About
this project

In the summer of 2014, shortly after my 39th birthday, my wife of seventeen years and I decided to separate. I found myself going on our annual family vacation to the North Shore of Lake Superior, in Minnesota, without her—that year it was just me and my kids, who were nine and seven that summer. I was heartbroken, terrified, broke, and angry. I couldn’t sleep. At night, I wrote in a journal, documenting my two weeks alone with the kids, who didn’t yet know about the pending divorce. During the day, I tried to remain optimistic and upbeat and fun. At night, I wrote down everything I was feeling. It felt essential to document this, I realize now, because at the time I was not sure I would survive.

I did.

In 2016, the manuscript I wrote during those two weeks won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for creative nonfiction. Buoyed by this win, I began to shape the pages into a book form. But the resulting book, a fierce and fragmented 200 pages of emotionally explosive prose, felt too angry, too tidy, and too eager to impose narrative on what really was a chaotic series of events in my life and in the world. They invaded privacies I didn’t wish to invade.

By then, I was married again, to a writer, and together we began working on screenplays and television pilots. We made a show and I began to commute between LA and Iowa, and, by the end of 2019, that marriage was in trouble. I once again began to keep a journal about the collapse of a marriage, documenting a series of secrets and losses and chaos that, once again, felt shameful and strange and unsuited to the book form. I shelved it, and put the feelings I was having, the feelings of losing myself in a relationship, the feeling of living a double life as a divorced dad, into a television pilot called The Off Weeks.

The nonfiction pages I scrapped and the marriage floundered and then finally died. I lost friends. I made enemies. I moved back to Iowa City full time. I started again. Again.

Also, during this time, I taught. A lot. I needed the money. And so I delivered a dozen one-hour craft lectures at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, amassing over 300 pages of prose that ruminated on the duties, challenges, and practical concerns writers face in our current moment. The lectures closed each ten-day winter residency with a combination of practical advice and spiritual direction that students seemed to appreciate, but that also felt very specific to that particular program. Designed to be read aloud, the lectures didn’t quite work as a book of essays.

During the semesters that followed those residencies, I also wrote over 2,000 pages in the form of letters to my students in that program, critiquing their work and helping them navigate the writing life. This was probably some of my very best writing ever. When I tried to distill those letters into a book form, the result was a manuscript that, once again, tried to traffic in absolutes, rather than capturing what I feel is the mystical mystery of the writing life, and once again, to publish those letters would have invaded privacies that I, ethically, as a teacher, could not invade.

All the while, as I moved through these often impossibly hard hurdles of midlife, the world endured horror upon horror. Donald Trump, COVID, multiple wars, genocides, terror attacks, mass shootings, and horrific natural disasters—fires, floods, and storms, many of them taking place in countries and landscapes I know well and love—Ukraine (where my mother is from), Asheville, Los Angeles. I joined Al-anon and Co-Dependents Anonymous and worked the steps. I went into intensive therapy. I talked a lot about things I didn’t want to talk about. I tried to avoid the news. I tried to become a better person, failing much of the time, but writing all of the time.

In short, I wrote three scrapped books in the past decade. Sections of these attempted memoirs and craft essays were published in journals and magazines, but ultimately, none of these came out in finished book form. None of them captured what I wanted to capture about my own experiences. And since fatherhood has been at the center of my adult life, I couldn’t write an honest book without writing about my own children, something I hesitate to do now that they are adults, who will tell their own stories about these years, if and when they want to do so.

These scrapped memoirs also revealed a version of me that seemed not to be a real version of myself, but a curated one, incredibly mindful of audience and public reception and other people’s feelings in a way I don’t think good art can be.

I also found that my life was revising itself—monumental change upon monumental change—faster than I could revise the manuscripts I was trying to write. Each time I thought I had a handle on the story, the story would shift, or, more accurately, my life would shift and/or the world would shift and the narrative would crumble. Shards. Ashes. Dross. I would get very sad writing these books while my own life was getting happier.

When I met someone new and started a new relationship, I found I also no longer felt like spending my writing time rehashing what felt like a particularly dark and harrowing period of my life. Nonfiction—at least the structure of a linear memoir, didn’t seem like the right way forward. And yet, it had been a decade since my last book.

So I returned to these three failed manuscripts again, to see what could be salvaged.

I gathered nearly one thousand pages of the past decade’s abandoned memoirs, published essays, delivered lectures, sent letters, and surreal autobiographical sketches. I pasted them into one document—thousands of pages—and then used a program that helped me shuffle the sentences into random order. I began to cut down the sentences, keeping only the ones that sparked joy or seemed to capture the essence of something I had experienced or learned or felt in the past ten years. I kept some very painful sentences, while deleting some very painful stories.

I added no new language to the manuscript, though on occasion I did change a pronoun to a proper name for clarity. I also fictionalized some of the names in the manuscript out of respect for the privacy of the people I write about.

The sentences that remain are found on this website in random order. Every reader of this project will experience it in a different way. My hope is that this project captures the chaos and energy of my forties in a way none of my other creative attempts have been able to manage. I hope they also capture some of the fragmented, unpredictable anxiety that comes with navigating midlife in precarious, demented times. (I was happy to hire a graphic/web designer in Kyiv, Ukraine to help me with this project.)

I wanted the project to feel like you stumbled into my subconscious, but it feels like an abandoned Cold War government office with one running computer randomly flashing sentences on a screen.

And for you, the reader of this project, if you’re an artist trying to make work to stay sane, to stay afloat, to stay alive, I hope you find a shard, a fragment, and phrase that speaks directly to your condition. As I said in one of my lectures, the mission of the writer is to discover what particular brand of suffering you were born to soothe.

I tried to do that here. I hope it helps. Or at least, amuses you if it does not soothe.

I finished this project at that same cabin, working early in the mornings. My two kids, no longer kids, were with me. We had a grand time. Kayaks, campfires, laughter, and remembering both the good and the bad of our last decade.

I felt whole and ready to share the pieces that got me here. I am grateful to have lived so much life in the last decade, even though it was often very hard. Whose life isn’t?