The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

The difficulty in life is the choice. And this week the choice came fast: an hour before we sat down, a tree took a lightning strike around the corner, dropped a branch on a woman’s car, smashed a transformer, took out the block. Genesis’s people — Josh, Kyle — ran toward it and pulled her out. Then they walked over and made a podcast about the creative life.

That’s the register of this second episode, recorded at the corner of 4th and Market, the intersection of a city that is itself a crossroads. Genesis poured a Scotch bottled somewhere between 1929 and 1940 — a hundred years in someone’s collection, traded for one of his paintings — and we talked about permanence, and how the people from a hundred years ago are speaking more resonantly to us than ever. (No, that pour you hear is not AI. That’s the real thing.)

Some of what we got into:

* The Waffle House poet. Genesis met a woman writing “immaculate poetry” at 3 a.m. who’s been at it twenty years and is certain it’s not for her. The whole episode circles back to her: the gap between a real gift and the permission to claim it.

* The compromises we make with ourselves. From a Seinfeld bit about the trashman to Chad’s first year of seminary mopping floors as “the minister to commodes” — the dignity of honest work, and the moment a gift asks to be shared anyway.

* When to keep going, and when to stop. Bukowski’s twenty years at the post office. The friend who built a $50M company and blew it up because chaos was his home. The bandmate who wouldn’t sign the deal. If you love the work like you love ice cream, the sugar high fades. If you love it like you love your children, you keep going — even if it costs you.

* What is good art? Bob Dylan’s voice. The mystery in Roethke’s line, “Light takes the tree; but who can tell us how?”

* The invisible layer. John O’Donohue’s “invisible choreography” between the heart and what it beholds — and how the receiver often finds something in the art the maker never knew was there.

Two poems. Chad read Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking” (“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.”) — and Genesis answered with Chase Twichell’s subway poem, the one that ends on “I don’t know who speaks / when the horse speaks.” Then Kyle Kasper, a poet who moved to Chattanooga last year and just published his first collection — and who’d run out to that wrecked car an hour before — read his own poem, “Kind to Me”: “We must be kind to ourselves… be good to your soul, like you would to a child.”

We closed on the question we’re keeping: What are you alive to right now? And what are you closed to? Genesis is alive to the opinion that challenges his own — “if nobody likes you, I wonder why not; let’s hang.” And what he’s closed to turned out to be the most open thing he said all night: the God question, from an experience in a 2002 storm he can’t un-know. “I don’t have the answers, but I have the experience.”

Listen above. New conversations from The Home Bar, and Mondays and Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts.

From Chattanooga, a crossroads city, at a bar on an intersection — this is The Difficulty. Brought to you in part by Crossroads Publishing Group.

There’s the feeling of standing on the edge of everything and nothing at once. So much that might happen. So much that could happen. And nothing has happened yet. You can feel your whole life leaning forward, and you can also feel that today, right now, for all your efforts, nothing’s changed. Sometimes joy and sadness in the same hour. The almost.

We’ve been taught to treat the almost like a waiting room. A dull hallway before the real thing starts. This week’s episode makes the opposite case: the almost is not the hallway. It’s the room. The waiting is not the thing before your life. It is your life, and there’s a way to be in it that isn’t agony.

I let three poets say it better than I can.

Galway Kinnell, in “Wait,” a poem he reportedly wrote for a student close to giving up: “Wait, for now. / Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” Not the highs. Not the crash the morning after the highs. The hours. They didn’t fail you before. They’re just not done.

Wendell Berry, six lines called “The Real Work,” for when it isn’t just waiting but stuck: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.” The smooth stream makes no sound. It’s the rock in the water that makes the music. Being baffled doesn’t mean you’re off the path. It means you’ve come to your real work.

Rilke, to his young poet: ripen like the tree that doesn’t force its sap. “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Not solve your way in. Live your way in.

And then, for the first time on the show, one of my own, from a collection coming soon called Mirage and Tar. It arrived easily after a David Whyte walking tour, back home in the ordinary house after the extraordinary time. The first two stanzas:

Lightly

When you step, step lightly,though you may not know where to go. But step, and know you get there by going,not by thinking where to go.When you breathe, breathe lightly,and trust the air to be there.Your breath knows what to do without thinking, but will followthe way you want to go…

The practice this week is one small thing. Once today, name one thing that is ripening in you. Something real and forming and not yet finished. Then, on purpose, refuse to demand that it be finished today. Just name it, let it ripen, and go on with your hours.

The verb isn’t hurry. It isn’t arrive. It’s wait — the way Kinnell means it. Active waiting. Trusting the hours.

Listen to the full episode above. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays.

Poems: Galway Kinnell, “Wait” (Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980); Wendell Berry, “The Real Work”; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. “Lightly” © Chad Prevost, from the forthcoming Mirage and Tar.

Host Chad Prevost and co-host Genesis launch the first live happy-hour episode of The Difficulty from Home Bar in downtown Chattanooga, inviting listeners to join Fridays and describing the city as a creative crossroads. They discuss Chattanooga’s “animal” vibe, then welcome Chicago-based curator/artist LaRon Dittoe, who works in finance and commits to a monthly creative practice through gallery shows and artist dinners, and shares her handle and a planned September Chicago exhibition. Another guest, Nic Chung (an artist in Chattanooga), argues creativity is an identity beyond mediums and reflects on a dream of dying that shifted him toward minimizing regret rather than fear. The group talks about confronting “the bottom,” social anxiety, community, sponsors, the show’s growth, weekly giveaways (including The Artist’s Way next week), Chad’s daily reader book structure, and brief UFO skepticism and faith-versus-doubt discussion.

Tune in every Friday for conversations that begin one place and always take you somewhere else like a good poem.

The difficulty in life is the choice. And every choice is a crossroads.

This week’s Working Writer roundup covers three stories that land on the same square, plus an announcement I’ve been sitting on.

1. Simon & Schuster relaunched Pocket Books as a home for indie and hybrid authors.One of the oldest names in American paperback publishing, rebuilt around signing successful self-published writers to print deals. Their own words: “a home for forward-thinking writers, including bestselling indie and hybrid authors looking to amplify their reach.” Translation: New York is no longer asking who has a manuscript. It’s asking who has readers. The room you build around your work isn’t the consolation prize anymore. It’s the asset.

2. The industry is counting its robots.BISG and BookNet Canada opened their 2026 “AI in the Book Industry” survey (through July 17). Last year’s round found about half the industry using AI, almost entirely in the plumbing: admin, marketing, data. Not the voice. I talk about where Crossroads stands: machines in the machinery, humans in the writing, audiobooks narrated by human beings. The flood of machine-made content drowns the generic. It can’t drown a voice a reader trusts.

3. Fourteen thousand librarians walked into Chicago.The American Library Association held its 150th annual conference: 14,801 registrants making plans for the future of reading. The quiet answer to “nobody reads anymore,” and a reminder that the professional middle (librarians, book clubs, spiritual directors, retreat leaders) is where books actually travel.

And some news of our own: starting this Friday, I’m launching a new live series with Genesis the Greykid, fine-art poet and co-owner of Home, the bar at the corner of Fourth and Market in downtown Chattanooga. A crossroads city, a bar on an intersection, and conversations about the in-betweens: the hard choices, and the constraints (time, money) we build a creative life inside. It can be beautiful.

If you’re a writer with a message standing at your own crossroads, that’s what we build at Crossroads Publishing Group.

Five things that actually moved in publishing this month, and what to do about each. The Authors Guild puts hard numbers on why author income keeps slipping, Audible forces a year-end decision on audiobook royalties, FSG opens a no-fee $15,000 fellowship (deadline July 6), book discovery starts shifting from search to AI, and the indie bookstore "death" turns out to be growth. The channels you don't control are getting harder, so put your weight on the ones you do.Join us at crossroadspublishing.group.

How many books on your shelf were actually finished (if they were even began)? This episode is about a different kind of book: short on purpose, beautiful enough to keep, written from the far side of a hard turn for the person standing in it now. A case for concentration over padding, and the first look at Crossings, our new short-form line.

Find us at crossroadspublishing.group.

Homer gives us a woman who weaves a shroud by day and unravels it by night, holding off a house full of suitors. We call it stalling. Homer calls it devotion. This one is for anyone whose truest work looks, from the outside, like waiting: the patient no, the thing left undone on purpose, the refusal to finish on someone else's terms.Find us at https//:www.crossroadspublishing.group.

I did an episode a few weeks back on Jasmine Sun’s provocations about independent writing in the AI era. One of those provocations: the value of polish is going down, and the value of personal style, charisma, and weirdness is going up. AI is very good at polished prose. AI is bad at voice—the particular moves only this writer would make, the typos the writer would have caught but didn’t, the metaphor that shouldn’t work but does because it’s coming from this particular mind.

Sun’s frame and the longhand frame meet exactly here. Voice is the comparative advantage. Voice is what AI cannot generate. And handwriting is one of the most reliable disciplines we have for preserving and developing voice.

Here’s why. When you type, autocomplete and muscle memory and the smoothness of the keyboard tend to push you toward standard phrasings. The fastest sentence to type is usually the most expected sentence. AI tools accelerate this further by suggesting the most predictable next phrase.

Even without AI, typing tends to homogenize prose toward the average.

When you write by hand, none of that exists. There is no autocomplete. There is no suggestion engine. There is only the pen and the next word, and the speed limit is your thinking. The sentence you write is the sentence you composed in your head and chose to put down. The sentence is unmistakably yours because nothing intervened between your mind and the page.

In the AI era, the handwritten draft is not nostalgic. It is maximally human. It is the most reliable way to produce prose that could not have been generated.Here’s something I’d like you to try. Write your next essay—or a chapter—by hand. Don’t do it for one session. Do it for a few weeks, long enough to get into a flow. See what emerges that doesn’t emerge at the keyboard.

If you do it, write me back and tell me what you found.

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WHY THIS KEEPS COMING UP

I’m writing this partly because the original Medium article keeps showing up in my analytics every month, even though I wrote it years ago. Writers are looking for ways to think about the question of HOW THEY WRITE in a moment when the answer is contested. The longhand discipline is one answer that hasn’t gone out of fashion in the lifetimes of the writers I just named, and I don’t think it’s going out of fashion now. If anything, the AI moment makes it more important.

If you’re working on something and you want a publisher who’ll talk to you about voice and craft and the actual practice of writing—not just the production at the end—Crossroads is that press. Discovery call on the site.

Twenty minutes, free.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

—Chad

TL;DRToday we open the doors. Crossroads Publishing Group—a hybrid publisher of serious nonfiction in Chattanooga—announces the Crossroads Commons, our founding membership. Three tiers; fifty lifetime Founder spots, ever.• Join the Commons → crossroadspublishing.group/commons• Publish with us → crossroadspublishing.group/engagements• The catalog → crossroadspublishing.group/catalog• Questions → [email protected]

Most small presses spend their first year trying to look like a big press. We’re not doing that. A hybrid publisher of serious nonfiction, based in Chattanooga, founded this year, built around the idea that books are occasions for community—and that the press’s job is to take that seriously.The Long StoryA few weeks ago I made a decision about how Crossroads Publishing Group would set itself apart: a real commitment to relationship. Then, on a mountain bike trail a few days ago, the bigger version of the idea arrived. It’s not just relationship—one-on-one, editor and author. It’s community. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it: leadership books end at community. Recovery books end at community. Theology, parenting, loneliness, climate—trace the actual argument and the topic turns out to be the doorway in. Community is the thing itself.

So I’m building the press to take that seriously, not as a marketing line, but as operating structure. Today’s episode lays out the whole thing.

Five structural commitments:

* Every Crossroads author gets a direct-purchase URL for their community—their people buy from the press, their royalty is higher, and the relationship stays out of the algorithm.

* Every book launches with an event in the author’s community, wherever they live.

* Every Crossroads author appears on The Difficulty.

* Authors meet each other—the catalog becomes a community of minds, not a list of titles.

* Readers get a structured way to belong to the press: the Crossroads Commons, open today.

The Commons, three tiers:

* Reader — $200/year. Every new title shipped to your door on publication day. A quarterly Circle Letter. 20% off direct orders. Your name in the colophon of every title shipped during your membership year.

* Patron — $500/year. Everything above, plus a signed limited-edition hardcover each year (printed exclusively for Patrons), an invitation to the annual Crossroads gathering, private author Q&As at every launch, and 30% off.

* Founder — $1,000, one time, lifetime. Limited to the first 50, ever. All Patron benefits in perpetuity, your name permanently in the colophon of every title we publish during your lifetime, and one annual meal or coffee with me. When the 50 are filled, that door closes forever.

The Commons isn’t a subscription to this podcast, The Difficulty stays free, always. It’s membership in the press itself. And you shouldn’t join from obligation or scarcity pressure. Join because the editorial direction and the community we’re forming matter to you, and you want to be part of the early conversation.

→ Join the Crossroads Commons

The four doors, if you’re wondering which is yours:

* Authors — from a $750 Legacy Audit to the full Compile to Publish engagement (print + ebook + audiobook, six to eight months): crossroadspublishing.group/engagements

* Readers — the Circle: crossroadspublishing.group/circle

* Writers developing a manuscript in community — the First Draft Cohort, applications open July 13, inaugural class begins September 14.

* Just want a book? — crossroadspublishing.group/catalog — William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is in print now; Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is next (and I’m narrating the audiobook myself)

This is your moment to step in.

—Chad

This is one of the slower Saturday episodes—no announcements, no news. Just a piece of the book I’m writing, read and thought through out loud.

It starts on Circe’s island, where Odysseus’s men have already been turned into pigs. It passes through Dante’s hell, where the greedy push boulders forever, and through Midas’s palace, where a father reaches for his daughter and finds cold metal. And it ends somewhere closer to home: the quiet withdrawal, the measured non-engagement, the parts of ourselves we’ve decided are too valuable or too vulnerable to share.

Because here’s the thing about Avarice: in its deepest expression, it was never about gold. It’s a misdirected search for transcendence. We’re not hoarding money, we’re hoarding self. Time, warmth, attention, the willingness to be known. And the endpoint of all that protecting isn’t wealth. It’s isolation.

Two questions sit at the center of this one:

What are you unwilling to give? And what is that withholding costing the people who need you?

If the episode does something to you, here’s the assignment, which is also the argument: share it with one person you’ve been quietly withholding from.

—Chad

P.S. — Monday’s episode is different. I have an announcement about the press, about what we’re building, and about how you can be part of it. It’s the most excited I’ve been about anything in a while. Come back Monday.