On Where I’m From

Thought I’d share something a little different today, even if it borders on a journal entry. Take it for what it’s worth.

If you can’t tell, I love to write. There’s nothing I’d rather do than hang out with my family and write. And as I’ve given myself more seriously to this task, I’ve found myself thinking more about the things that have shaped me. Since people often ask about my influences, I thought: why not share them?

This list isn’t comprehensive, just an overview. And I’m staying away from theological influences for now. That’s probably better saved for a separate post. These are mostly cultural and geographical, the kind of things that settle into your bones without you noticing.

Most of my life has been lived along a line that stretches from Roanoke, Virginia to Goodland, Kansas. I only lived in Goodland for several months and Roanoke for one year. In Goodland, we stayed in a house with cheap rent on the condition that my dad would reframe and drywall parts of the upstairs. The storms out there were something else. We spent a lot of nights in a grimy, unfinished basement riding out tornado sirens.

Roanoke was a whole different kind of eerie. We lived in this massive house that had once been a plantation, complete with spooky old slave quarters in the basement. Many of the bedrooms were locked. Curiosity got the best of us, so we climbed onto the roof to peek into the upper windows. Inside were rooms full of antique furniture, all covered in white sheets like something out of a ghost story.

But the bulk of my life was spent in small-town southern Indiana: Osgood, Greensburg, Sunman, and Lawrenceburg. We did a short stint in Bloomington too, a college town with its own pace and feel.

I’m a Midwesterner. And if you dial it down further, I’m a Hoosier. I feel at home on dusty roads lined with cornfields or thick forests. I like snowy Januarys and heavy summer thunderstorms. I love county fairs with tilt-a-whirls, deep-fried oddities, and every 4-H animal imaginable.

Friday nights in the fall are for football. If you’re close enough to town, you can hear the announcer over the speakers and see the glow of the stadium lights.

I’m especially drawn to the quarries of southern Indiana. They’ve always fascinated me. The rock that built skyscrapers like the Empire State Building was pulled from the ground here, leaving behind massive canyons filled with clear, still water. Rusted cranes and old equipment sit abandoned on their edges. Me, my brothers, and our friends used to explore them. You could see 40 feet into the water, and I used to imagine something staring back up at me.

Living out in the Indiana countryside will make you fall in love with the night. No streetlights, just a black sky pricked with more stars than you could ever count. My grandpa and I used to sit on the front porch and watch the sky, counting planes as they passed.

Creeks and ponds were our summer playgrounds. The ponds were full of bass, catfish, and bluegill. The creeks gave us crawdads, salamanders, and the occasional copperhead if you weren’t careful. I spent many lazy afternoons with my grandma, fishing by Ponder Lake with Reds baseball on the radio. 1990 was a great year.

In my mind, the ideal place, and maybe it’s just because it’s where I grew up, has gardens and livestock, old barns, morning doves, tree frogs, and a barbed-wire fence holding in a small herd of cattle.

There are many amazing places in this world. The swamps of the South, the mountains of the North, beaches, deserts, and canyons that never seem to end. But nothing beats home.

The Midwest is home.
She is probably my greatest influence.

On Literary Influences

It probably makes sense, given how deeply I’m shaped by old, small Midwestern living, that my literary influences lean in that direction too.

Stephen King, poets like Robert Frost, and the Southern Gothic tradition, especially Flannery O’Connor, loom large. My mom is a big fantasy reader, so I grew up reading those books too. I’m well-acquainted with all the big names. But if I’m honest, I don’t think I ever would’ve picked those on my own. They were her books more than mine.

King stuck with me, though, and that’s partly because of her influence, but mostly because his stories are very American. They’re set in real places with deep roots, but those places are full of secrets. Things are always falling apart just under the surface. His characters have to find a way through the shadows and the half-truths.

He’s often thought of as a horror writer, but I think King is really a Southern Gothic writer for New England. Only his ghosts and monsters are more literal. The broken-down towns, the forgotten corners, the creeping dread and moral ambiguity, it’s all there. He just puts fangs on it.

The decade-worn settings of Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and O’Connor aren’t all that different in spirit from King’s Castle Rock or Derry. Their monsters just look different. In Southern Gothic, the real terror is man himself—his madness, his pride, his contradictions. Think of A Rose for Emily, or O’Connor’s traveling Bible salesman. These stories take place in a once-great South that’s unraveling, exposing hypocrisy and the macabre under the surface.

That kind of storytelling resonates deeply with me, especially having grown up moving from town to town, living in houses and apartments of questionable quality. There’s something about peeling wallpaper, odd neighbors, and places where history never quite left that gets under your skin and stays there.

On the Music That Shaped Me

Like all small children, the music of my earliest days was the music of my parents.

My dad’s music of choice was Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues. To this day, I know all their songs word for word. That was the soundtrack of car rides, weekends at home, and quiet evenings. My mom was more into Billy Joel and, for reasons I still find oddly endearing, she had a strange fascination with Rick Wakeman’s instrumental albums. I remember one in particular: Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s this sprawling, keyboard-driven epic that feels like a fever dream. But that was her music.

The bands I fell in love with were Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi, Nirvana, and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. I’ve always had a soft spot for American rock, especially the kind that flirts with Americana. Something about gritty vocals, echoing guitars, and stories that feel pulled from small-town diners or dusty highways.

There’s one big exception to that Americana streak, though. I’ve always been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. And if I had to add a more recent name to the list, it would be Beck. I love the alt-country stuff he’s done on albums like Sea Change, Mutations, and Morning Phase. Those records sound like a dream after a long drive through cornfields at dusk.

My wife and I, along with a couple friends, are actually going to see him in just a few weeks. Can’t wait.

On Film and Television

Before the death of my daughter, I was definitely a cinephile. I loved film. From the time I was 15 until about 31, there were very few months when I didn’t see one or two movies in the theater, sometimes one every week. I could list dozens of movies that influenced me in some way.

But after her death, I found myself unable to handle the emotional weight of movies. The way images are paired with sweeping music to manipulate emotion—it was too much. Too precise. Too targeted. It felt like someone trying to reach into my chest and press a bruise that never healed.

Still, the influence remains. So rather than listing every film I’ve ever loved, I’ll stick to the ones that stayed with me.

My dad loved westerns, and so do I. I love John Wayne, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. There’s something about that rough and rugged individualism that speaks to me. Yes, it can be taken too far. But there’s a certain nobility in the man who’s willing to go it alone, to face down impossible odds because it’s the right thing to do. That kind of story has always drawn me in.

Funny enough, a lot of the other films I love follow the same structure: Field of Dreams, Moneyball, even Good Will Hunting in a sense. The outsider. The maverick. The man who bucks the system and pulls off the impossible. If you grew up poor, moving from place to place, I suppose that kind of story becomes your fantasy.

As for television, I have warm memories of watching Northern Exposure with my mom. It’s quirky and philosophical and full of small-town charm. With my dad, it was The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. That recurring theme of the macabre sneaks in again—odd tales, moral twists, dark corners.

We don’t really watch much TV anymore. Probably the last show we really got into together was Foyle’s War. It’s very British, very understated. But the first couple seasons are wonderful—quiet, moral, and full of that wartime gravity that stays with you.

On Grief, Localism, and Writing Through the Fog

It took me years to realize this, but death and tragedy have shaped the way I approach almost everything.

One reason joy is such a central theme in what I teach is because I’m constantly fighting off the spirit of melancholy. It’s always there, waiting. One of the great blessings of my wife is that she can see it coming on in me before I do. She’ll give me a quiet warning, just enough to pull me back.

Loss was always close. My mom lost her father when she was just 11, so I grew up with the idea that a parent could be taken from you in an instant. Both of my grandmothers died young, within a couple weeks of each other, in their early 60s.

A friend I worked with as a busser was killed in a motorcycle crash—just made a bad turn on a CBR. Strange enough, another friend with the same name died later that year. I remember getting the call from a mutual friend. She was crying, telling me he had died. I hung up the phone so I could call her and tell her, not realizing she was the one who had just told me. That all happened before I was 17.

Then my cousin Gregg died as a teenager. I’d lived with him one summer. It was a great summer.

My uncle Roberto, who was more like a big brother to me, died at 32. I had talked to him not long before, tried to work up the courage to preach the gospel to him. But I didn’t.

And then, of course, there’s my little girl. My younger brother. My mother.

Given enough time, death becomes an influence in every life. It shapes how we see, how we move, how we hold joy.

I know this is a heavy note to end on. And truthfully, I don’t always know where these reflections are going. It’s become my practice to wake up each morning and write something like this with little planning. I just get up and write. Sometimes it’s a mess. But if you want to be a writer, you have to write, even when the fog is thick.

Looking back on all these influences—people, places, sorrows, songs—it’s no wonder I love localism.

I’m a child of nomads. I’ve lived in houses and apartments and borrowed bedrooms all across the Midwest. What I want now is a home. A place I know. A place where I know the smells, the sounds, the feel of each season. A place of mystery to be explored, whether it’s Marengo Cave, a broken-down shack in the woods, or the Clermont County Fair.

Home is more than your house. It’s all the houses. It’s the people who know what you know, who love what you love. That kind of togetherness gets you through the dark times. Because when one part of your life falls apart, the rest can hold steady.