I’m Josh Hale and I’m a writer based in Chicago. I write short fiction pieces as well as poetry. I like creating work that resonates with people by creating convincing characters and settings. You may not be able to relate to all of my characters. My hope is that you’ll understand them as they are. I’d rather give you a scene than describe a setting. I believe that small details are sometimes the largest ones.
Some literary influences are David Foster Wallace, Chinua Achebe, Mark Danielewski, Emil Ferris, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Charles Bukowski, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, and Lois Lowry.
I’m in the process of updating this site and I add stories as I write them. I hope that you enjoy what you see here and if you really enjoy it, please considering donating an amount that you can afford to keep this thing going. I genuinely enjoy writing and I hope to be able to do it full time at some point. Thank you for visiting!
Latest Writing
Reggie's House
I’m driving down Lawrence one afternoon and I make a wrong turn. I’m looking for the next intersection but I stop. There’s a big oak tree in a yard capable of shading the houses on either side of it. I know one of those houses….Reggie. I remember it all now, he has the house just to the left of the big tree. I haven’t talked to Reggie in a very long time.
The big shrubs are in front still, covering most of the front room windows. It looks deceptively narrow, in front but it goes a good way back. All the way in the back there’s a nicely sized yard with a couple of basketball hoops and a concrete court, or at least there was. We used to line up old bottles of Green River along the windowsill and fire at them with bb guns. We had to be careful about aiming the bb guns at each other because they looked like pistols. The cops from the ritzier part of the neighborhood occasionally drove down the alley and they didn’t take any crap from us. So, we fired always at the bottles, always at an an...