This picture is by my older son, who drew our family on his whiteboard.

On a whiteboard, there are drawings of five lanky figures in pink, orange, and purple. The faces wear impassive expressions. The art is by my older son when he was three years old. It's a picture of our family, which actually has four people, not five. I believe the extra figure represents his favorite stuffed animal, though I’m not entirely sure.

I think I’m the pink one on the right.

Life has lots of parts.

Sometimes I write. An essay for Lapham’s Quarterly about searching for happiness in an often-hellish world was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2020. More work can be found at LQ as well as n+1, Harper’s, and Hodinkee. Please resist the urge to Google further youthful literary indiscretions.

Sometimes I release music. My most recent project, Absent City, released an LP called Continue Normal Living in October 2020. This was an inauspicious moment to release music, but there was some favorable reception, including this quotable line:

Absent City’s music seems to exist as a journey, a place where hope ebbs and flows, looking longingly for a future that might never exist, looking rosily at a past that perhaps wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

For the Rabbits

I believe in cooperative models and communities of practice. I collaboratively run Homing Instinct Records, a Bay Area label collective organized for artists to support one another through resource sharing and mutual aid. With anything I do—parenting, working, creating, being a person in the world—I believe that equitable arrangements based on respect and community are worth fighting for.

I work in content design, writing, editorial systems, and verbal identity. I have written, designed, edited, and consulted for products, brands, publications, institutions, and creative studios. A few of these places: Grammarly, Apple, Harper’s Magazine, Penguin Books, Callaway Arts & Entertainment, and the Criterion Collection. Many more projects (some now lost to internet time) haunt the spaces between those listed.

You can continue your Henry journey in several ways.

→ Learn more about my professional history on my LinkedIn profile.

→ Get a sense of my capabilities and services by exploring my work.

→ Request a full portfolio, ask for the password to this site, or just generally get in touch at henry [dot] freedland [at] gmail [dot] com.