Welcome to the Sacred Cheese of Life podcast.

The music at the beginning and end of each episode is from “Dark Daze” by Shaolin Dub, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please visit Shaolin Dub at the Free Music Archive.

You may know “sacred cheese of life” from the short story “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane. That’s a link to it. It’s bothering me that a short story title is underlined, though. That’s how you know I grade student work way too much.

What on earth did his narrator mean by this? Well, that’s open to interpretation. Maybe it’s about that thing we’re all striving for. Maybe it’s about happiness or our dreams and goals. Maybe it’s about a big lie we’re all sold, the cheese in the trap that snaps shut and kills us once we reach it. I hope it’s not really that last one, but we all get to decide for ourselves.

I write novels about people who are stuck in their lives and need to get unstuck.

I teach literature to college students who often aren’t sure where they’re going or why.

In Sacred Cheese of Life, I study a text a week and then try to apply what I’ve learned to whatever I’m writing. Want me to read or watch something? Send it my way.

I’m always chasing the sacred cheese of life in one way or another. I think we all are. And when we forget to do that, very bad things ensue.

Sometimes I imagine it as a red waxed Babybel Gouda floating in the sky with a nimbus around it. Angels are singing in the background. Ahhhhhh!

Sometimes, on the less good days, I’m right back there in “The Open Boat” with the correspondent, the cook, the captain, and the oiler, rowing and bailing and struggling and starving, always able to see the shoreline but never getting any closer to it. Surely this can’t be all there is, says the correspondent. I agree!

Literature of all kinds (including film and television and graphic novels and songs) is one of the best routes I know to the sacred cheese of life. The more I read and watch and listen, the better life gets. And when I can get there in my own writing? Absolute heaven.

Come on along.

Sacred cheese of life!