My whole life I’ve loved telling stories. The world is fucking strange, my friend. It makes it a trip to write about, even if it didn’t happen just so. Growing up I always wanted to somehow marry my writing to skateboarding, but it usually felt dorky and unnatural. Big Brother was running stories that were infused with enough imagination to border on fiction. That gave me a few ideas. Then the Gonz started writing stories for Thrasher. It would be a story and a drawing in every issue for a year or so I think. I’d dig it out of the mailbox every month and flash through to find the gem. Those stories helped make me feel less awkward for hoping to find a place for written words in the culture of skateboarding.

25 or so years later a few segments of my childhood dreams had found dimension. I was living in San Francisco, and shirt-folding at what had become the dearest to my heart skate mag, Lowcard. My boss, Rob always took note when I’d conveniently place my zines of short stories (written under the moniker Willits E. Major) in places around the warehouse where reading is…encouraged. One day he asked if I’d be down to write a story for the mag.

A story? Just a story? About skating?

I mean, yeah, write whatever. Just include a skate photo and we’ll work it out.

He said he was trying to have something different for people to read in the mag rather than the same old shit every issue. That was 12 years ago and I’ve had a story in every issue since.

I wasn’t able to re-surface all of the stories I’ve written for Lowcard (my typewriter didn’t come with an external hard drive), but here is a collection that I hope you enjoy as much as I’ve loved writing every one of them.

I also have had the honor of writing for the online periodical Defiant Scribe, and have included some of those stories here to give readers a different breath of my voice. Partly because as proud as I am of what I’ve written for Lowcard, the canvas of a half page of prose contains a different stroke than that of something longer.

I appreciate you spending your time with these stories. And know that I have a whole shitload more to tell…

-Sean M. Sanford

*From A Manbaby’s Requiem 2019