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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luxury corner
I’m afraid to leave my little corner of luxury for what feels like a wasteland. I’ve grown familiar with the season of anticipation that settles in after accepting a job, signing a lease—those rituals that mark a kind of finality before the next unknown. That’s when the observing begins. Everything around me is filtered through…
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problem predictor
I found a study that said “maternal relationship instability was a stronger predictor of children’s externalizing problems when family enmeshment was high” and flashed back to my own upbringing and the genesis of my own lifelong problems. My sister has completely gone back on her word and spends money so wildly it’s like Christmas hit…
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the very moment…
The very moment…… The very moment you chose to skip out on our dear Uncles funeral is the very moment you chose yourself. The very moment you chose to kick me out of his house in my worst hour is the very moment you chose manipulation. The very moment you chose to scream at me…
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cheeseburger in hell
My uncle died suddenly in his sleep in April. I drove down to Denver where he lives in desperation knowing my life would change and the family ties I had broken in my meth addled state would now be broken by siblings that I’m fairly sure never liked me. I asked the fire department go…
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foamy love
I tell most people I came to Gillette, Wyoming for family matters but really I am here to get fucked up. I am tired of the constant psychiatric, standardized, and vague tests that I will always complete, pass, and tattoo into my limbic brain. Ain’t got no spending money to etch symbols on my skin…
