A novel about friendship, buried secrets, and the price of uncovering the truth.
Welcome
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
Seven towering hills of chat ring the town—waste rock from the mines, pale and glassy in the sun. In 1954, twelve-year-old Grace Ryan arrives and quickly learns that Jasper is not a quiet place, and that danger lingers just beneath its surface.
Drawn by an old survey map, a brass tag marked B6, and questions the adults refuse to answer, Grace, Percy, and Clay uncover hidden tunnels, poisoned water, buried records, and a silence that has protected powerful men for years.
Seven Hills will be Available to purchase October 2026
Stories
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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…
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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.
Bespoke 