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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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