the auspicious and tender age of 24 with the coming-of-age novel Tender As Hellfire. Now with the publication of The Great Perhaps, the Chicagoan's fifth novel, published with Norton in 2009 his trajectory continues upward....
Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher
Like many, I first learned about Tom Perrotta from the movie, Election. Was Reese Witherspoon hot in that thing, or what? It came out in that time of American Beauty and The Sixth Sense, and Magnolia and is one of those dark, edgy, artistic, satiric films that I just...
How Do You Prepare for a Serial-Release Novel Launch in a Month?
The Gauntlet Thrown: Atticus Books has agreed to release my first novel, The Director of Happiness, in installments of two chapters a week for eight weeks, beginning this March. It works because the novel is written in 16 short chapters, and even with the footnotes...
Questions of Idenity and Purpose: Running a Small Press
It's exhilarating at times, running a small press. You make new connections with the community. You're a part of something you feel passionate about. You connect with other writers, other artists and designers. Other people. It's more than that, too. You're literally...
Writing a Song: The 1-2-3 Immersion Method
When my brother, John, moved here to Chattanooga in 2008 one of the super-big excitements hinged on the idea that John and I had dreamed about for many years. We began to believe that if we were just able to live in proximity to each other we could form that...
A Note of Gratitude to Steve Scafidi
Recently I received something pretty unusual: a kind of "fan email" for my limited-edition chapbook, White-Feathered Bodies. It was from a guy I'd never met, Steve Scafidi. I told my publishers at Q Ave about it, and learned just what a gifted poet Scafidi is. You...
Mission Accomplished? A First Draft
It's printing as I write. Simon Krimple's Wager. The first time I've printed any of it as a matter of fact. A first draft. 100,000 words later and mission accomplished! 325 double-spaced pages. A first complete draft. Wow. Feels pretty good. A signpost in the...
Finding Inspiration: Bob Dylan
A few weeks ago, Shelley got us tickets to go see the Avett Brothers at Track 29 here in Chattanooga. I discovered the Avett Brothers two or three years back, and had actually them introduced them to her. She's a folkie through and through when it comes to music. For...
Finding Inspiration: Woody Allen
Last night, Shelley and I found a pleasant evening of escape watching Woody Allen's much-anticipated Midnight in Paris. In fact, we'd already tried to go to the movie while it was in theaters both in Denver and in Chattanooga and through a series of near-misses still...
The Map and the Territory: ‘Death of the Author’ Renewed
In graduate school one of the most stimulating and inspiring courses I took was Dr. Randy Malamud's 20th Century British Fiction course, which he sub-titled, The Death of the Author. We began with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, ran on to J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and other...
New Hope for the Dead Alive and Kicking
You know, when a book of "uncollected" work is published from someone who died well over a decade ago (technically, in another century), it's safe to say that few to none are paying attention. That may be a safe enough assertion about any book, whether or not the...
Writing as Recovering
My parents, usually led by my dad, a minister, went through long periods of time when the family gathered for a devotion first thing in the morning around the table. One bleary-eyed morning, a reading from Genesis 32 stood out, probably because the events seemed to...
My Daughter’s Middle Finger
This is either (1) my daughter Lennyn's response to every agent or publisher who doesn't see the possibilities of her daddy's first novel, OR (2) my daughter, Lennyn, telling her daddy which finger hurts. Today, I had to stop everything I was doing, and run to pick...
Stumbling upon The Song of Lunch
How often do you flip on the TV and immediately start watching a film based on a poem? Let's take it a step further: How often do you flip on the TV and immediately find yourself watching a compelling film based on a poem? For me, I can safely say that up until about...
Another Freak for the Fire
Jamie Iredell's second full-length collection of genre-defying acrobatics (the title of his first, for instance, is Prose. Poems. A Novel) is a compendium of freakish behavior. Like a dictionary, the entries are arranged alphabetically and each entry features a...
The Nostalgia Echo Coming to a Near Future You
I'm very excited about the release of C&R's second fiction publication and first novel. I don't know what you may have heard about Mickey Hess from his previous eclectic writings on Hip-Hop, his memoir, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory, or his 24-hour blurb review...
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