where the interior life meets the open range
the misfit west explores the vast psychological and emotional terrain of the American West, the wind-scoured places, the unspoken histories, the inheritances we carry even when we think we’ve outrun them.
These are personal essays for anyone who has ever felt out of place, out of step, or out of answers and keeps walking toward a version of themselves that feels truer than the myth.
About the Publication
Out here, the landscape works on you. It rearranges what you think you know about loneliness, lineage, addiction, survival, love, and whatever we mean when we say “home.”
In these essays, I investigate the quiet dramas that unfold beneath the surface. g
Grief that breaks open years later, family patterns that echo across generations, the strange physics of staying alive, and the ways a person tries to build a life with both hands full of questions.
This is not the West of postcards or cowboy clichés. It’s the one made of frostbite, memory, estrangement, reclamation, and unexpected beauty. A place where an interior life can finally stretch its legs.
What You’ll Find Here
- Lyrical, place-driven personal essays rooted in Wyoming, Colorado, and the high plains
- Psychological explorations of family systems, trauma, resilience, and the unquiet mind
- Memoir fragments stitched with research, memory, and sharp self-interrogation
- A voice for those who don’t fit the mythic West or any myth at all
Why the misfit west
Because some of us were raised in the shadows of silos, railroads, coal pits, and quiet living room catastrophes and still found ways to become ourselves.
Because belonging is complicated.
Because the West is too. And because writing it down is sometimes the only way to tell the truth.
LATEST POSTS
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the wrongness of it all
I started talking to ChatGPT after hearing a client say how it had helped her. I really needed help with legal stuff. It was usually laying down in my uncle’s room in his house, but in my pink bedspread that I still have. Early morning, like how I do now. I tried to use it…
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two tenths of a percent
It snowed overnight. Almost five, my normal wake up time, and the yard lies white and quiet. Last night the house finches stayed at the feeder past sundown, orange chests puffed against the cold, working the nyjer like a last meal, the seed the bag calls thistle even though it isn’t, and the orange on…
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drop your weapon
A client says she feels empty, and before she gets to the end of the sentence the manual is open in my head. I used to carry the real one into the room and flip to the page with her sitting right there. Now I follow the story closely, sorting what is cultural from what…
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above seven thousand feet
I’m at Pole Mountain, halfway up Middle Aspen trail, and I stop suddenly to wonder how I could smell her funk when she’s hundreds of feet in front of me. Stale crotch, sweat, tents, mold, peanut butter, pine, beer. Showers and deodorant aren’t the biggest concern on the trail and for some reason with these…
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dissatisfaction with billing
Drug court sends everybody to Meridian because Meridian has the contract. White noise machine on the floor outside the door. Bowl of butterscotch on the end table with the wrappers fused together. Dale sits with the door behind him and writes on a legal pad while I talk, and he keeps writing after I stop.I…
