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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It’s 1969 and I’m in the woods looking for Germans along with my nine year old buddies helping our friend Tom celebrate a birthday before the advent of chuckie cheese. He wanted to play war games after cake and ice cream so we drifted through the timber firing our fingers like browning automatic rifles at…
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My son is getting an $8,000 haircut in two weeks. He’s been at the University of Hamburg studying and traveling since January and for the past two years his hair has grown along with his learning, a marker of time, evidence that the shafts of hair are passing through the follicle reservoirs at the speed…
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My son spent every waking moment of 1996 as a three-year old child repeating one word, “Why?” Why are there big red balls on some electric power lines and why can’t he wear his socks according to thickness instead of color and why do arrows on signs point up into the heavens where cars can’t…
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Congratulations James Sutherland! Can’t believe my nephew is graduating from Harding University. Just a few years ago he was a leaping gnome on a trampoline and a make-believe toothbrush on a crocodile in one of the first stories I ever put on paper. Carbon Canyon is a children’s story written during a vacation in 1999.…
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The bus crossed the 7th street bridge and I peered over the rail through an open window at the eddies of a muddy river, swirling coffee relentlessly shaping the bank of naked earth. On my first day of junior high ringing bells punctuated my hourly class schedule. This change in my academic life assaulted my…
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I should have listened to the grizzled veteran, the St. Louis Cardinals concessionaire who sold me the hot dog when he admonished me to, “Stick that five dollar bill in your pocket and quit waving it around like a 4th of July flag!” I stared at him mouth agape, not sure of his meaning, and…
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Once in my youth, I felt heaven unreachable, sterile, a place of thou shalt not have fun, and my fervor was not equal to the pill-box hatted lady sitting in the pew in front of me blocking my view of a preacher imploring me to get right and ready to go home. Since I didn’t…
Bespoke 