Welcome to The Driftless

What to expect going forward

October by William Trost Richards, 1863

Two years ago, I launched this newsletter because I wanted to share stories.

In 2022, I embarked on an ambitious project: to write a new story every week. At the end of one year, I had succeeded. I had 52 new stories. But that success created a new problem: what to do with them.

I launched The Unnerving in the fall of 2023 with the goal to share those stories. As I previously wrote, I quickly burnt myself out with my weekly pace. Since then, my posting here has been sporadic, with long gaps between new work. I realized that it was difficult to share my writing here because I had created a narrow identity. The Unnerving promised a specific aesthetic, one that I write in frequently, but not always. Also, this newsletter was slowly becoming a graveyard for old work, a place to drop dusty stories that had been sitting around my hard drive for too long. The Unnerving had ceased to be creatively generative.

So I’ve made a shift. This newsletter is now called The Driftless.

All the old stories are still here, but I’ve given them a fresh look. And in the future, you can expect a greater range of writing. Stories, yes, but more essays. More explorations. More work that resists easy categorization.

I want to get excited about sharing work here again.

Finding My Natural Form

A few weeks ago, my wife cut through six years of scattered writing focus with an offhand comment: “You know, your nonfiction is spectacular.”

Her comment struck a nerve because I hadn’t thought of myself as primarily a “nonfiction writer.” I realized I had been attached to an identity of myself as a fiction writer (who also happened to write essays). But when I stepped back from this identity, I saw a pattern emerge from the last six years of writing.

In 2019, I launched an Instagram account and wrote poems. Then, after a couple of years, I stopped writing poems. Instead, I jumped into Medium and wrote essays about writing. Then, I stopped doing that, too. I wrote the first draft of a novel that never got anywhere. I launched this Substack, posting horror fiction. Then, I stopped again. I’ve been spinning my wheels with my writing projects, never getting any traction, never sticking with them for long.

But in 2024, I also started writing essays, and something different happened. I started to gain traction. People read my work and resonated with it. I won a contest. The essays made money.

But, most importantly, writing them felt easy. At first, I thought that was a problem. Isn’t writing supposed to be hard? What if it can actually be easy?

What if my identity as a “serious fiction writer” was an impediment? What if writing essays is easy because it’s my natural form?

Three weeks ago, I turned 38. The night of my birthday, I was thinking about writing essays. On my shelf was Michel de Montaigne’s collected works. I read the introduction and discovered a strange synchronicity. Montaigne picked up essay writing on the day of his 38th birthday, after retiring from public life. He needed to discover himself, figure out what he really thought, so he turned to a form invented for that purpose: the essay.

I commit to doing the same.

What is The Driftless?

I named this newsletter after the small region in the Midwest where I grew up. The Driftless is a unique ecological region that was spared by the glaciers of the last ice age which rendered most of the midwest flat and featureless. The Driftless, however, retained its original character, its “steep hills, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, and karst geology with spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams.”

I want this newsletter to be a small, bizarre, idiosyncratic corner of the internet. Where so much of online discourse has been flattened by relentless chasing of quantity (over quality), ideological head-nodding, and shameless self-promotion, The Driftless seeks to retain the “steep hills and forested ridges” of a pre-always-online literary world.

Here we believe in:

• Slowness over speed

• Rest over hustle

• Exploration over goals

• Obscurity over fame

• Difficulty over ease

• Failure over success

• Silence over noise

I plant to write about creativity, technology, and what it means to build a life outside the attention economy. Some essays will wander through ideas. Others will be stranger, harder to categorize. I’ll still write fiction—that itch isn’t going anywhere, it’s just becoming a smaller part of a larger, not-yet-clear to me project.

I still plan to post sporadically. Not weekly, not on a schedule. When the work is ready, it will come out, not when a content calendar demands it.

What to Expect

If this sounds like your kind of cozy internet corner, I’m glad you’re here! Subscribe, comment, introduce yourself. Tell me what resonates or doesn’t.

If this isn’t what you signed up for, no hard feelings—unsubscribe guilt-free. The Unnerving was one thing; the Driftless is something else.

My goal for the next twelve months is simple: write more essays. I will stop chasing an identity that doesn’t really fit me. I will do what is easy, simple, even. I will build momentum right here.

Welcome to The Driftless. I look forward to sharing the next essay with you.