The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

Dr. Chad Prevost
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The Difficulty is a podcast about creativity, meaning, and the hard choices that shape a life. Each week, writer and publisher Chad Prevost works through the questions underneath the creative process and the examined life—how we make work that matters, sit with life's difficulties instead of rushing past them, and keep going. Expect arguments, reflections, and the occasional witness to something worth seeing. Slower, more contemplative episodes land on Saturdays. It's also the voice of Crossroads Publishing Group, a press built on a single idea: books are occasions for community. If you're a creative, a thinker, a maker, or anyone navigating the difficulty of doing meaningful work—pull up a chair. chadprevost.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Write the truest sentence you know

    I had sixty-thousand words then I had twenty-thousand, and I still did not have a book. This Thursday’s episode is about how I finally learned the difference, and it’s the most useful thing I know about the work. The manuscript had frameworks. It had seven tidy maps. It had the warm, encouraging, here-are-your-steps voice I’d spent years building. And every time I read it start to finish, something was wrong and I couldn’t name it. That’s not writer’s block. It’s quieter and worse: the slow realization that a pile of genuinely good material is not a book. In Vivian Gornick’s terms, I had a situation. I didn’t have a story. The way out came from Hemingway, broke and young in a cold Paris garret, who when he couldn’t get started would tell himself, “Write the truest sentence that you know.” Just one. But here’s the part everyone skips: he also cut to it. Whenever he caught himself writing elaborately, presenting something, he’d throw that ornament away, what he called the scrollwork, and start from the first true simple sentence. The truest sentence isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off. So I went hunting through my thirty-seven thousand words for the one place I’d stopped performing and actually said the thing. Then I found the sentence. Everything that served it stayed. All seven maps, the whole coaching voice blog posts, went over the side as ballast, and the book finally floated—well, it’s floating. You’re allowed to not know your true sentence yet. You almost never do going in. You write the messy draft precisely to find the one true thing hiding in it. You’re allowed to have a pile that isn’t a book yet, that’s just the middle, everyone’s middle looks like a pile. And you’re allowed to cut what you love. In fact you have to. Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me the one true sentence your project is really about, or the one you suspect you’ve been avoiding.“The truest sentence isn’t something you add to your draft. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off.”The Difficulty lands Mondays, Thursdays (the working writer), and sometimes Fridays and sometimes Saturdays (from the workshop). If this named something you’ve been circling, subscribe, and forward it to someone with a pile that’s trying to become a book. More at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Write the truest sentence you know

  2. 5d ago

    Locate yourself

    I went out to play disc golf yesterday, and I kept losing focus on the game. My mind wandered off down every side trail in the woods. This Monday’s episode follows a few of those trails. We start with the poem you think you know. “The Road Not Taken” gets read as an anthem for bold nonconformists, but read the middle again: the two roads “equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” There was no road less traveled, not really. Frost isn’t describing a choice. He’s describing the story he already knows he’ll tell about it, “with a sigh,” years from now. The difficulty is the choice. But underneath it is a harder thing: knowing where you’re actually standing when you make it. From there we get lost on purpose. The way some languages orient by north and south instead of left and right, and how our ancestors located their very identity in place. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and the terror of losing your self coordinates entirely. And the strange argument between Walt Whitman, who blessed the multitudes we contain, and Gurdjieff, who sat with a more accusatory tone toward those same sleepwalking multitudes. What I carried out of the woods were three questions: What are we actually, consciously choosing? Why do we spend so much energy distracting ourselves from ourselves? And why is it so hard to know who we are? And one small piece of permission, which is what we do here on Mondays. You don’t have to travel both roads, catch every fleeting thought, or unify the crowd inside you into one tidy self. You only have to remember yourself among them. Be the quiet one who watches the parade without climbing aboard every float. That’s the fixed point. That’s what it means to locate yourself. Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me your one fixed point, the thing you orient by when everything else is just trees.The Difficulty lands Mondays (the long walk), Thursdays, and Saturdays. If this located something in you, subscribe and forward it to one person who’s feeling turned around. More at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Locate yourself

  3. Jul 10

    The Difficulty: live from The Home Bar with co-host Genesis the Greykid

    The difficulty in life is the choice. And this week the choice came fast: an hour before we sat down, a tree took a lightning strike around the corner, dropped a branch on a woman’s car, smashed a transformer, took out the block. Genesis’s people — Josh, Kyle — ran toward it and pulled her out. Then they walked over and made a podcast about the creative life. That’s the register of this second episode, recorded at the corner of 4th and Market, the intersection of a city that is itself a crossroads. Genesis poured a Scotch bottled somewhere between 1929 and 1940 — a hundred years in someone’s collection, traded for one of his paintings — and we talked about permanence, and how the people from a hundred years ago are speaking more resonantly to us than ever. (No, that pour you hear is not AI. That’s the real thing.) Some of what we got into: * The Waffle House poet. Genesis met a woman writing “immaculate poetry” at 3 a.m. who’s been at it twenty years and is certain it’s not for her. The whole episode circles back to her: the gap between a real gift and the permission to claim it. * The compromises we make with ourselves. From a Seinfeld bit about the trashman to Chad’s first year of seminary mopping floors as “the minister to commodes” — the dignity of honest work, and the moment a gift asks to be shared anyway. * When to keep going, and when to stop. Bukowski’s twenty years at the post office. The friend who built a $50M company and blew it up because chaos was his home. The bandmate who wouldn’t sign the deal. If you love the work like you love ice cream, the sugar high fades. If you love it like you love your children, you keep going — even if it costs you. * What is good art? Bob Dylan’s voice. The mystery in Roethke’s line, “Light takes the tree; but who can tell us how?” * The invisible layer. John O’Donohue’s “invisible choreography” between the heart and what it beholds — and how the receiver often finds something in the art the maker never knew was there. Two poems. Chad read Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking” (“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.”) — and Genesis answered with Chase Twichell’s subway poem, the one that ends on “I don’t know who speaks / when the horse speaks.” Then Kyle Kasper, a poet who moved to Chattanooga last year and just published his first collection — and who’d run out to that wrecked car an hour before — read his own poem, “Kind to Me”: “We must be kind to ourselves… be good to your soul, like you would to a child.” We closed on the question we’re keeping: What are you alive to right now? And what are you closed to? Genesis is alive to the opinion that challenges his own — “if nobody likes you, I wonder why not; let’s hang.” And what he’s closed to turned out to be the most open thing he said all night: the God question, from an experience in a 2002 storm he can’t un-know. “I don’t have the answers, but I have the experience.” Listen above. New conversations from The Home Bar, and Mondays and Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts. From Chattanooga, a crossroads city, at a bar on an intersection — this is The Difficulty. Brought to you in part by Crossroads Publishing Group. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    The Difficulty: live from The Home Bar with co-host Genesis the Greykid

  4. Jul 6

    Wait, For Now

    There’s the feeling of standing on the edge of everything and nothing at once. So much that might happen. So much that could happen. And nothing has happened yet. You can feel your whole life leaning forward, and you can also feel that today, right now, for all your efforts, nothing’s changed. Sometimes joy and sadness in the same hour. The almost. We’ve been taught to treat the almost like a waiting room. A dull hallway before the real thing starts. This week’s episode makes the opposite case: the almost is not the hallway. It’s the room. The waiting is not the thing before your life. It is your life, and there’s a way to be in it that isn’t agony. I let three poets say it better than I can. Galway Kinnell, in “Wait,” a poem he reportedly wrote for a student close to giving up: “Wait, for now. / Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” Not the highs. Not the crash the morning after the highs. The hours. They didn’t fail you before. They’re just not done. Wendell Berry, six lines called “The Real Work,” for when it isn’t just waiting but stuck: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.” The smooth stream makes no sound. It’s the rock in the water that makes the music. Being baffled doesn’t mean you’re off the path. It means you’ve come to your real work. Rilke, to his young poet: ripen like the tree that doesn’t force its sap. “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Not solve your way in. Live your way in. And then, for the first time on the show, one of my own, from a collection coming soon called Mirage and Tar. It arrived easily after a David Whyte walking tour, back home in the ordinary house after the extraordinary time. The first two stanzas: Lightly When you step, step lightly,though you may not know where to go. But step, and know you get there by going,not by thinking where to go.When you breathe, breathe lightly,and trust the air to be there.Your breath knows what to do without thinking, but will followthe way you want to go… The practice this week is one small thing. Once today, name one thing that is ripening in you. Something real and forming and not yet finished. Then, on purpose, refuse to demand that it be finished today. Just name it, let it ripen, and go on with your hours. The verb isn’t hurry. It isn’t arrive. It’s wait — the way Kinnell means it. Active waiting. Trusting the hours. Listen to the full episode above. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays. Poems: Galway Kinnell, “Wait” (Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980); Wendell Berry, “The Real Work”; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. “Lightly” © Chad Prevost, from the forthcoming Mirage and Tar. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Wait, For Now

  5. Jul 3

    Genesis Greykid and Chad Prevost on the Creative Life and the Pathless Path

    Host Chad Prevost and co-host Genesis launch the first live happy-hour episode of The Difficulty from Home Bar in downtown Chattanooga, inviting listeners to join Fridays and describing the city as a creative crossroads. They discuss Chattanooga’s “animal” vibe, then welcome Chicago-based curator/artist LaRon Dittoe, who works in finance and commits to a monthly creative practice through gallery shows and artist dinners, and shares her handle and a planned September Chicago exhibition. Another guest, Nic Chung (an artist in Chattanooga), argues creativity is an identity beyond mediums and reflects on a dream of dying that shifted him toward minimizing regret rather than fear. The group talks about confronting “the bottom,” social anxiety, community, sponsors, the show’s growth, weekly giveaways (including The Artist’s Way next week), Chad’s daily reader book structure, and brief UFO skepticism and faith-versus-doubt discussion. Tune in every Friday for conversations that begin one place and always take you somewhere else like a good poem. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Genesis Greykid and Chad Prevost on the Creative Life and the Pathless Path

  6. Jul 2

    The Big Five Just Chased the Indie Author

    The difficulty in life is the choice. And every choice is a crossroads. This week’s Working Writer roundup covers three stories that land on the same square, plus an announcement I’ve been sitting on. 1. Simon & Schuster relaunched Pocket Books as a home for indie and hybrid authors.One of the oldest names in American paperback publishing, rebuilt around signing successful self-published writers to print deals. Their own words: “a home for forward-thinking writers, including bestselling indie and hybrid authors looking to amplify their reach.” Translation: New York is no longer asking who has a manuscript. It’s asking who has readers. The room you build around your work isn’t the consolation prize anymore. It’s the asset. 2. The industry is counting its robots.BISG and BookNet Canada opened their 2026 “AI in the Book Industry” survey (through July 17). Last year’s round found about half the industry using AI, almost entirely in the plumbing: admin, marketing, data. Not the voice. I talk about where Crossroads stands: machines in the machinery, humans in the writing, audiobooks narrated by human beings. The flood of machine-made content drowns the generic. It can’t drown a voice a reader trusts. 3. Fourteen thousand librarians walked into Chicago.The American Library Association held its 150th annual conference: 14,801 registrants making plans for the future of reading. The quiet answer to “nobody reads anymore,” and a reminder that the professional middle (librarians, book clubs, spiritual directors, retreat leaders) is where books actually travel. And some news of our own: starting this Friday, I’m launching a new live series with Genesis the Greykid, fine-art poet and co-owner of Home, the bar at the corner of Fourth and Market in downtown Chattanooga. A crossroads city, a bar on an intersection, and conversations about the in-betweens: the hard choices, and the constraints (time, money) we build a creative life inside. It can be beautiful. If you’re a writer with a message standing at your own crossroads, that’s what we build at Crossroads Publishing Group. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    The Big Five Just Chased the Indie Author

  7. Jun 25

    Working Writer: The Money Moved

    Five things that actually moved in publishing this month, and what to do about each. The Authors Guild puts hard numbers on why author income keeps slipping, Audible forces a year-end decision on audiobook royalties, FSG opens a no-fee $15,000 fellowship (deadline July 6), book discovery starts shifting from search to AI, and the indie bookstore "death" turns out to be growth. The channels you don't control are getting harder, so put your weight on the ones you do.Join us at crossroadspublishing.group. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Working Writer: The Money Moved

  8. Jun 22

    Crossings: The 64-Page Book That Knows Where You Are

    How many books on your shelf were actually finished (if they were even began)? This episode is about a different kind of book: short on purpose, beautiful enough to keep, written from the far side of a hard turn for the person standing in it now. A case for concentration over padding, and the first look at Crossings, our new short-form line. Find us at crossroadspublishing.group. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

    Crossings: The 64-Page Book That Knows Where You Are
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The Difficulty is a podcast about creativity, meaning, and the hard choices that shape a life. Each week, writer and publisher Chad Prevost works through the questions underneath the creative process and the examined life—how we make work that matters, sit with life's difficulties instead of rushing past them, and keep going. Expect arguments, reflections, and the occasional witness to something worth seeing. Slower, more contemplative episodes land on Saturdays. It's also the voice of Crossroads Publishing Group, a press built on a single idea: books are occasions for community. If you're a creative, a thinker, a maker, or anyone navigating the difficulty of doing meaningful work—pull up a chair. chadprevost.substack.com

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