I'm Writing a Memoir. Here's What It's About.

This is the book I wasn't sure I'd write.

Not because the story is too hard — though parts of it are. Because I didn't know for a long time whether it was my story to tell, or whether I'd spent enough time inside it to have anything true to say.

Broken Ground is a memoir. It's about losing a flower farm in Pleasant Valley, Alabama. About resigning from a church I loved, in a way I'm not proud of. About a manic episode I didn't recognize for what it was until the damage was already done. And about what it looked like to rebuild — slowly, badly in places, and then, eventually, differently than I expected.

The title comes from the experience of starting something in broken soil. When Heather and I moved to the farm, we didn't know much about growing things. We found out what the land would and wouldn't do by trying things that didn't work. That's a different education than any I'd had before.

I was a pastor before I was a farmer. I was a farmer before I was a web developer. None of these feel like separate lives from the inside — they're all the same person trying to stay useful, which is maybe the most honest description of my vocational history I can give.

What connects them: I am better at starting things than sustaining them. I am faster to vision than to maintenance. These are not virtues, dressed up as they sometimes are. They are the specific texture of my failure, and the memoir is, among other things, an honest account of how I've learned to live with them.

The essays I've published here are early chapters. Not polished drafts. More like the field notes that became a direction:

• Hope in the Wilderness — the depression, before the diagnosis
• Five Fifteen — the morning the farm started ending
• The Hospital — ten days at UAB. What I brought in. What I left there.
• No Shade — the first Easter after. Someone handed me a cup.
• The Chief Ladiga Trail — the trail I've been walking through all of it

I'm writing it by hand, in a journal, at 2am mostly. That farmhouse in the photo above — that's where most of it happened. The writing is trying to catch up to the living, which is always the problem with memoir.

I'll announce when there's more to share.

If you've lost something you built, or left something you loved, or come through something you didn't think you'd come through — this book is for you. Not because I have answers. Because I was in it too.

Broken Ground is forthcoming. Sign up for the Southern Legends newsletter to follow along.