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I write books at nine thousand feet, in a small town in Colorado, mostly before the sun is up. This is a podcast about building things by hand — books, apps, mornings, a life — told quietly, to one person at a time. That person is you. From Galena House in Frisco, Colorado. New episodes when they are ready, and not before.
♫ The Galena House playlist — the episodes, among the songs they sit with: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/55wkYr82P02Tsr4zgKZubw
A note from the house: Galena House Audio is the independent creative work of Avery Lane Maxwell. Stories and reflections are presented from the host’s personal perspective and recollection. References to real places, workplaces, or events do not represent statements on behalf of those organizations or their owners, employees, or guests. Certain identifying details may be changed or omitted to protect privacy. Nothing shared on the podcast should be understood as professional, medical, legal, or recovery advice.
[gentle music]
The People Who Notice. Episode Eight of
Galena House Audio, from Avery Lane
Maxwell.
I have been thinking about the difference
between being noticed and being seen. I am
very good at the first one. Always have
been.
I am only now learning what the second one
costs, which is nothing, which is the
whole problem.
I once wrote a boy who learns very early
that people respond well when you make
yourself understandable to them. Be
pleasant. Be useful. Remember the thing.
Know when to speak, and know when not to.
Carry your plate to the sink.
Notice what nobody else noticed and
mention it casually enough that it does
not look like noticing.
Very normal childhood hobbies.
The boy gets good at it. Then the man gets
very good at it. You can make quite a life
that way. People like having you around.
Rooms become easier.
Someone needs something and, somehow, you
are already moving toward it.
I know this man. Obviously. I wrote him.
What I am only beginning to understand is
that there is another experience entirely,
and it cannot be arranged.
Someone can see you while you are not
trying to become visible.
[a low hum]
Let me tell you about Thursday, because
Thursday was not arranged either. There is
a bus that runs from the mountains down to
Denver.
It is called the Pegasus, which is a lot
of name for a bus, and I say that with
love.
I missed it. Then I missed the next one. I
would like to tell you there was a reason.
There was not.
There was a man who can anticipate the
cream before you know you want it,
standing at the wrong end of a parking lot
with the right coffee.
When I finally sat down in a window seat,
the day had already stopped belonging to
me, and I think that was the beginning of
it. Nine thousand feet let go of me
slowly.
The aspens were doing the thing they do
this week, where the whole hillside seems
to have decided something at once.
I did not take notes. I want you to hold
onto that. I watched, and for once the
watching was not for anything.
Denver, then. And the first person I saw
when I stepped off was Courtney.
My counsel, my publicist, the person who
reads the world on my behalf and tells me,
gently, where I am standing in it. We have
sat across tables before. It does not get
less remarkable.
There is something that happens when you
sit down with someone who has already
decided you are worth the trouble. You
stop performing your worth. There is no
point.
She did the reading a long time ago.
She did not take on a project. She took on
me.
I am still not entirely sure what to do
with that, except to say thank you, and
try to keep being the person she said yes
to.
That is the whole of it, really, and I did
not know it yet at lunch. The people who
matter to me lately are the ones who met
me before the introduction.
Before the biography. Before I had
prepared the room. And who kept coming
back after they had seen the rest.
David and Julie met me that way. I do not
want to tell you where. The geography is
not important, and they would say the
same.
It was one of the places where my ordinary
life happens. I was working. Moving.
Talking. Carrying things.
Probably thinking about six things at once
and finishing four of them. There would
have been coffee somewhere. There is
usually coffee somewhere.
And I was not introducing Avery Lane
Maxwell. There was no author bio. No
explanation of Galena House. No carefully
arranged version of who I am. I was just
doing the day.
And they watched. Not in a strange way.
That would be a different episode. They
simply noticed. The way I moved through
people. The way I spoke. The things I
cared about.
The fact that if somebody looked
uncertain, I was probably already trying
to make the uncertainty smaller. They saw
me while my attention was pointed
somewhere else. And I think that matters.
Because the person you meet when he is
introducing himself and the person you
meet while he is busy living can be
slightly different people. The second one
is harder to arrange.
The second one is the only one worth
finding.
I used to have a line for what I wanted my
work to be. Found, not marketed.
I retired it for a while because it
started to sound like a strategy, and the
moment a true thing becomes a strategy it
stops being true.
But that is what happened. Nobody marketed
me to David and Julie.
They found me, in the middle of a Tuesday,
doing the ordinary work of being alive,
and they decided that was enough to come
back for.
[fire crackling softly]
That boy knew all about arrangement. He
discovered something very young. If the
outside of you says the right thing, the
world becomes easier. People relax.
Teachers smile. Mothers say you are
welcome anytime.
Employers move you out front. Rooms make
space.
And none of that is fake. That distinction
matters enormously to me. The warmth was
real. The helpfulness was real. The
attention was real.
The mistake was thinking that because
something was constructed, it could not
also be sincere.
I do not believe that anymore. I think we
all build ourselves. We just use different
materials. Mine happened to include very
good manners and a strange amount of
coffee.
Some people get leather jackets. I learned
how to anticipate cream. We work with what
we have.
But there is a cost to being very good at
making yourself readable. Eventually, you
start wondering whether people like you or
whether they like the version you made
easy to like.
That is an uncomfortable question. I ask
it more often than I would like, usually
while I am trying to do something else.
Good questions are rude that way.
And then every so often, life answers one
without being asked. David and Julie did
not meet me after a speech. They met me in
motion. And then we talked. Really talked.
Books. Paper. Making things. Beauty.
The unnecessary detail that becomes
necessary once you care about it. Why some
objects feel different when another
person's hands have been involved.
Why a thing should be beautiful even when
beautiful is technically more trouble.
I understood them quickly. Not completely.
I am trying to stop doing that to people.
But quickly enough to recognize something.
Oh. You care about this too.
That sentence has opened more doors in my
adult life than I expected. You care about
this too. Not, you can do something for
me. Not, I can do something for you.
Just: there is a small part of the world
both of us refuse to treat casually. Come
look.
[a low hum]
David and Julie own a stationery shop in
Denver called Idea Chic. There is a
mailbox out front that says Send More
Mail, which is the whole of my philosophy
on a sign.
And in the back room lives Hazel. Hazel
was born in 1933. She is a letterpress.
She is enormous.
Black iron, wood, belts, gears, a great
wheel, all of it gloriously unconcerned
with becoming sleek. I had been thinking
about Hazel since David first described
her to me.
A machine nearly a century old that still
makes an impression on paper.
I mean. Come on. You cannot tell a writer
that and expect him to behave normally. I
took two buses. Obviously.
And there they were. David. Julie. Hazel.
The three of them already inside a
relationship I was only beginning to
understand. David knows the machine. You
can see it in his hands.
There is a particular way people move
around something they truly know.
No wasted motion. No theatrical
competence. The hand goes where it belongs
because it has gone there before.
Julie knows the other side of the object.
Paper. Color. What someone will eventually
hold. The little decision that makes a
card become the card. And Hazel knows
pressure. Hazel is very good at pressure.
I watched the wheel move. I watched ink
spread. I watched old wooden forms come
apart in the hand. I watched orange become
pumpkin.
And I took photographs of absolutely
everything, because apparently when I am
delighted I become a small investigative
agency.
There was one moment when David showed me
the old wood. Pieces darkened by ink and
years. Individual blocks that, by
themselves, did not say much of anything.
Put them together correctly and suddenly
there was language.
That stayed with me. Of course it did.
People are like that. Lives are like that.
A coffee cup. A boy on a bicycle on a red
dirt road in Georgia. A recipe.
A song. A room. A person you knew for
three months. A person you have known for
thirty years.
A sentence somebody said once and forgot
entirely. Individually, they are pieces.
Then one day you look at the whole
arrangement and realize: oh. That spells
me.
[rain falling]
I have spent a lot of time trying to
understand who Avery Lane Maxwell is. This
may surprise nobody listening. I have
written about him under other names.
I have written about the other names. I
have built an entire little house around
the investigation. There are easier
hobbies.
But something has changed lately. I am
becoming less interested in defining
myself before I live. I would rather go
find out. That is new.
For years, observation came first. Life
happened. I stepped slightly outside it. I
studied the event. Then I understood how I
felt. Sometimes Wednesday understood
Tuesday.
Occasionally a whole book understood a
year I had already lost.
There is a line of machinery in me that I
recognize almost embarrassingly well. The
watcher. The part of me standing one step
behind the person having the experience,
taking notes.
He is extremely competent. I am fond of
him. He kept excellent records.
But lately he has been missing things. Not
because he has gotten worse at watching.
Because I keep getting there first.
I smile before I inspect the smile. I
laugh before I decide why something was
funny. I like somebody before I have
finished learning them.
I go somewhere because a friend said, you
should go. And then I am simply there.
That last one happened after Idea Chic.
David and Julie told me to spend the
evening at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I
had time before the bus home.
Normally, time is extremely vulnerable
around me. Give me three empty hours and I
will find six jobs for them.
A website. A manuscript. An email.
Something that needs adjusting by three
pixels for reasons nobody else on earth
will ever know. There are entire
civilizations that have collapsed under
less management.
But they said, go to the gardens. So I
went to the gardens.
[river running]
And I found a new happy place. I mean that
plainly. I walked in and something in me
knew almost immediately that I would come
back. There was water. Stone. Trees.
Paths that bent just enough that you could
not see where they finished.
Little changes in height. Little rooms
made without walls. Denver moving
somewhere beyond all of it, still being
Denver, while inside the garden people
became quieter without anyone asking them
to.
I love when a place does that. Not
commands quiet. Earns it.
I walked. That was all. No task. No one
waiting for me to improve anything. No one
asking what I thought. Nothing needed to
be ready by morning.
The garden had been doing perfectly well
before I arrived.
That is healthy for me.
I watched the light change. Sat for a
while. Got up. Found another path. I
remember thinking that if I had known the
place existed, I probably would have
planned it. Scheduled it.
Made the right amount of time. Looked up
what I was supposed to see.
There would have been efficiency. I am
very capable of ruining wonder with
excellent planning.
It is one of my gifts.
Instead, I had been sent there. By new
friends. That made the whole evening feel
borrowed in the best way.
Like I had been handed a few hours from
somebody else's knowledge of the city.
Here. We think you would like this. Go.
And I did. That is connection too. I think
I have spent so much time writing about
the emotional architecture of people that
I occasionally forget the very ordinary
ways we alter one another.
A recommendation. A book. A restaurant.
Take this road. Listen to this song. You
would love her. Order this. Go there
before sunset. One person nudges another
person's life three degrees to the left.
And three hours later he is standing
beside a pond in Denver thinking: I am
happy.
I keep coming back to that. Not because
happiness is rare. I do not think it is. I
think we are often moving too quickly
through it to catch it in the act. That is
different.
I once wrote a man who can explain a room
perfectly and sometimes cannot quite
occupy his own chair. He can tell you what
everybody needs. He can make himself
necessary.
He can build warmth so convincingly that
everybody else feels it. And then he
stands at the edge of the thing he built
and asks whether it reached them.
I love that man. I am not interested in
humiliating him now that I understand him.
He got me here. But this is where the
story changes. I am in the room too.
David and Julie did not simply receive
something I made for them. They gave
something back. Their work. Their
enthusiasm. Hazel. Their city. A garden.
The suggestion of another afternoon.
Friendship.
And I let it come toward me. That sounds
small. For me, it is not.
[fire crackling softly]
There is another moment I keep thinking
about, from a year I wrote down as it
happened. A new friend appears.
Unexpectedly.
And in the private handwriting from that
year, I wrote how happy I was to have
found him. There was no pressure to the
conversation. It felt safe.
Later, I wrote that perhaps the friendship
was simply organic. Building. Maybe good
for him. Maybe good for both of us. Even
in my own journal I turned myself into a
case study.
Absolutely exhausting man.
But look at the word I chose. Organic. I
think I knew something before I knew I
knew it. The relationships I trust most
are not always the ones I constructed
beautifully.
Some of them just grew. No architecture
first. No projection.
No useful role I had to fill before I
earned the chair. Two people met.
Something was easy. They came back.
I have some new friends. David and Julie.
I like saying their names. I like that the
friendship did not arrive with a job
description.
I like that we share a fascination with
beautiful things and the hands that make
them. I like that they introduced me to
Hazel.
I like that they looked at the remaining
hours of my Denver day and thought there
was somewhere beautiful I should see. And
I like that they were right.
That is what friendship does at its best.
It does not merely know you. It adds
territory. Your map gets larger. Here is a
shop where you know two people now.
Here is a machine with a name. Here is a
garden you did not have yesterday.
Here is a photograph that did not exist
last week. Here is a future afternoon
already possible because somebody entered
the present one.
[rain falling]
I have moved a lot in my life. I started
on a road in Georgia that most maps do not
bother with, and I have been looking for
the next room ever since.
Places have meant too much to me before. I
know that.
I know what it is to arrive somewhere and
immediately begin asking it to explain who
I am. This town will fix it. This room
will make sense of it. This job. This
person. This version.
I do not ask places for that anymore. That
may be why I can love them better. The
Botanic Gardens do not have to save me.
Denver does not have to become destiny.
David and Julie do not have to become
characters in some future architecture I
have already designed for them.
They can be David and Julie. New friends.
Hazel can be Hazel. A magnificent machine.
The garden can be somewhere I go because I
am happy there.
That is enough. More than enough,
actually. There is an enormous freedom in
allowing beautiful things to remain their
actual size. I used to believe making
something meaningful required making it
large.
Now I think attention does the opposite.
Attention lets a small thing remain small
without becoming insignificant.
A pumpkin printed in orange ink. A
recommendation made in passing. A few
hours before a bus. A photograph of three
people standing beside an old press. None
of those things needs enlargement. They
already happened. They already reached me.
[a low hum]
The brand people would probably tell me I
should not say this next part. Which is
precisely why I am going to.
Avery Lane Maxwell is not a character I
put on in the morning. He is also not some
pristine authentic self hidden underneath
everything I have built. That is too
simple. I made him. And then I became him.
Or perhaps I became him by making all the
things he would make. The music. The
rooms. The ridiculous attention to paper.
The insistence that one sentence can still
be better. The coffee.
The photographs. The letters. Galena
House. All of it.
Construction is not the opposite of
sincerity. Sometimes construction is how
sincerity acquires walls.
But the test, I think, is what happens
when nobody has been told to look. Do they
still see you? David and Julie did.
Courtney does, every time, and has for a
while now.
That is what moved me. They met me before
the biography.
They watched me going through an ordinary
day and found something there worth
knowing again. There is no award I could
get for my work that would replace the
particular pleasure of that.
Because somewhere underneath all the
ambition, there is still a boy who learned
very early how to become welcome anywhere.
And the question he could never quite
answer was whether anyone would have
welcomed the person who had not prepared
the room first.
I think I know now. Some people do.
[river running]
The sun was lowering when I was at the
gardens. I remember that more than any
particular plant. Light moving across
water. The day losing its edges. People
beginning to leave.
That peculiar hour when you become aware
that a beautiful place will continue
existing after you walk out of it. I used
to find that sad. Now I find it
comforting.
I do not have to keep everything alive. I
can leave. I can come back. The garden
will be there. My friends will have their
lives. I will have mine.
Somewhere Hazel will keep turning that
enormous wheel.
The world does not require my supervision
in order to remain beautiful.
I cannot tell you how relaxing this
information is.
And maybe that is the sentence I have been
writing toward for eight episodes. Not, I
finally found the right place. Not, I
finally became the right person.
Not even, I finally learned how to stay.
Something simpler.
I am becoming available to my own life.
I am there when somebody interesting walks
into it. I am there when friendship
begins. I am there when an old machine
presses orange into paper.
I am there when somebody says go to the
gardens and, instead of finding a reason
not to, I go.
I am there when the water catches the
evening light. I am there when I realize I
want to come back.
I am there when the bus pulls out of Union
Station and the city goes gold behind it
and I do not reach for my notebook.
And increasingly, I do not need to stand
one step behind myself and take notes
first. Sometimes Avery gets to go. The
writer can catch up later.
He always does.
[fire crackling softly]
I spent years becoming someone other
people could read. Maybe this part of my
life is about becoming someone I can
simply live as. That person still notices
everything.
He still makes too much coffee. He still
misses the bus.
He will still adjust something by a
quarter inch when nobody else can see the
difference. He will probably always make a
room easier if he knows how.
I like those things about him. I am
keeping them. But there is more room now.
For surprise. For receiving. For other
people's ideas. For a new road through a
city.
For friends I did not plan on having. For
places I did not know I needed.
For delight that does not need to become
evidence before I trust it.
I have been looking for home for as long
as I can remember. I used to think it was
a place. I have asked a great many places.
Then I thought it was a version of me I
had not finished building yet, and I
built, and I built, and the lights never
quite came on.
I think now it is simpler and stranger
than either. Home is not a place. Home is
a person. It is the one who saw you before
you started and came back anyway.
Sometimes that person is a friend who says
go to the gardens. Sometimes it is a woman
who did the reading. And sometimes, if you
are patient with yourself, that person is
you.
I am home. Not the walls. Me.
And if you are listening to this in a car
or a kitchen or the last hour of a shift,
you are somebody's home too, whether or
not anyone has told you yet. Found.
Not marketed. It always was. Some things
know the way back.
I have some new friends. Pretty cool. And
because of them, I have a new happy place
too. That is not a grand revelation. It is
better. It is Thursday ordinary.
Real enough to photograph. Small enough to
keep.
Courtney. David. Julie. Hazel. The
gardens. A bus I nearly missed twice. A
day in Denver. Avery, somewhere in the
middle of it, having a very good time.
Maybe that is what shining actually is.
Not making the room look at you. Being so
completely inside your own life that
somebody notices the light anyway.
[silence]
I am Avery Lane Maxwell. This is Galena
House Audio. And apparently, the world is
still introducing itself. I think I will
let it.
[music swells softly]