Stan Lake, a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina, joins us to talk about his debut poetry collection, A Toad In A Glass Jar. His work appears in The War Horse, Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, and Lethal Minds Journal; he also writes a weekly Substack. See more at www.stanlakecreates.com.We trace a childhood of creeks and BB guns to a 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom—and the dissonant return from convoys to college classrooms. Stan reflects on faith and doubt, ministry and punk rock’s DIY ethos, and the pressure to turn authentic experience into “content.”He walks us through shaping a “poetic memoir” around the toad’s life cycle and the rigorous editing that sharpened it at Dead Reckoning Collective. His advice to new writers: stop aspiring, start doing.