About
After graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2005 and working as a religion reporter in my late 20s, I met my wife and walked away from climbing the career ladder. We now live in an old log house we rebuilt in rural, southwest Wisconsin, where we homeschool our two children, don’t have plumbing, use a small battery for electricity, and live on land with my mother.
During a decade hiatus from writing, I learned practical skills like carpentry, farming and splitting wood. In 2023, I began writing again, and the following year my family became Eastern Orthodox Christian. My favorite writers are Vine Deloria Jr. (on land), Wendell Berry (on farming), and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (on Eastern Orthodox Christianity).
Land
We live rurally, among ridges, valleys, and hollows. During more than 2 million years of warming and cooling cycles, dozens of glaciers covered the lands surrounding this small corner of Southwest Wisconsin, and an even smaller slice of Northwest Illinois. Everywhere they went, these ice sheets filled in the terrains with glacial deposits of sediment, or drift, leaving the world flat when they receded. But none of those mighty ice masses ever came here, so that these ancient, river-eroded grounds never filled with glacial drift. Its rolling hills and valleys stand as a visible memory of the ancient terrain.
Farm
Our family raises sheep, chickens, and tends a garden. As Martin Prechtel writes “…but no matter what they were known for, every single adult Tzutujil man and woman considered themselves to be Farmers. By definition, farming was neither a choice nor a career, but was what it meant to be human.”
Prayer
“Acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved,” says St. Seraphim of Sarov. Before my family became Orthodox Christian in 2024, I primarily read indigenous writers. We now attend an Antiochian Orthodox Church and seek to follow the ancient way of Christ.