Galena House Publishing.Becoming Avery.
Before this room, there were twenty-three others.
Yellowstone. The Smokies. Crested Butte. A decade in motion, coasts, borders, other countries, rooms I can still draw from memory and towns whose names I have to reach for. I have been, as they say, all over the world. And I want to start this whole thing by telling you what I was actually doing out there, because it took me years to say it plainly.
I was interviewing places for a job none of them could do.
You know the feeling, maybe. You arrive somewhere new and for three days it fixes you. The light is different, the air argues with you a little, nobody knows your history, and you think, here. This is the one. This place will make me into the person I keep meaning to be. And then week two comes, and you unpack the last bag, and there you are again. The same you, in better scenery.
I spent years running from things that ask me to stay still. I mistook a lot of places for salvation. Twenty-three of them, give or take.
Hi, I'm Avery Lane Maxwell.
And I should be honest with you in the first ten minutes, because this show is going to be built on honesty or it isn't worth your ears: Avery Lane Maxwell is a name I am still becoming.
It's the name on the books. It's the name on the door of a small publishing house I built with my own hands in Frisco, Colorado, at nine thousand feet. And it is not quite the name I was handed at birth, it's the name of the man I have been trying, every morning, to close the distance with. The writer who stays at the desk. The one who finishes things. The one who stopped running.
There's a line in the magazine of my house that I didn't write about myself, exactly, but that I've stopped pretending isn't about me: He is not Avery. But he is not not Avery.
That's the show. That's the whole show. A man in a small mountain town, out loud, in real time, becoming the name on his own books. Not arrived, becoming. If you want a podcast by someone who has it figured out, there are thousands, and some of them are very good. This is the other thing.
Now, yes. There is an inn in this story. I keep one, on a street called Galena, and you'll hear it behind me sometimes: the fire, the dryers, the stairs that announce everybody. After a decade in motion, an old inn was the first place that didn't audition for me. It just asked me to stay, and kept asking, every morning, in the form of work. The inn is not who I am. The inn is where the becoming gets done, the room it happens in. There's a difference, and I intend to keep it.
The first novel came out of that room. It's called Still, by Design., the period is part of the title, and it's about exactly what you'd guess a man with twenty-three former salvations would write about: a caretaker, a mountain town, and the slow architecture of coming back to yourself. Stillness as a made thing. Built, not found. The second novel is written, and it's out walking its own road right now, and when there is news you'll hear it here, quietly, first.
But here is the part I most need you to hear, because it's the reason this podcast exists at all, and it is not about me.
In every one of those twenty-three places, I watched the same scene. At a book shop, a trailhead, a laundromat, a hotel coffee bar. People, good, interesting, lonely people, standing a few feet apart, each one privately starving for a real conversation, and nobody starting one. Myself included. Me most of all. You can cross the whole world and never actually talk to anyone. I know, because I did it.
So this show has one ambition, and I'm putting it on the table in episode one so you can hold me to it:
I am not trying to get you to listen to me. I am trying to get you to talk to each other.
Here's how it works. Every episode ends with a question. Not a big philosophical one, a door-opener. Something you can actually say to a person: to the friend you keep meaning to call, to your sister, to the stranger at the counter if you're feeling brave. You take the question out of your headphones and into a room with another human being. That's it. That's the assignment. This podcast succeeds when you press stop and start talking to someone who isn't me.
And when the conversation surprises you, write to me. The house answers its letters; it always has. Some episodes, with permission, I'll read what came back, so the person listening in Ohio hears what the question opened up in Wales, and the circle gets wider than any one voice could make it. A podcast as a commons. A question, passed hand to hand.
Because here's what I actually learned from a decade of geography: no place saved me. But conversations came close, every time. The right question, asked by someone who meant it, did more for me than any mountain range, and I say that as a man who now lives inside one, on purpose.
The name, the books, the house, the staying, all of it got built the same way everything real gets built. By hand, slowly, with someone eventually asking the question that mattered.
So let me be the one who asks first.
Here is your question, for this week. Ask it to somebody, out loud, not in a text:
"What's a place you thought would fix you, and what happened when it didn't?"
Ask it, and then do the hard part: say nothing, and listen. If what comes back is worth carrying, the house's address is averylanemaxwell.com, and the letters door is open.
I'll be here. Nine thousand feet up, becoming Avery, one morning at a time.
Come in. It is already warm.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters