Welcome to my writing home.
For more than fourteen years, I’ve been writing and publishing essays here, following a curiosity that takes me across the landscapes of literature, philosophy, yoga, music, motorcycling, and the everyday experiences that reveal something about being human.
Across nearly 600 essays, I’ve explored the places we inhabit, the people who shape us, the things we carry, and the unexpected ways meaning emerges when we pay attention.
My writing moves between lyric nonfiction and memoir, between the contemplative and the physical, between a motorcycle on an open road and the quiet of a northern Wisconsin lake. Sometimes it begins with a question. Sometimes with a memory, a conversation, a song, or a tree.
What connects it all is a conviction that attention matters: to our words, our bodies, our relationships, and the world around us.
Here you’ll find published essays, reflections, stories, and selections from my ongoing work, along with news of my books and speaking engagements.
I invite you to wander, read, and stay awhile.
Speaking as Hospitality
The best speakers aren’t performers. They’re hosts.
Public speaking is often taught as a performance, a matter of mastering techniques, controlling nerves, and making an impression. But what if we began somewhere else?
In Speaking as Hospitality, I invite speakers to turn their attention outward, away from themselves and toward the people who have come to listen.
Drawing on decades of experience as a teacher, pastor, counselor, and public speaker, I explore speaking as an act of welcome. The speaker becomes a host, preparing a place for others through attention, presence, and the generous offering of words.
The book addresses the emotional dimensions of speaking, the cultivation of ease, and the authority that comes not from performing for an audience but from serving one.
Like a host setting the table, a speaker prepares to offer something of value. The goal is not simply to deliver a successful speech but to create a meaningful human connection.
Speaking as Hospitality: It’s Not About You will be published by Sūtra House on January 12, 2027.
Use code ORMSON15 for 15%
WRITING
Stories Emerge Like Bears
Forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, January 2028
Some stories announce themselves. Others emerge slowly, like bears moving out of the woods, carrying something we did not know we had been waiting to see.
Stories Emerge Like Bears is a lyric memoir shaped by the landscapes of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where lakes, forests, old cabins, motorcycles, and family histories become companions in the search for meaning.
The essays move through memory and place, through the ordinary experiences that acquire extraordinary weight with the passage of time. A father and son walk among ancient white pines. An old hand pump draws water from beneath the earth. A motorcycle carries its rider toward an uncertain destination. The voices of people we have loved continue to speak long after they are gone.
These are stories about belonging and loss, about what we inherit and what we leave behind. They follow the ways attention transforms experience into memory, and memory into something worth telling.
Written in lyric prose, the book invites readers into the spaces between what happens and what it means, where the physical world and the inner life meet.
Watch for Stories Emerge Like Bears, coming in January 2028.
Explore My Writing
The books are part of a much longer conversation.
Across years of writing, I’ve followed many paths: some through literature and philosophy, others through yoga studios, music, open highways, and the forests and lakes of the American North.
These interests may seem far apart, but they share a common ground in attention, curiosity, and the search for meaningful human connection.
Here are a few places to begin exploring.
Yoga and Embodied Practice
Writing about the relationship between body, mind, spirit, and the practice of being present.
Explore Yoga Song and other yoga writing
Motorcycling and the Open Road
Stories of movement, freedom, risk, discovery, and the trickster’s presence along the way.
Read Motorcycling’s Resplendent Passages
Literary Essays and Lyric Nonfiction
Essays shaped by memory, place, language, family, and the surprising connections between ordinary events.
Read Banjo Liberation and explore more literary essays.
Speaking, Voice, and Emotional Readiness
Reflections on the spoken word, the emotional life of the speaker, and the connection between voice, presence, and audience.
Pounding Chords on that Big Taylor Guitar and Singing my Ass Off
Whether I’m writing about a hand pump at an old cabin, a motorcycle on a winding road, or a speaker standing before an audience, I’m interested in the same underlying question: What becomes possible when we pay attention?
Thank you for visiting. I hope you’ll find something here that speaks to your own experience.
What did you notice here? I welcome your thoughts.