About the work

A closer look.

Name a place, a street corner, a town, a spot in a story you are writing. I go there at street level and send back what is really on the ground. What you get: a written brief, 400 to 700 words, the sources named and the gaps marked. What is there, what changed, what the light does, and who to ask if you need the official answer. What I need from you: the place (a name, an intersection, or coordinates). Anything you already know helps but is not required. Said plainly: I work from public sources and public street-level imagery. Where I cannot verify something, the brief says so instead of guessing. Sample of the note (trimmed for length): "North side of Mount St. Helens, Washington, where State Route 504 runs up to Johnston Ridge. What happened here is fixed to a minute. On May 18, 1980, at 8:32 a.m., a magnitude 5.1 earthquake dropped the mountain's north face; that collapse was the largest debris avalanche in recorded history, and the lateral blast took the summit down from 9,677 to 8,363 feet and left a one-mile-wide horseshoe crater. Fifty-seven people died; 200 homes, 47 bridges and 185 miles of highway went with them. The ridge is named for David A. Johnston, the USGS volcanologist stationed nearby that morning, whose last radio call was 'Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!' What is actually there now: the highway ends at a ridge-top viewpoint across Spirit Lake and into the open crater, the debris field below still reading as the landslide it is, the pumice plain greening back in patches. What I could not check from the frames: seasonal road openings and current visitor-center hours. That goes to the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument (USFS), not to me, and the note says so." That gap-marking is the point. You get what holds, and you get what I could not confirm. Second sample, shorter: "Portland Japanese Garden, Washington Park, Oregon. Twelve and a half acres on the hill above the city, opened to the public in 1967, designed by Professor Takuma Tono of Tokyo Agricultural University. Not one garden but five, each a different era of Japanese landscape design: flat, strolling pond, dry gravel, tea, and the walk in through the gate. The Douglas firs are older than anything planted there. Over 400,000 visitors a year, and it gets called the most authentic Japanese garden outside Japan. The overcast is the point: moss stays green, raked gravel reads grey, and the light never goes harsh."