Every town has stories beneath its streets.
Some are buried beneath abandoned mines.
Others beneath baseball fields, family tables, and memories that refuse to disappear.
Bespoke is where I share those stories.
Featured Book
Seven Hills
A novel by Brent Taylor
In the fictional mining town of Jasper, Oklahoma, three childhood friends come of age beneath the shadow of the Seven Hills—towering remnants of a mining boom that brought prosperity to their community while leaving scars that will outlast them all.
Grace Ryan, Percy Walker, and Clay Boyd share a childhood shaped by baseball, friendship, faith, and the rhythms of small-town life. But as they grow older, Jasper begins to change. The mines that once sustained the town have left behind poisoned streams, buried dangers, and questions few people are willing to ask.
When Grace returns home from college, she sees Jasper differently. Her hometown seems to be changing. Percy dreams of becoming a writer and searches for a life beyond Jasper. Clay is deeply faithful to his home and family.
As their paths diverge, each must decide what loyalty means to a hometown that has given them both belonging and loss.
Seven Hills is a story of friendship, memory, courage, and the complicated love we carry for the places that made us.
Books for Sale
Seven Hills will be Available to purchase October 2026
Stories
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The man with the shepherd crook disguised as a dust mop has died. There is a melancholy in the closet where the mops lean against the wall and the Folger’s can is empty, no longer filled with Brach’s candy. Rusty gave it all away. General Douglass MacArthur said, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade…
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Last night at the Brady Theater, Garrison Keillor sang and told stories accompanied only by a piano and his red sneakers. He talked about a conversation with a girl from an age he didn’t quite understand. She had lots of steel in various orifices, the lips, ears, nose. Keillor said it looked as if she…
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Grandpa Taylor never had a mullet, although he may have once shot one in the woods behind the barn. Grandpa seems more understandable now, more on my level. I’m entering an age of understanding that my grandpa didn’t always own a pony and a red cart. He seems younger now, although he’s passed on. My grandpa…
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While playing golf yesterday, someone asked if I was playing my little homemade golf course. I said, “No, I just take care of it, mow it, water it, kind of like a garden, a hobby. Just like my wife Karen, who works in her garden beside the 8th tee box. We work together at different…
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This morning, over coffee and my digital newspaper, I caught the image of a spider on my shirt at the upper right breast area and I brushed it off but it didn’t move. It was a Ralph Lauren horse logo. My shirt was inside out. This would have bothered me in my early years before…
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Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~ Victor Hugo I had a reputation as a youngster that enshrouded me like cigar smoke hovering over Churchill on a still summer evening. I sang pretty well. I sang because my church sang a capella and everyone sang. If…
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I’m a home builder by trade, but when I grow up, I want to be a writer. Since writers publish books, that’s the next step. Bankruptcy is the one thing common to both writers and builders. While the financial poverty of writing is constant, the financial woes of builders are violent, like a train derailing…
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Sunday morning during communion while the church sang, “How deep the Father’s love for us,” I sat and listened unable to sing, because I had a softball stuck in my throat. I had just read a text from my brother Toby, “Played a little chess Drew is beating me without even looking. Washing his hair…
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Kid these days. They aren’t like Karen and me, just as we weren’t like our parents, just like they…well, for instance, Great-Grandma Beck was 14 when she married, Mom and Dad 19 when they married, and I was 25. My kids will be drawing a pension by the time they marry. And they probably won’t…
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Billy Graham and my Grandma Mildred, side by side, illustrate a conundrum of mine; why do some folks talk non-stop and others hardly at all? Billy Graham was one with the gift of gab, my Grandma Mildred Davis went the way of minimal expression. The soft-spoken and the vocal are both gifted. But I relate…
