Avery Lane Maxwell.

STILL HERE

No. 1 of 5
A USED SUNDAY

Sunday night, and the house has given everything it had. Elias at the desk with the coffee made five times, a glass on the landing where no glass belongs, and a question from a guest about whose version gets to be true. The first of five readings for the end of a long day. If today used you up a little too, this one is for you.

Still Here. is five readings from the house: Elias, read aloud by Ave...

This episode is also a film. Watch it with the sound on: averylanemaxwell.com/podcast

Get comfortable first. Avery is in green sweatpants and an old red tee with a gold eagle that has nearly washed away, the kind of thing that knows your shape without asking you to become a different one.

A hello to you, whoever is out there with a mug and a long day behind you. Two people keeping another old house, a long way from here, and a light ...

The Sunday Room is a film. Watch it with the sound on: averylanemaxwell.com/podcast

THE SUNDAY ROOM

No. 2
LET THE BEAUTIFUL THING STAY ITS ACTUAL SIZE

A baby pumpkin on the desk. A family ring with a row of very small diamonds. And a week of missed buses that kept putting Avery, somehow, exactly where he was supposed to be.

First, Denver.

Lunch with someone who has become important to the work. An afternoon beside an old letterpress ...

The first episode of The Keeper, the television expression of this house: a half hour, cut for broadcast from the prelude and The Sunday Room, with titles.

Imagine a room with me: two chairs, a lamp instead of the overhead light, a window with something worth looking at in it. Then six minutes on a bicycle through Frisco at the gold hour, and the discovery that I know this town well enough to leave it. The versions of people we keep...

Fall has never felt new to Avery. It arrives every year dressed differently, and he recognizes it before he understands why: a certain yellow, the brown underneath it, light going flatter in the afternoon. And suddenly he is also on Maley Road, in Georgia, watching his stepmother mark the season.

An essay about resemblance, the word more generous than sameness. How memory keeps what it likes, by color and texture. The versions of a ...

The first Sunday Room. Tuesday carries the finished essay; Sunday carries the life around it.

Avery asks you to imagine a room with him: two chairs, a lamp instead of the overhead light, a window with something worth looking at. It feels a little like a therapist's office. That is fair. He is borrowing the furniture, and the hour. The Sunday Room goes wherever he goes; its one fixed address is Galena House's new writer's studio on L...

A prelude. Not the leaving; the thing before it.

Avery started on the footbridge, turned left toward the post office, and for six minutes rode through a town that has held a very large version of his life. Not the whole thing. That distinction matters now.

On a boy who spent years looking for home and the man who learned to make one almost everywhere he went: a cup placed correctly, a lamp instead of an overhead light, a book left op...

Avery went down to the water for a few minutes with his phone, not because he had something to say. The creek was moving, the trees were yellow, mostly, and one green leaf hung so close to the lens it took up more of the picture than it had any right to. He nearly moved it. He didn't.

An essay on how fast fall happens in the mountains and how everyone in Colorado says the same sentence about it every year; on a man who can turn a ch...

Thursday began with the Pegasus bus leaving Frisco without Avery, twice. It ended beside water in the Denver Botanic Gardens, not reaching for a notebook. In between: Courtney DeWinter, his PR counsel, across a table again; and David and Julie Sandusky of Idea Chic, who had met him in motion, working, carrying things, not introducing anyone, and noticed anyway. Inside their shop lives Hazel, a letterpress born in 1933, who is very ...

A Galena House Audio story, written with intention.

There was once a pumpkin that grew beside a little house at the bottom of a hill. He was not the biggest, or the roundest, but he was orange, and he was a very good listener. Every morning two brothers came through the garden. Then summer became September, September became October, and the boys said he was ready.

A story about keeping things: a face drawn with one eyebrow higher tha...

A dear friend called today after almost two years, and within thirty seconds it was yesterday. The same morning, a man Avery barely knew came looking for him with a piece of flounder. And on the desk, the first letter from a listener. Three people arriving from three directions, each saying, in a different way, I found you.

An essay on the difference between absence and neglect, on loyalty that does not need winding, on the little b...

There is pumpkin bread cooling when this one starts, and a letter on the desk. My first from a listener. I do not read it aloud; it belongs first to the person who sent it. But somewhere around the second reading it occurred to me that the letter is another version of me. Somebody formed an Avery in their mind and wrote to him. He is me. He is not all of me.

The first time I learned that another person could keep a different version...

I am browning butter when this one starts, which turns out to be the whole point.

The same smell has been in a kitchen in Georgia, a rental in Montana, a town in Colorado where the road stops, and now here, at nine thousand feet, where it takes longer because everything does.

Four kitchens, twenty years, one smell.

That is a map.

So this episode follows the map, and it follows it by the water.

Georgia, where the water has been going the...

A podcast made at nine thousand feet in Frisco, Colorado, in the hour before anyone is awake.

I am Avery Lane Maxwell. I write books, and I have spent nine years keeping houses for strangers. Every episode here is an essay, read slow, scored with my own music: about building a life by hand at altitude, about the house that didn't save me, and the habit it taught me instead. Leave the room ready. Someone is coming.

And every episode e...

A Sunday Special, because some essays do not wait for Tuesday.

This year has been hard. It has also been extraordinary. I have stopped asking those two things to cancel each other out.

In this one: what Still, by Design. taught me about stillness and what Good Little Innkeeper is teaching me about truth. Being so good at meaning that imagination starts impersonating evidence. Why good intentions are not receipts. The exhausting belie...

Episode Three. The one that goes back for my grandmother.

I meant to tell you about my grandmother and her scones. Every time I tried to get to her, I kept finding water: a hot spring in Montana I went to get sober beside, a river in Colorado that would not stop for anything, and the flat green heat of Georgia, where the watcher in me was born at a kitchen table, listening to women say "remember when."

So this is an essay about what ...

A place you thought would fix you — and what happened when it didn’t. This week: the answer I dodged last week. The inn at nine thousand feet, the years I spent confusing movement with progress, a guest who remembered me before I’d decided which me I was — and the whole argument in food form: the house scone recipe, altitude included.

Written and read by the fire at Galena House, Frisco, Colorado.

♫ The Galena...

Before this room, there were twenty-three others. Episode one: a decade in motion, the places we mistake for salvation, and the truth about the name on the books — a name still being become. Plus the whole point of this show: it ends when you start talking to someone who isn't me. This week's question, to ask someone out loud: "What's a place you thought would fix you — and what happened when it didn't?" Write the house...

Hello. I am Avery Lane Maxwell. 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. New episodes when they are ready, and not before. Come in. It is already warm. The novel: Still, by Design. — out now, everywhere books are. The read...