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Who Do You Think You Are?

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by Dr. Chad Prevost

386 episodes

Updated Daily

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Podcast Overview

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. <a href="https://chadprevost.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">chadprevost.substack.com</a>

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Publishing Since

1/13/2020

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Recent Episodes

July 16, 2026

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 <a href="https://chadprevost.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">chadprevost.substack.com</a>

July 13, 2026

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 <a href="https://chadprevost.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">chadprevost.substack.com</a>

July 10, 2026

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 <a href="https://chadprevost.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">chadprevost.substack.com</a>

386 total episodes available with 1 transcripts

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What is Who Do You Think You Are??: 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. <a href="https://chadprevost.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">chadprevost.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

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