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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This was a football catch for the ages in a million backyards, a thousand Friday nights, and a hundred campus Saturdays, just not according to the technocrats at the National Football League.
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This detachment from the materialism of the season reminds me of the time we took the kids to California and Uncle Clark gave all eight children a lump of coal. It’s the conundrum of Christmas.
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Brandon and I launched our kayaks just below the Cherokee Bridge waterfall unsure of the legality of our venture not to mention the health risk. We set off to kayak the Caney River, because we felt like it, in the mold of Sir Edmund Hillary who once said, “It is not the mountain we conquer…
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My brother Toby is six years younger than me. As a three-year old lad, he was universally adored by teenage girls at church, wooed and cooed over because his dark eyelashes fluttered like lazy cabana fans and his black hair was licked by cream-fed cows at the center of his hairline in a cool-to-be-square duck-tail.…
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I once saw a list of things Dad’s should teach their sons. How to balance a checking account, how to ask a girl out, how to change a tire, and so on. But as I think about my failure to teach my son these skills, I realize how much nurturing help I’ve had. Saturday I…
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My wife reminds me occasionally that I forgot to propose, and that our marriage certificate was not notarized properly under the laws of New Jersey. We’ve been not married for 29 years now. To assuage my guilt, awash in the glut of new age engagements initiated by princes in hot air balloons accompanied by life-sized…
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This morning, I read several lies and truths about domestic violence. The internet has a way of making us all experts…and idiots. I did find this one interesting. “Prior to the mid-1800s, most legal systems accepted wife-beating (today’s term is domestic violence) as a valid exercise of a husband’s authority over his wife. One exception,…
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I dragged Karen to the Community Center last night and listened to Roy Blount, Jr. speak about the literary world and about his great friend and favorite author, Charles Portis, famous for writing the book True Grit and as well as other books, The Dog of the South and Norwood. Mr. Portis prefers the earlier…
