What I’m Reading…
I’ve been spending time with Jack London lately- specifically, The God of His Fathers, a collection of stories that feels carved out of raw earth. London wrote with muscular clarity, but what strikes me now, reading him later in life, is the tenderness beneath. His characters move through landscapes that test them, but the real struggle is always internal: pride, fear, the ache of wanting to belong to something larger.
In mid-June, my wife and I visited Jack London State Park in Glen Ellen, California. Walking the grounds where he lived and worked-the cottage, the stone barn, the vineyard he once tended-I felt a closeness that comes from standing where someone whose books I enjoyed as a young man once stood. The hills were dry; the oaks heavy with shade. It was easy to imagine London wrestling with a sentence or a scene.
Reading him now, I’m reminded how deeply American literature is tied to landscape and labor. London understood that the land shapes the people who work it, and that the hardest truths often reveal themselves in silence. Those themes echo in my own work, especially in Franklin’s End and the Coal Leagues novel I’m writing-stories where the ground itself seems to hold memory.
What I’m Writing…
My small desk has been crowded with the past-not my own, but the lives of those who worked in the Appalachian coal fields and played baseball in the coal leagues. I’ve been trying to understand what courage looked like in a world where the ground itself could betray you.
Some days the research feels like excavation. Other days it feels like listening for a voice that hasn’t spoken in years.
I keep returning to the immigrant stories, too-the families who arrived with a name and a speck of hope, and found themselves in towns where the mine determined everything: the air they breathed, the hours they worked, their future. I’m trying to write these lives without romanticizing them, to let the quiet moments carry their own weight. It’s been bumpy.
These stories echo against Franklin’s End, which is still very much with me. Franklin’s world is Appalachian, too, though his struggle is more intimate-grief, loyalty, the shadow of a single moment. Writing the coal leagues novel feels like stepping further into the landscape that shaped Franklin, as if the hills and hollows are still speaking.
These stories are taking me where they need to go, not necessarily where I want them to. That’s what’s making it so hard.
Leave a Reply