I’ve always believed the stories we carry shape the lives we live. The stories you share shape the lives around you. My work as an author has been about that very truth—the way a single line, a single book, can tilt a life.

The Open Sidewalk Project grew from that conviction. Too often, books sit still. Their pages close. Their stories go quiet. But stories aren’t meant to gather dust. They’re meant to gather people. They live when they’re passed forward, when they travel into the hands of someone who didn’t expect them, at a moment they might need them most.

The Open Sidewalk Project began with a book I first read to my children: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. His crooked lines broke apart the safe rhythms they were used to, tumbling us all into absurdity, wonder, and questions that clung long after the book was closed.

What I didn’t expect was how much it would echo back to me. Sidewalks are supposed to be safe, predictable paths. But Silverstein pointed toward the edge—where maps fade, certainty slips, and imagination takes over. That edge is where stories matter most.

That book was supposed to entertain my kids. Instead, it reframed something for me: sidewalks are the life we inherit. The space beyond them is the life we choose.

And that, I think, is where so many of us get stuck. We confuse safety with meaning. We tell ourselves that staying between the lines is the point. But the stories that linger—the ones that take root in our children, our friends, our own late-night reflections—are almost always born at the edge, where something ended and we had to improvise the next step.

The older I get, the more I’ve come to believe that this is what art is really for. Not to pave over life with something smoother. Not to offer escape routes that keep us comfortable. But to hand us back to ourselves when the sidewalk runs out. To remind us that endings are beginnings in disguise, and that the world asks less for compliance than for curiosity.

The Open Sidewalk Project exists to give those stories a chance to travel. To step off the curb,
into the unknown, and find new hands to carry them forward. Each reflection, each photo, each
note becomes part of a living archive—proof that stories don’t just move, they connect.

Together they mark the journey of books that are still alive. They move us beyond the predictable into connection, curiosity, and moments that can change a day—or a life.

And maybe that’s the point of carrying stories at all: to name what can’t be contained in sidewalks. To give voice to what doesn’t fit neatly between painted lines. To leave behind a signal that others can follow when their own path falls apart.

That’s why this movement lives by a simple rhythm:

Discover. Reflect. Set Free. Mark the Moment.

The sidewalk doesn’t end because the builders ran out of cement. It ends because imagination begins where certainty stops. Stories don’t travel alone. They live because someone dares to set them free, to let them wander into the hands of a stranger at just the right moment.

The book on your shelf—the one still echoing from the last time you read it—I don’t know who needs to read it today. But somebody will, someday. Have the courage to carry it forward. A release is momentum. Momentum is memory—and every release is proof the story lives.

When the sidewalk ends, the story begins.