Why Now, and Why Here

There is something idiosyncratic about starting a project in a time where everything feels like it’s unraveling. Perhaps it is the feeling that history is being erased or rewritten. But maybe that’s just the catalyst I required.

There is something inherently human about seeking order in times of chaos, about asking questions when certainty slips away. We turn to stories, fragments, reflections—not to resolve the mess, but to be able to hold it in our hands for a while.  

The Pico Papers were not born out of strategy. They emerged out of restlessness. Out of the need to write without waiting for permission. To reflect without tailoring the voice or tone to fit a gatekeeper. To stop asking “is this publishable?” and instead ask “is this true?”

After all, when have cats ever asked for permission?

This isn’t a blog. It isn’t a brand. It’s a quiet space for what doesn’t quite fit anywhere else—for the questions that don’t behave, and for the stories that won’t stay buried. It’s for essays, dispatches, and small provocations from places too often ignored.

It is named for a cat, yes. A partially blind orange cat who sees in ways that defy the limits of sight. Pico was rescued from California and now spends his days perched quietly on my desk, attuned with the world with a kind of watchful softness. He doesn’t need full vision to know where the pain lives. He feels it. He senses what doesn’t get said.

And perhaps that is the best metaphor I could offer: to write from spaces that demand noticing. Not the headlines, but the silences underneath them.

We are living in a moment of overlapping erasures—of memory, of truth, of those pushed to the edges of our collective narratives. In such a time, silence isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity.

There is no grand plan. Just the beginning. And in the beginning, there is always a little noise, a little fear, a little grace, and the impulse to say something, to do something that matters.