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 yet 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 — 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 windburn, 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.
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LATEST POSTS
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not a fit
The mushrooms are separated by plastic. The white button mushrooms sit sealed and identical, pale under taut film, each one interchangeable with the next. They look like what grocery stores like to sell: clean, standardized, anonymous. I lift the package, feel how light it is, how little resistance there is to it, and put it…
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warm hands
December 9, 2008 sits in my body like a bruise that never finished blooming. It was that hour after sunset when the sky goes the color of a dirty dish towel and the house smells like someone should be cooking, but no one is. Four o’clock. The clock still mattered then. Time still pretended to…
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credentialing catharsis
At 10:59, the door takes two knuckles—not a knock, not a greeting. A reminder with bones. In the hallway, a television laughs at nothing. A child runs the length of the carpet and back, as if the building contains a track. The blanket presses its orange geometry into skin—little squares, shipping stamps, proof of transit.…
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hookups
The camper sat where things went to disappear. Not hidden—just off to the side, behind cottonwoods that never thickened. Wind moved through them like it had permission. It had once been a camper. That was the rumor. He’d stripped it down and rebuilt it without finishing anything. Walls opened into nothing. Wires crossed where shelves…
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porch gospel
The essay arrived like a pressed wildflower—pretty, flat, already dead. Someone forwarded it to me because they were worried about the man inside it. In a town like ours, worry travels by screenshot. Names don’t need to be written for a body to recognize itself in the outline. I opened the link on my phone…
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one in nine
Here’s a number that floats through recovery culture like a quiet curse: Only one in nine people recover from addiction. It gets said softly, like realism. It gets repeated like wisdom. It lands like a verdict. But the number doesn’t mean what people think it means—and the fact that it survives says more about our…
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