If Miles Zaud isn't reporting and writing a story in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe, odds aren't half bad he's writing or playing music in a style dear to you. Jazz, folk, gospel, classical, musical theater - they're all in his repertoire.
Maybe he's seated at a concert grand, maybe he's stomping his foot, fiddle and bow in motion. Maybe he's scoring cues for a film.
Whatever the endeavor, Zaud is absorbed, a young man immersed in the timelessness of a creative flow state.
The Saybrook senior grew up in Topanga, California, just north of Santa Monica, playing piano, surfing, and undertaking homeschool adventures, including travel to "primitive skills gatherings" around the American West. These are back-to-the-land festivals in which participants, hundreds strong, aim to live in tune with the ways of early humans: Starting fires with sticks, handcrafting atlatls (javelins) and traps for procuring food, sleeping under the stars.
Participants may bring tools and tents, Zaud said, "but most people really don't - the point is to do it yourself."
The gatherings eventually became the subject of his Yale senior project, a 20,000-word work of gonzo non-fiction that he ranks high among his collegiate achievements, along with a series of original musical scores recently performed on campus under the title "Curious Opus."
It was last September that Zaud set out for a skills gathering in Rexburg, Idaho, aiming to cast a reporter's gimlet eye on a culture he'd known since childhood. As sometimes happens, he met a girl, a wildland firefighter, and fell in love.
"The gathering itself took some really unexpected turns," he said.
The resulting work of creative non-fiction, titled "Kindling Point" and written mostly in his top-floor Saybrook College suite, turned out to his satisfaction, which for him is saying a lot. "I think I'm somewhat of a perfectionist," he allowed.
At first, Zaud wasn't sure whether he'd try to publish the piece. "I think the magic will be somewhat lost if, you know, [a primitive skill gathering] was essentially a Burning Man thing," he said. But he believes he's managed a depiction that's at once honest, personal, and sympathetic, and is now open to sharing his work, "if I can find somebody to publish it."
Naturally self-deprecating, Zaud - a 2025 winner of W.W. Norton & Co.'s annual Norton Writer's Prize, for a piece about a Connecticut cheesemaker - credits his Yale English department thesis adviser, the writer Anne Fadiman, as his inspiration for majoring in English and as an ideal guide in the art of ambitious non-fiction. Week after week, he said, they spent hours one on one, discussing and scouring his drafts.
"She really has been one of the best things about Yale," he said. "…Whatever merit I have as a writer is due to her."
Zaud's literary adventures will continue. Before the month is out, he'll join venerable Harper's Magazine as part of a quartet of summer interns. He plans to live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with fellow Yalies.
He's keenly aware that his new home contrasts fundamentally with the waves of Topanga and the California fiddle camps where he's often played and taught, in Big Sur and Shasta. Still, New York remains fertile literary ground, and, importantly for Zaud, who spent his high school years at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, a lively place to make music - perhaps with his younger brother, Logan, a double bass student at Juilliard.
At Yale, the Yale Jazz Ensemble and the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra performed his works. Earlier this month, Logan came to New Haven for a Sudler Hall performance of eight of Miles' original compositions - the "Curious Opus" - not merely to listen, but, as you'd imagine, as part of the 15-strong ensemble of talented intimates Miles assembled to translate his pieces into sound and feeling.
"It was really nice to have that, to be joined by so many people," Miles said. "… I felt so comfortable playing. I just - I know them all so well."
