Greetings from 1858

Hello there, good people.

Sorry for being so scarce around these parts. I’ve been busy on the farm with all manner of affairs and repairs. One-hundred-and-ninety-seven acres do not take care of themselves. I imagine it will get easier when they invent machines to help out with the milking and mowing but for now, it’s just me and the Mrs. and our eleventy-nine kids tending the herd and putting up stores for winter.

<shakes head vigorously as if to come out of a daydream>

Hi, so, I’ve been a bit lost in the distant past lately. The 1700s and 1800s mostly. Some 1600s. An occasional stop 15,000 years B.C.. I’ve been all swept up in this history thing I’m working on. It’s a long story. Or set of stories, really. I’m going to share a couple of them.

Before jumping into the first of them, I thought I should offer 1) an apology for having been scarce here; and 2) an introduction to my pending posts and how they came about.

Starting with the apology, I’m sorry for the slowdown in publishing these past couple months. These last two weeks, I have been completely swept up in some historic research which I will explain in a minute. The two months prior, I was wrestling with a giant hairball of obstacles and impediments. Maybe I’ll go into it more at some point but for now, I’d really rather not. It’s just so tedious.

Instead, suffice it to say: writing is hard. No one tells you the specific ‘how’ it is hard or how it will be hard next. You just have to experience it yourself and then try to work your way through it all on your lonesome certain that it just you until you are so frustrated, you just vomit it all up in some forum with other writers… who then instantly nod along with a commiserating slight chuckle because they know exactly what you mean from having been there.

There are just things that get in the way and most of them are just your own bullshit. They are mostly just you finding new ways to get in your own way... which then leaves you trying to self-diagnose and self-treat maladies new to you. The methods that work for you are hard to figure out and hard to implement - and harder still to turn into habits. There is no shortcut. You just have to slog away at clearing your own logjams. I’m making some progress there. I’m getting there. We are at the start of my second year here. I would like to hope I will look back on it next December proud of how far away I am from the struggles of these last few painful months.

While this will likely do little for you, for what its worth, just know that I am never ‘not writing’. I am never blowing off my sole occupation of being a writer. I’m never not thinking about what I’m writing or supposed to be or going to next. Other than when I am with my son, I am never off-duty. I never feel off-duty.

Even when you aren’t seeing dishes coming out of the kitchen, I’m still sweating profusely next to the stove. i wish effort and output truly went hand in hand. Unfortunately, they don’t. I’m sorry they’ve been so far apart lately. That is not a phenomenon I wish to see continue or expect will. Thank you for bearing with me as I work through it. I appreciate you good people. More than you know.

And now with all of that said, let’s pivot to talking about SOME NEW WRITING, shall we?

Oh my god, I am excited, terrified, and kind of dizzied by this thing that I have been working on. It is a total departure for me. Had you told me a few weeks ago how I was going to spend my next few weeks, I would have laughed at how absurdly ludicrous it sounded…

“You’re going to head off to a diner, make one little stop on the way, and then end up a two weeks later tumbling down an abandoned gravel quarry wall with your pockets full of rusty old nails and rock samples…”

Uh, wut. Why would I possibly do that.

“…because you had a little time left after the old graveyard and still had some gaps to fill in between the ice age, Tchaikovsky, and when Mrs. Obediah Pellet lived over by the creamery.”

Oh, of course.

I dunno, man. It all just happened. One minute I was doing a little light trespassing out of curiosity. The next, I was bounding into a historian’s office exclaiming “IT WAS BIG ARCH! I KNEW IT! That map you sent confirmed it!”

“That map you sent me…”

A map from 1850. Which a historian sent me. I know historians now. They send me things. History things. I then bound into their workplaces all excited about them.

A few weeks ago, I would have laughed at the very idea, but then I would have probably remembered my ADHD and thought “Ok, well, I don’t see the whole history angle but… it does kinda sound like me to be honest… except for maybe the bounding. I’m not really a bounder.”

I bound now.

Anywaaaay… enough of all this.

Let me just introduce you to the rabbit hole I fell down…

It began with me wanting to know the history of a specific building and then a specific family and then a specific place. A town. A small one. An idiosyncratic little hamlet. A place that on the surface makes no sense at all… but which actually makes complete sense if you take the time to understand it and how it came to be. A place that was ‘first’ in many ways but was an anachronism even then.

Y’all… you can hear in my voice that I’m kind of in love with this little place, can’t you I am. I am in love with its people and past. I am fascinated by its very specific uniqueness and the very specific reasons for it. To me, it makes for stories which are interesting as standalones but add up to more when taken together.

Sometimes the past better explains the present than even the present can. In looking at the distant past, there is an inherent noise-reduction. A stripping down, a stripping away. A paring to the core of things, of people, of life and community and how things change and how they never do. Not everything is a metaphor, an allegory, a mirror, or looking glass. Some things, are all of them… if you look long, look close, look deep. If you tumble down a whispering well to hear what a place has to say.

I like this place. I like its stories. They speak to me.

I honestly have no idea what I will have written of them by a few weeks from now. Trying to plan that out in advance would only delay me publishing anything at all. It would push off posting a first piece until I had my arms around the sequence right up until the last. I don’t want that. So, at risk of possibly wishing later that I had taken a different approach, I’m going to just share a couple stories from deep down the rabbit hole… and take it from there.

The stories are non-fiction-ish* with a significant caveat:

A ton of shit just gets lost to history and no amount of research can ever dig it back up. Records are lost, witnesses die, their stories are forgotten.  What we are left with is a patchwork of fragments and clues from which to make inferences and form hypotheses. We can fill in the missing tiles in the mosaic to complete the stories but there is some speculation involved.

Such is the case with these pending stories of mine. They come with an implied disclaimer:

*Depictions are based on actual historic evidence as completely and as accurately as possible. However, given the limitations in source material, narrative and characterizations include ample informed speculation. The result is narrative storytelling not historical documentary.”

…which is all to say:

I ain’t making anything up just from imagination. I’m filling in blanks where they exist with my best, informed speculation at what would have been the answers. I happen to want that speculation to be correct… which is part of what has led me soooo far down the rabbit hole. This will all make more sense after you read a couple issues…

In the meantime, suspend a little disbelief and just ride along for a couple issues if you will… and then let’s talk about what we think about the whole thing.

The first issue will be in your inboxes by tomorrow.

It is about a wild little small-town drama I came across accidentally via only a brief, vague reference in a 150-year-old book I was poring over for an entirely different reason. I’ve spent the past week since tromping around cemeteries and local libraries to piece it together. To my knowledge, it is a story that has never been fully told. Mine will be the first telling. Your reading will be the first it is heard.

Its protagonist is a man named Archibald.

I can’t wait for you to meet him.

Stay tuned for his story…

I think you’ll enjoy it. It is just fun as shit.

“ARCHIBALD, WAKE UP! WE HAVE COMPANY COMING.”