Hi, I’m James
I tell stories that make ordinary life feel extraordinary.
The debut release from James Burge.
The Shape Of Ordinary
From writer and storyteller James Burge comes The Shape of Ordinary, a debut book that explores what it means to find joy and meaning in daily life. Thoughtful and poetic, it’s a captivating new book release for readers who love reflective stories and timeless writing.
Buy Your Copy Now
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35 Reasons 35 is The Youngest Old Age
The common refrain is that 40 is the new 30, and 30 is the new 20. If that’s the case, where does 35 fit? It sits in a strange, middle space, a demographic crossroads where the boundless energy of youth is finally, tangibly bumping up against the irreversible realities of time. At 35, you still…
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Injecting Meaning Is an Art of Its Own
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the ways we assign meaning to things.How two people can look at the same object and walk away with completely different emotions and experiences. Sometimes a book is just a few pieces of paper bound together.There’s nothing inherently magical about ink pressed into lines.And yet we sit with certain…
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The Shape of Words
On The Way Words Look I’ve been thinking about this lately, how the way words look can say just as much as the words themselves. Sometimes I’ll write a sentence, stare at it, and realize it doesn’t feel right. Not because of what it says, but because of how it looks on the page. The…
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Writing the Shape of Ordinary
A few years ago, I had this idea while watching Shutter Island, a psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese. The film, adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name (which is still on my must-read list), follows a U.S. Marshal who travels to a psychiatric facility on Shutter Island to…
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From “Back in Time” to The Shape of Ordinary: My Writing Journey
Writing has always been my way of understanding the world, a form of expression that’s equal parts creative and cathartic. My story as a writer began in 2000, in Mrs. Pilant’s fifth-grade class, when I wrote a short story called Back in Time and somehow won our Young Writers Competition. It was a wild story…