Episodes

Every episode, newest first

Show notes, timestamps and a full transcript on each one.

4 episodes

No. 4 · Jul 13, 2026 · 15 min

Plein Air Painting: What Painting Teaches You About a Place

I once spent two hours plein air painting on a warm pier on the Big Island, trying to get a single fishing boat down in watercolor, and somewhere in the second hour I realized I had never actually looked at a boat before in my life. I'd seen thousands. I could draw you the idea of one with my eyes closed. But I'd never looked — not the way the paper made me, where every guess I made was wrong until I stopped guessing and started seeing, and the one blue I'd carried my whole life fell apart into a hundred passing colors that only existed at ten in the morning, for about eight minutes, in that particular light.

No. 3 · Jul 6, 2026 · 14 min

Creative Block? What Travel Does to Your Creative Work

Creative block, for me, usually breaks in the few days after I get home from somewhere. I got home from a trip last spring and within four days I made the best painting I'd made in almost a year — not because I'd gotten better in eleven days, but because something had passed through me on the way home and left it there. It wasn't a painting of anywhere exotic. It was the light through my own front window on a chipped white bowl with two limes in it, a bowl I'd walked past every day for two years and never once seen.

No. 2 · Jun 29, 2026 · 16 min

Hawaii Travel Tips: Hawaii Isn't What You Think It Is

The best Hawaii travel tips I know aren't about where to go. The first time I felt like I was actually in Hawaii, I was lost — turned around on a back road on the east side, no signal, the road suddenly running through somebody's real life, with trucks in the yards and a small white church and old men in plastic chairs outside a store. I'd been to the islands twice before that and I don't think I'd really been there at all. I'd seen the postcard. I'd never seen the island.

No. 1 · Jun 22, 2026 · 16 min

What Is Slow Travel? Why I Stay Longer Than I Should

What is slow travel, really? For me it comes down to one habit: staying longer than I should. There's a town on the east side of Maui where the road runs out before the island does, and one Wednesday night I sat on the steps of a rented room and realized I wasn't ready to leave. So I moved the flight, annoyed a few people back home, and stayed three more days. Those three days are the reason I remember the trip at all.