I’m pleased to share that I have a new short story published this month on Creative Colloquy’s website. It’s a piece of flash fiction written in response to artist Steve LaBerge’s installation “Touching Down in Tacoma,” which was a part of the Tacoma Light Trail, an exhibition of light art in downtown Tacoma. For a few weeks this winter, LaBerge transformed the lobby of the historic Pantages Theatre into an alien landscape with a lone illuminated figure sitting beside a suit of some kind and a board of multicolored squares. Also included was an ethereal song provided by the Puget Sound Revels.
Looking at LaBerge’s piece, I was struck by the whimsy and the melancholy in the scene. With that in mind, I set out to write a short story incorporating the various elements of the installation and trying to imagine who the lone figure was and what they were doing there in this bizarre, otherworldly place. The resulting story is “Victorious,” about the last survivor of a devastating future war in the final moments of a world about to end. It appears in this month’s fiction and poetry published by Creative Colloquy, alongside a poem by Erik Carlsen.
Before reading the story, I invite you to look at “Touching Down in Tacoma” and listen to the music. Then, head over to Creative Colloquy to read the story. I hope you enjoy it!
Let me start out by saying that I didn’t intend to create a podcast. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always enjoyed podcasts, having been a fervent Radiolab listener for more than 10 years, and I regularly recommend shows like 99 Percent Invisible, Levar Burton Reads, The Moth, and Imaginary Worlds to anyone who will listen. But I never thought I would make one. These shows were highly produced works of art. Coming from a film background, I knew how much time and energy that takes to pull off.
But then, the whole world changed.
A deadly pandemic upended my daily routine. I was out of work, alone at home, for days…and then weeks…and then months. I read a lot, but I also dove headlong into every podcast I could find, sampling from genres and formats I never knew existed. I listened all the time—in the shower, while weeding the garden, out walking the dog—trying to shut out terrifying reality with comforting voices in my ears.
All that listening dredged up an old idea. Back in college, I used to joke with my friend and frequent collaborator Will McDonald that someday we were going to make a black-and-white sci-fi B-movie called Captain Radio and the Mutant Mole People from the Eleventh Dimension. For years and years, it was nothing more than an inside joke. Then, in the fall of 2020, something clicked and I realized that Captain Radio wasn’t a movie at all, but a 1930s radio show.
I started writing. Soon, I had dashed off three scripts bursting with rocket ships, ray guns, robots, mad scientists, rapid-fire dialogue, melodrama, and (of course) a valiant hero. It was silly stuff, popcorn fare of the highest order, but it felt good to write something hopeful in the midst of a global catastrophe. I needed the escape, and I suspected others did, too. So, I pitched the show to Will and asked him to come along as the star and co-producer. For some crazy reason, he agreed. Together, we assembled a talented voice cast from across the country, many of whom we knew from Theatrikos Theatre Company in Flagstaff, AZ.
After a lot of work finalizing the six-episode story, organizing recordings, learning my way around Audacity, creating sound effects with random objects lying around my house (wine glasses, bags of rice, and a wet sponge among many others), the first episode dropped on December 31, 2021. Chapter 4 is out now and as we rocket toward the season finale in a couple of weeks, I’m proud of the work we’ve done and hope listeners have enjoyed coming along for the ride as much as we’ve had fun putting it together.
If you’re interested in checking out the show, you can find The Adventures of Captain Radio in all the usual places you consume podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to leave a rating and review telling others one thing you liked about it — that helps us immensely. You can also buy merchandise featuring artwork and quotes from the show, or you can skip all of that and make a monetary donation on Ko-Fi to help pay the bills. You can learn more on the Obscure Studios website if you’d like to dig deeper.
I didn’t set out to become a podcaster, but here I am. I’m so excited to be sharing this spacefaring journey with you. Thanks for listening.
What a year, am I right? After the dumpster fire that was 2020, 2021 offered new and unexpected challenges, along with a second helping of pandemic life just to keep things interesting. Personally, this past year was a time of incredible change, for which I’m grateful (ongoing global epidemic notwithstanding).
This year, I became a father, and it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever done. Sure, there are exploding diapers, plenty of screaming, and sleepless nights, but there’s also a little person who smiles when she sees me, grabs my fingers tightly, and calms down at the sound of my voice. This year was one of preparation, getting everything set up, and welcoming a new life into this messy world — and the world is a brighter place for her presence.
This was also a year that took my creative life in unforeseen directions. In November, while getting up every few hours at night with an infant, I decided to do NaNoWriMo, as a way to stay awake and much to my surprise, ended up writing 50,000 words of a novel manuscript in 30 days. I’ve kept the momentum up and now I’ve got a solid 80,000 words of a Las Vegas mobster novel and less than 20,000 words to go before I reach the end. It’s a major accomplishment for me, since I have a hard to time finishing any writing project, to be so close to typing “The End.”
My other major creative pursuit was something completely different: a full-cast audio drama. I started writing The Adventures of Captain Radio in 2020 when I was desperate for some escape from grim reality. In 2021, I got back into the project, and the first half of our six-episode season is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other audio streaming platforms.
And to top it off, I baked some really, really delicious bread this year.
Amazingly, for the second year in a row, I accomplished all of my birthday resolutions. Let’s see if we can keep the winning streak going. Here are my personal and creative resolutions for this coming year:
Be the Best Parent I Can Be
This is a big one. I’m new to this whole parenting thing and want to be a good dad. This means taking the time to be present, leaving work at work, and devoting myself fully to the joy and hardships that come with raising a tiny human. It isn’t easy, but it is rewarding and I’m looking forward to helping my daughter explore the world. I’m thankful I live in one of the few states that offers paid family leave and I’m getting ready to take off two months to spend caring for my daughter when my wife goes back to work.
Finish What I Start
This is a big one. I get excited by new ideas, and I’ve always been more keen to kick off a shiny new thing than to invest the energy to complete an existing project. This year, I’m endeavoring to continue the projects I began last year. That means wrapping up the first draft of my novel and starting revisions, editing and releasing the rest of my podcast, and completing work on the short story collection I began editing in 2020. This year will be a year of getting things done, even if they take a while.
Embrace Change
My life is vastly different than it was just a year ago. I’ve embarked on a new journey as a parent, changed jobs in the middle of a historic pandemic, and had most of my plans for the year upended in some way — but the results have been worth it. Change is inevitable. You can either fight it, getting lost in a cycle of anxiety about what might happen, or embrace it, making space to welcome the unknown. I can’t control what happens, but I can control my response to it. I hope to do this better as I begin this next trip around the sun.
I find the practice of setting birthday resolutions to be helpful. In a decade of doing them, I haven’t always accomplished everything I set out to do or be, but that isn’t the point. The point is to try, to strive for something, to set the mark and see how close I can get. I may stumble on the way, but that’s part of the fun. Here’s to 32.
— 30 —
Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. His new fiction podcast, The Adventures of Captain Radio, is now available to stream on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere. His fiction has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter for more thoughts and musings.
It’s 7:30 am on New Year’s Day. Morning dawns cold and clear and silver over the snow that still blankets the roads and rooftops in our neighborhood. I am in the nursery, trying to coax a three-month-old human to go back to sleep. My wife has been up half the night with an anxious dog while fireworks and clanging pots and pans tore through the night and I’m trying to give her a break so she can rest. The wriggling little girl in my arms finally stills, her breathing quiet as she drifts off.
The pace of life is different in the fresh hours of 2022. The previous year was a hard one. The world stood on what felt like the brink of collapse, with a virus raging and political strife surrounding us. I tried to keep myself safe and protect my family, holed up in our house, which sometimes times felt like a refuge and other times like a prison.
In the midst of uncertainty, I started a new job after months of not knowing if I would ever find one. We welcomed our daughter into this broken world on the last warm day of autumn — a glimmer of something beautiful in the gathering dark. Becoming a parent is not what I expected. I am not different; only my priorities have changed. I find more joy in simple things: an extra hour of sleep, a smile, a filling meal, and in all the changes wrought in the fires of the outgoing year.
There is nothing inherently special about this day. I choose to find meaning in the turning of the year, even though I know that there’s still going to be a pandemic, climate change, war and shadows of war, hunger and homelessness, division and suffering in 2022, just as there was in 2021. I choose to look ahead with hope despite all of that, because there’s also going to be beauty. My daughter will grow. She’ll learn to sit up on her own, express herself, and notice new things each day.
As morning light fills this tiny room, I am grateful for my family, for four walls and a comfortable rocking chair, for gray hairs, for pandemic projects, for good books and steaming cups of tea, for a small hand wrapped around my finger. And so I enter 2022 humble, weary, restless, grateful, hopeful, and ready to be surprised by the changes in store. Happy new year.
— 30 —
Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. His new podcast, The Adventures of Captain Radio, is now available to stream wherever you listen to podcasts. His fiction has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his newsletter for more thoughts and musings.
I wasn’t there, but I will always be there. I was eleven years old when four commercial airplanes were hijacked on the morning of September 11, 2001. Turned into weapons of mass murder, two hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one was steered into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the final plane, who’s target may have been the U.S. Capitol building, was brought down by passengers in a field in rural Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 people were killed and many thousands more were injured.
Living three time zones away, I didn’t see the destruction live, as many did, but I saw replays over and over again that day and for many weeks afterward. I can close my eyes and see smoke pouring out of a gaping wound in the South Tower, the North Tower crumbling under its own weight as a cloud of dust obscured its collapse, a man plunging headfirst from a burning skyscraper. September 11 was a day of tragedy on a scale I still struggle to comprehend — and a stark dividing line separating the world that existed up to that morning from the dark days that followed.
For those of us who were children on the day of the attack, but still old enough to remember it, the shadow cast by 9/11 is long. It is a part of our collective cultural memory, a moment when the innocence of childhood was pulled out from under us and the horrors of the world were laid bare. I once read that world events which occur in early adolescence have a profound effect on the development of our values, beliefs, and political opinions. I can’t find that article now, but I believe its central argument holds up. My worldview was strongly shaped by that day and by the events which followed: the War on Terror, the era of “See Something, Say Something” paranoia, the rise of the surveillance state, and the unraveling of our country’s civic fabric.
I was a different person after September 11, 2001. We are all different now, moulded by a shared national trauma. Consumed by grief and anger, we inflicted lasting harm on ourselves and the world. Not all of it was intentional and perhaps it could not have been avoided, but the impact of this single day of terror continues to reverberate not only across America, but also in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, which were caught in the crosshairs of our retribution. I don’t know where that leaves us, but I know it did not bring back the people were lost that day.
The September 11 attacks will probably always define our generation, much as the Kennedy assassination or the Moon landing are forever tied to our parents’ coming of age. I don’t know what that legacy will ultimately be. Twenty years later, the dust is still settling. But I do hope it can spur us to honor the memories of those who died, support those living with the physical and emotional scars of the attack and its aftermath, and work to create a more peaceful world where the cycle of violence is broken once and for all.
I don’t know about you, but these days, I’m numb. Numb to the rising tide of this unending pandemic. Numb to the suffering of people in Afghanistan. Numb to the wildfires ravaging communities across the West. Numb to the tearing of our country’s social fabric and the partisan screaming all around. I don’t know if it’s a result of exhaustion from years of living with national, global, and existential crises or if the fact that most of my human interactions are mediated by a screen have made it harder to put myself in other people’s shoes.
And it’s not just me. Last fall, social psychologists Judith Hall and Mark Leary wrote an article for Scientific American declaring that America as a whole has “an empathy deficit.” We are losing our ability to care about others, especially those who don’t look, think, or act like us. We no longer believe we owe anything to each other, or that other perspectives are worth hearing. We are cold, indifferent, and isolated. I know I am.
These are books that deal with difficult subjects, like climate change, racial justice, and the queer experience. They’ve challenged me, they’ve broken my heart, and they are slowly wearing down my callouses. I think reading beyond our comfort zone is necessary now more than ever. If we don’t relearn how to feel what a stranger feels, then we’re in deep trouble. But if we can rediscover something buried in the pages of a book that can remind us that we are part of the world instead of separate from it, then maybe there’s hope for the future.
This week, temperatures in Tacoma were upward of 105 degrees—34 degrees above the average high for June—and stayed in the triple digits for three consecutive days. In a region where less than half the population lives in air conditioned homes, people suffered and as many as 100 people in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia died due to a heat wave unlike anything seen in the Pacific Northwest for as long as weather records have been kept.
Our climate is changing in ways both subtle and profound, causing incremental disruptions in global weather patterns as well as sudden, extreme weather events like heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and deluges. This round of dangerous heat is over, but it is part of a larger shift that imperils people and ecosystems in every corner the world. More is coming.
As I look forward to the birth of our first child, I find myself increasingly worried about the world our child will grow up in and the multitude of social and environmental sins they will inherit. Will my child be able to go outside to play in the summer? Will there be unburned forests to enjoy?
There are things we can do. We can acknowledge and share the scientific consensus that climate change is real and that humans are driving it. We can take responsibility for our personal actions and take steps to reduce our carbon usage. More substantively, we make our voices heard at the ballot box to demand measures to curb the devastating impacts of the climate crisis and reign in the industries and nations who continue to put profits ahead of preservation.
There is no time to wait. We got ourselves into this mess; now we need to be the solution.
If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a year, you know I love to travel. When COVID-19 shut down all non-essential travel in 2020, we were forced to cancel our planned Hawaiian vacation and postpone any and all of our travel plans for the foreseeable future. We’ve done our best to be safe and follow health authority guidelines and we’ve been lucky not to get sick thus far. Earlier this year, we decided we were ready to go on our long-delayed trip to Maui, but we knew we couldn’t travel the same way we did in the before times. We were itching to get out of the house, but at the same time, we wanted to do what we could to minimize the risk to ourselves and the people around us. It was a tricky balancing act. Here’s how we did it:
Understand the Risks and Take Appropriate Precautions
One reason why I felt more comfortable traveling now than I would’ve a year ago is because of how far our understanding of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has evolved. We now know that the virus spreads primarily through airborne particles. We know that masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of those particles and protect those around you. We also know that most super-spreader events occur indoors in poorly ventilated conditions. With this information in mind, we were able to decide on some parameters for our trip to keep ourselves and others safe.
Choose the Right Location and Method of Transportation
We chose to pursue our cancelled visit to the island of Maui in no small part because we were unable to get refunds for most of our trip expenses, just vouchers for later use. Still, there were a few factors that made it easy to get there while prioritizing safety.
The first thing that makes Hawaii a great choice right now is that its case numbers are low compared to most states. Hawaii has been requiring out-of-state arrivals test negative for COVID-19 to bypass a mandatory quarantine, (and has since added an extra rapid test upon landing), so we felt reasonably assured that most of the people on our flight would not be carrying the virus.
The second mark in Hawaii’s favor is evidence showing that ventilation and air filtration on commercial airplanes is actually quite good, offering an extra layer of security should someone on our flight contract COVID in the narrow window between receiving their negative test result and boarding the aircraft.
Third, Hawaii’s tropical climate and wide array of outdoor activities and dining options allowed us to spend very little time indoors with other people. We purposefully chose takeout and outdoor dining options whenever we could, stayed in a small bed and breakfast instead of a busy resort (which was also way cheaper), rented a car to explore on our own rather than joining a group tour, found quiet beaches away from crowds, and wore our masks whenever we couldn’t physically distance (this was only ever really a problem in the airport, where we chose to double-mask).
Maui was made for adventure. Whether you’re driving the winding road to Hana, standing above the crater of Haleakala, or laying on the beach with a good book, it’s easy to find things to do outside on the island and easy to avoid crowded, indoor spaces. Sunny skies and warm weather make it an easy place to physically distance and enjoy a break from reality. Even if you’re not planning a trip to Hawaii, this is the kind of vacation I’d recommend during the pandemic. Instead of worrying about all the things you can’t do, now is an opportunity to embrace all the activities you can do safely right now. I’ve been so grateful for the ability to get out for my daily walks to keep my sanity this past year and our visit to Maui offered new and exciting ways to experience the beauty of nature.
Being able to travel is a privilege, now more than ever. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic which has upended the lives of nearly everyone, so expect that things will be different — and you will also have to act differently. If you’re in the position to be able to travel right now, keep these guiding principles in mind:
You Are Responsible for the Health of Everyone Around You
When traveling to an isolated area, remember that you can have an outsized impact on the community you’re entering. Places like Hawaii have limited medical facilities that can be easily overwhelmed. They may not have the resources to care for you if you become ill or if you infect others. We all have a responsibility to care for one another, so don’t go if you’re experiencing symptoms of COVID or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive. You may also want to reconsider your plans if there’s a sudden surge in positive cases in your community or the community you’re visiting. A stranger’s health may depend on your choices and that’s something you have to take seriously. If you’re not going to follow mask guidelines and basic hygiene practices, don’t travel right now.
Be Patient and Generous
The tourism, food service, and hospitality industries have all taken a beating this year and many low-wage workers have struggled to provide for their families and keep themselves safe. Travel is only just starting up again, so it’s important to be patient and understanding. Prices are high, supply chain disruptions have caused shortages, hours for many businesses are in flux, and staffing is limited even as demand is surging. If you aren’t going to be patient and respectful in your interactions with staff, supportive of local businesses, flexible when circumstances change, and as generous with your tips as you can be, don’t travel right now.
Put In the Extra Effort
Maui was breathtaking and I’m glad we went. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected and COVID-19 forced us to change plans several times, but we were able to unplug and treat ourselves to some much-needed relaxation while also helping the local economy. Only you can decide if traveling right now is worth the risk for you and there are many more factors to keep in mind than I’ve gone into here. Also, I’m not a medical professional, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But, if you’ve got the itch to see more of the world than the inside of your home and you’re willing to put in a little extra effort to do so mindfully and safely, I think you should definitely consider booking your trip.
Have tips for traveling in the age of COVID-19? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!
It feels weird to say it, but ten years ago, I started this blog. At the time, I didn’t know why I wanted to start a blog or what I was going to do with it. I just knew that I was serious about writing. So, I did what any aspiring writer in 2011 would do if they wanted to reach a large audience — I set up a WordPress site, I shelled out for a fancy domain and I forgot about the whole thing for several months. Then, in the fall of 2011, I came back around to the project and started a posting frenzy. Within a year, I had posted a staggering 76 blogs.
My output has slowed significantly since those wild, experimental early days when I would post literally anything that was on my mind. I wrote about my writing process, about my struggles with motivation and procrastination, about major milestones in my life, and the minutiae of daily existence. No topic was too broad or too small to avoid being beaten over the head with a hackneyed metaphor (okay, I still do that). It wasn’t earth-shattering, but I was having fun with it.
A few people commented. A handful of people subscribed. Everything was going well.
Then, in the spring of 2012, I returned from a weeklong trip to Guatemala. My post about the experience, Guatemala in the Rear View Mirror, was selected by WordPress for its Freshly Pressed feature on their homepage, which brought thousands of people to my site. That single post was viewed more than 3,600 times and as a result, hundreds of people subscribed (and many of them stuck around, much to my amazement). I was surprised and elated.
Like any 15 minutes of fame, my time in the spotlight didn’t last long. It was an experience I may never repeat, but it taught me that people were hungry for the kinds of things I write about, so I kept it up. Even with that early boost, over time, I found myself blogging less and less. By 2018, I was only averaging four or five posts a year. Now, I feel like I’m back in the swing of things. I’m more confident in my writing and more established in my writing career. Much of that success is thanks to the countless hours I’ve spent posting on this blog and to the encouragement of my readers.
I don’t think I’ll ever stick to a schedule as rigorous as the two or three posts a week I used to write on this site. I simply don’t have the time or the energy (and I’m sure my subscribers appreciate not being bombarded with dozens of notifications each month). However, I still find the practice of blogging to be beneficial. It gives me an excuse to flex my creative muscles and I still feel a twinge of excitement whenever I hit the publish button, knowing my words are reaching my small but mighty audience around the world.
Here are a few of the most popular posts from the past 10 years (most of them from the early days of the blog):
I expect to be here in another decade, toasting to twenty glorious years of writing on this blog. I hope you’ll stick around for more thoughts on writing, travelogues, and whatever is interesting to me at the moment. Thanks for reading!
Photo courtesy of Yaroslav Danylchenko via Pexels.com
Right now, the Internet is awash in think pieces on the anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. One year ago, the world changed overnight, but not in the ways I thought it would. By early March 2020, where I live in Washington State, it was obvious that we were on the precipice of some kind of disaster. The first documented coronavirus case in the United States had appeared just 60 miles north. I was wrapping up my certificate program, where my final project was a plan for communicating a COVID-related closure of my workplace. There were rumblings that we would need to quarantine for 2-3 weeks, so I went to the grocery store and stocked up on shelf-stable food, frozen meals, Theraflu and toilet paper. I woke up on Monday morning to discover that my office was closed until further notice.
I remember being worried about the future, afraid of contracting the virus and terrified that I wasn’t sanitizing my door handles enough. But in the back of my mind, I was also primed to expect a very specific kind of catastrophe — the kind I had seen and read about in movies and books for years.
In the 2007 movie I Am Legend, loosely based on the novel by Richard Matheson, the last human in New York City lives under constant attack from vampiric mutants infected by a re-engineered measles virus. In the 2014 novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a troupe of Shakespearean actors travels on foot between isolated communities after a flu pandemic has wiped out much of humanity. Without a real global epidemic in recent memory, these were my templates of what to expect in a pandemic: a fast-moving virus devastates the world overnight, society crumbles, and the survivors are left to wander the wasteland.
This has been a very different kind of pandemic. Society didn’t collapse, but it did fray around the edges as we confronted a chronically under-resourced public health system, political divisions between those who believed the virus was a threat and those who dismissed its severity as hundreds of thousands of people died, and systems of inequality that insulated those with privilege from dangerous exposure to the epidemic at the expense of marginalized groups who were already at higher risk of complications. It may not have been the apocalypse as we imagined it in works of fiction, but it exposed our vulnerability and exacted a terrible cost in human life and livelihood.
Everything is different now. Physical reminders of the reality of this pandemic are scattered around our house. There’s a pile of freshly laundered cloth face masks on top of our dresser. I keep an extra mask and a small bottle of hand sanitizer in my car. I follow the one-way arrows in the grocery store aisles, though it feels like I’m the only one. A package of Clorox wipes, purchased at great expense in those confusing early days sits mostly untouched in a closet. The world didn’t end, but it did change.
I’ve written before about my fascination with dystopian fiction, but now that I’m living in an actual dystopia, I’ve realized that these stories don’t have to accurately predict the future to offer valuable insights. At their core, these stories aren’t about killer viruses, they’re about humanity and how we cope with the unimaginable. Our real-life pandemic isn’t over yet, but fiction can still help us imagine how we can rebuild, preserve our humanity and find hope in hopeless situations.
After a year of living under the specter of COVID-19, I could use a little hope. I think we all could.
If you’re interested in another take on what we’ve learned over the past year, I highly recommend latest episode of the podcast The Social Distance, “It’s Been a Year,” which includes an insightful conversation with the one and only Dr. Anthony Fauci.
J.W. Eberle 
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