My name is Brian, though my family knows me as Cabezón (“Big Head”), the latest in a long line of ginormous domes stretching back to the Old Country and the Old World.
The size of my most prodigious feature inspired my first published collection of stories, Big Head on the Block, in October 2023. Nearly all the stories in that book originated here on Substack, where each week I share reflections and rambles from the basement of my mind—to take a phrase from E.B White. My stories generally focus on the themes of growing up, failing to grow up, being a failure as a grown-up, and traveling back to the time before I was a failure and a grown-up.
It’s exhilarating stuff.
I’ve written since at least third grade. That was the year I took a notebook and began scribbling lyrics for refashioned Spice Girls songs that I planned to perform with the two other boys in my Catholic school class. Justin and Dong-Hyun weren’t interested in joining the Spice Boys, but I kept scribbling anyway.
Most of my writing, for years, was bad. Very bad. In notebooks, I jotted down poetry and song lyrics inspired by Blink-182 (i.e., immature) and System of a Down (i.e., depressing). After the internet crept into every American household in the early 2000s, my thoughts spilled out in blogs hosted on LiveJournal, DeadJournal, Blurty, and Myspace. My freshman year at William Paterson University, I took my Facebook rambles about politics and religion and started a Blogspot page described to visitors as a place of “contemplations for anomalous minds.”
Like many millennials who graduated from college during The Great Recession, I had few job prospects. So, instead of doing the reasonable thing and attending grad school for a degree as useless as the one I’d just earned in Latin American studies, I moved a half day’s drive from my hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, to experience America outside the immigrant-dense, concrete jungles of the Northeast. The only job offers I got when I showed up in Knoxville, Tennessee, were at a call center and a local bank. I took the bank job and spent three years as a bill collector asking poor folks in trailer parks across America to send Jim Clayton money for less than what I’d currently make working at Chick-fil-A.
But my day job didn’t matter much to me. I came alive at night when I took the bad songs I wrote during my lunch break and sang them while strumming a guitar and a harmonica in coffee shops up and down East Tennessee. When I got off a call quickly, I kept the receiver at my ear, pretending I was still hassling a customer for money. Instead, I found websites not blocked by firewalls to stream Champions League games and drafted soccer stories for Bleacher Report whenever my boss wasn’t looking over my shoulder. I taught myself basic WordPress. During that time, I made this and this, which got me into grad school for journalism. I interned at ESPN during the World Cup summer of 2014 and wrote about sports for local newspapers and a national college soccer blog. In 2015, I signed a contract with the U.S. Department of State and spent three years writing profiles and doing digital marketing for a mentorship program for female and disabled athletes from around the world.
In the time I’ve written stories for pay, I’ve profiled American cage fighters, immigrant soccer players, Oscar-nominated filmmakers, front-line healthcare workers, and hundreds of sports, business, nonprofit, and higher education leaders. In 2017, I was invited back to the University of Tennessee to teach writing to journalism and public relations students. And I’ve spoken about the craft at national conferences, storytelling roundtables, and workshops for high school students.
I don’t think it’s possible for me to be happy if I’m not scribbling words on paper or in Google Docs. In 2021, I began the process of separating the work I do to feed my family and the work I do that requires no paycheck or outside attention for motivation (I also started a soccer podcast with a friend).
The stories you read here are about old soccer heroes, used bookstores, and family. Occasionally, I break down my published work, doing my best to show how you can replicate it. This Substack is a space, I hope, for a community of ordinary and unusual, normal and non-conforming people to read, learn, and engage with each other. So, thanks for signing up for the journey. I’m excited to see where this takes us.
A selection of my recent and favorite published work:
10/11/24 “Free to Think,” Feature on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy housed at tiny UT Martin and run by a curious tinkerer named Jim Fieser, Our Tennessee
10/13/23, “Placemaking,” Feature on architecture professor Rana Abudayyeh’s work re-envisioning refugee camps in her native Jordan, Our Tennessee
4/11/23 “Whiskey and Trees,” Feature on the relationship between Jack Daniel’s Distillery and UT’s Tree Improvement Program, Our Tennessee
6/9/22 “Galactic Gal,” Profile of aerospace engineer and social media influencer Camille Bergin, Torchbearer Magazine
6/2/22 “Fashion and Function,” Profile of former Tennessee swimmer and adaptive fashion designer Mary Cayten Brakefield, Torchbearer Magazine
10/19/21 “The Sweet Life," Profile of Cruze Farm Dairy owners Colleen Cruze and Manjit Bhatti, Torchbearer Magazine
10/13/21 "Portraits of Resilience: Knoxville's Latino Entrepreneurs," Knoxville Entrepreneurship Center
6/8/21 "Deeply Rooted," Profile of Oscar-nominated West Virginian filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, Torchbearer Magazine
11/9/20 "Alumna Combines Love for Medicine and Spanish to Serve Others," UT News
9/28/20 "Inheriting a Tradition: Embracing My Dad's Love of the Outdoors," Latino Outdoors
6/24/20 "Into the Light," Profile of NCAA champion swimmer Maddy Banic, Torchbearer Magazine
9/20/19 "A Catalyst for Hope," Feature on the work of global sportswomen associated with UT's Center for Sport, Peace, and Society, Our Tennessee Magazine
11/17/17 "Megha Vora Fights so Girls and Women in India can Live Fearlessly," ESPN
8/1/17 "Sports Diplomacy Touches the World," Ability Magazine
12/15/16 "Paola Kuri Advocates for Soccer without Gender," ESPN
3/9/16 "At Boxing Weekend, Fraternities Battle (And Party) for More Than Just Bragging Rights," The Knoxville Mercury
