Phil Bearce is a writer, songwriter, and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose work is rooted in memory, family, aging, loss, humor, and the strange persistence of ordinary moments.

For decades, he has written songs, poetry, essays, memoir, stories, and observations drawn from a life spent paying attention. His writing tends to favor the small details: an empty chair, a familiar road, an old photograph, a joke that arrives a little late, the people who shaped us, and the quiet realization that time has been moving while we were busy doing something else.

Although much of his writing began as lyrics, Bearce increasingly lets some pieces escape the gravity of melody and stand on their own as poetry and prose. His voice is conversational, reflective, occasionally irreverent, and interested less in explaining life than in noticing what it leaves behind.

He continues to write because, after all these years, there still seems to be something worth saying.