Samples of short essays from Simple Pleasures

Simple Pleasures is a work in progress, a collection of essays devised as a series of odes—evocations really—summoning not the things that I write about, but the spirit of those things. Written in the first person, each essay describes in less than 1,000 words a well-known, nearly universal household act or chore, something plucked straight from our everyday lives. Without undo navel-gazing or shame, I employ my real-life experiences—from baking bread to shoveling snow to washing the dishes—not as examples of my industry or sloth, but as avenues to explore the prosaic. Like Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Everyday Things, my essays shower praise on the normal. Unlike his poems, I move away from a list of inanimate objects to write about the daily or seasonal activities we perform, in the end shining a light on the joys they bring. Through a concentration of language and without fear of sentimentality, Simple Pleasures showcases how truly pleasant the everyday, the common, and the famously mundane can actually be.