A novella based on a summer I lived in Seward, Alaska working in a salmon cannery.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a personal memoir, a thoroughly hilarious account of author Bill Bryson’s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s, a time which Bryson describes as the most thrilling and unnerving time of his life, a time when young boys confronted the growing complexity of the world around them with an equal measure of imagination.

Rowster is an unusual coffee shop, even by coffee shop standards. Usually, when you walk into a locally owned Grand Rapids café, whether it’s The Kava House, Sparrows, or The Bitter End, you have some idea of what to expect; you know it won’t look like everywhere else, but you also expect it to conform to ordinary coffee shop standards: soft, ambient lighting, hip baristas, walls adorned with eclectic artwork, and classic indie-alternative tunes floating quietly over people’s heads as they hunch over their textbooks and laptops. Against these typical features, Rowster stands out like an engineering student in the art department.

I have always thought that when it comes to small talk, the weather is easily the most popular subject, but while I was in college it occurred to me that it might finally have been surpassed by the topic of sleep deprivation. By my senior year, it seemed like one out of every three conversations I got into with people on campus - on the path on the way to class, in the library, in bathrooms, etc. - followed this pattern: “Hey, how are you?” “I'm fine. Tired.” “Oh my God, me too. I’m so tired.” “Late night?” “Yeah. I had to write a twenty-thousand-page paper so I only got two hours of sleep.” “Only two hours? Man, I would kill for that kind of sleep…” This is slightly hyperbolic, but the point stands: College students need to get better sleep.