No Choice

Originally published as an email newsletter in June, 2025

Dear subscriber,

A writer friend from here in the Tri-Cities encouraged me to write a newsletter update. When I protested and told him that I hadn’t published anything recently, and that that was the only reason I ever sent a newsletter, he graciously told me in-not-so-many-words that was bullshit and I should send one anyway, because, despite my inclination to believe that I don’t have much of interest to say outside of my fiction writing (I’m still not convinced this isn’t the case), people may still like to hear from me once in a while.

So, here I am. Blame Derrick Heisey if you didn’t want to hear from me. (and go check out his stuff, especially if you’re into horror, the macabre, or stories about shape-shifting monsters that terrorize truck drivers)

Anyway, as I sat down to write this, I realized something. Of late, I honestly just haven’t felt any inclination to write a newsletter, no urge to let people know what I’ve been up to—let alone post on social media. Which, as some of you know, I once did…a lot. Before I detoxed from social media, I feared that if I stopped posting, if I stopped telling people what I’m up to and that I’m still writing, not only would people think I’ve given up on my craft, and think that I’m living in some shame hole for being the writer who doesn’t write, but everyone would forget about me, full stop, and that if everyone forgets about me, then those things I feared people might think, might actually come true in real life.

Thankfully, despite my lack of internet presence of late, I have not put down my silly, childhood dreams of writing novels. In fact, quite the opposite. After querying my last novel for about a year while working on short stories, and subsequently stuffing it away in the proverbial drawer, I’ve spent the last two-ish years working on a new novel, of which I have a completed draft. Still plenty of work to be done, but it has shape, structure, and over a hundred-thousand words. So, my head is still rhythmically beat, beat, beating itself against the wall, and that’s just fine.

While there are moments of impatience that flash through my mind, moments where my dreams and machinations of what it means to be a writer capture my imagination—about my work being read, enjoyed, or talked and thought about by people, or times when I’m in a bookstore and I run my finger across the spot where my novel might one day sit—I’m also a rather patient person, and I believe that, as long as I keep working, keep focusing on my craft, something will catch on one day. And, if it doesn’t, if I never publish my good-enough American novel, a life spent scribbling away for no one but myself and a handful of close readers isn’t too bad, either.

So, anyway, I wrote a newsletter. Like the introduction you just read, it’s a little long-winded, but I figured I may not write another one for another few months, a year, two years, who knows, so I decided not to be too sparing with my word count. If it’s too long to read, no worries. A wise man once told me, no skin off my ass. So, ditto, I guess.

I’ll get on with it. Hope you enjoy.

I.

Multiple drafts of two unpublished novels. A half-dozen completed short stories, (at least a dozen unfinished one’s). All four of my literary publications to date. A two-year, low-residency MFA program started, traversed, and graduated. Probably somewhere in the ballpark of a million words written, give or take. The overwhelming majority of it has never been read by anyone but me and our AI overlords. It’s by far the most I’ve ever written in any six-year period.

All that, and much, much more, happened in my six years of living in what I referred to as the Helm House, in the northern countryside of Pasco, Washington. But my time in that squat, two-bedroom, somewhere between blue and gray, eighty-ish year-old farmhouse has come to an end. No more sixty mile views off my back porch, no more thousand-pound rodeo steers shuffling by my garden, no more water trickling from my ceiling in the winter.

It’s the longest I’ve ever lived in the same house in my adult life. By a long shot. Since going off to college I seemed to move every couple years. Four years in Pullman while attending Wazzu, an alcohol and drug-clouded blur of a year in Kennewick after graduating from Wazzu, a year and a half back in Pullman after getting a full time job at, you guessed it, Wazzu, a year and a half in my birthplace of Moscow, Idaho, and finally, a hot minute (three-ish months) in Missoula before returning to southeast Washington in February of 2019, landing back in my childhood bedroom with Maizy (my dog), an empty bank account, no job, and my first and only broken heart (a broken heart that taught me a whole hell of a lot, and that I’m grateful for).

II.

By April of 2019, I had landed a job at Hanford, and was on the verge of signing a lease on a little alphabet house (iykyk) in the old part of Richland. And when I say on the verge, I mean it was Sunday, and I had plans to meet the home owner on Monday to hand him the lease documents, which were already signed and sitting on the island in my parents’ kitchen.

But that morning I received a call that went something like this:

“Brent?” Gruff tone, old man voice.

“Yes?”

“It’s Harvey.”

Computing…oh, Harvey! As in, the farmer who owned the house I grew up in north of Pasco. As in, the man I’d sent a letter to weeks earlier (which I’d subsequently forgotten about) to see if he had any of his old labor houses for rent, possibly that “little blue-gray one off of Helm”.

“Morning, Harvey.”

“You’re interested in that little house off Helm?”

“Yes sir.”

“Meet me there in a half hour if you want to look at it.”

Dad and I hopped in my pickup and headed southwest from Eltopia—where my parents live outside the Tri-Cities—down to what Franklin County folks know as Block One (the regional designation for that portion of the Columbia Basin irrigation project). Farm fields and orchards as far as the eye can see, flanked by the big, rolling Columbia River that makes all those farms, all those orchards, possible in the warm, semi-arid, Columbia Basin shrub steppe.

The little blue-gray house, as I mentioned, is off a gravel road called Helm, which is off what’s called Columbia River Road. And that road, is the road I grew up on. Less than four miles from the Helm House is the house my parents first rented from Harvey in the mid-‘90’s, back when I was just a toddler. The place where my oldest memories were formed.

(Living on dirt roads by big rivers, watching burning sunsets from the tailgate of a pickup, renting farmhouses surrounded by alfalfa or corn or cattle, settling in as an adult a few miles from where you grew up…what I’m saying to my city friends and readers is, yes, for better or worse, my life is basically a cliché country song.)

Anyway, when we got there, we bounced down the driveway, which was overgrown with thick April grass after an unseasonably wet winter and spring. I noticed the crooked, spray-painted, nearly unreadable address marker, and the one, one little Russian olive tree—more of a tall shrub than a tree—that stood along the driveway. The house and the surrounding shrub steppe pasture was roughly 25 acres. So I’ll repeat, this was the only tree on the entire property that, otherwise, was mostly rabbitbrush, rye, and a smattering of sagebrush. Long views, no shade.

And more fucking goatheads and tumbleweeds than you’ve ever dealt with in your life.

As we got to the house, I saw that the white paint on the clapboard trim was mostly chipped away. Several of the single-pane windows had chips and cracks. A rose bush that had gone wild at the front of the house was the only shrub, flower, or plant of any kind other than weeds or grass in the flower beds. And the lawn, well…there was no lawn. Dirt and gravel crawled right up to the back porch.

But, despite the blemishes, the rough exterior, there was something about it. Something real. The house seemed to actually belong in this place, in this landscape. The homesteaders who built it seemed to have the hot, dry summers, and cold, blustery winters in mind, with it’s low roof with wide overhangs, it’s stucco exterior. There were the big bay windows, the rounded breezeway from the tiny kitchen to the little living room. There was a personality to it that’s not easy to explain. Character. Something you find in an old neighborhood where houses have been built one at a time over the years, and something that’s completely devoid of the sprawling, single-family subdivisions that continue to spill out from the edges of the Tri-Cities.

To others, the term “shit hole” might also come to mind. But to me, it was special, and it was home. (The property it’s on has been bought, and the house will likely be torn down to build anew. So it goes.)

Anyway, back to the story. Harvey arrived in his cowboy hat and sunglasses. He was a man of few words, but one of those people who, when he spoke, people seemed to listen. (Harvey unfortunately passed away while I was living in the house, thus the past tense in that last sentence) After some brief pleasantries, he walked us around the house, showed us the little shed out back, showed us where the main water valve was on the front of the house. Took us inside, flipped on the main breaker for the first time in, “Oh, four or five years,” and toured us through the stale house.

A Native-print area rug covered most the living room floor. There were three pieces of art already in the house. One was an old Texas license plate, one was a print of La Adelita, the famous painting that became a symbol of the Mexican revolution, and a framed poster of a list of Texas Bix Bender quotes, the words “Don’t squat with your spurs on!” at the top of the list. One of the bedrooms had an old twin mattress lying on the floor. There were a handful of dishes in the kitchen, a few other odds and ends.

After a brief tour through the 900-ish square foot house, he turned to me.

“Well, what do you think is fair?”

“For rent?”

He stares at me. I interpret his silence as a “yes”.

“Well, the place I’m looking at in Richland is nine-hundred, and this is bigger than that. Further from town though, needs some work.” Pause, trying not to act intimidated by his stony, cowboy stare. “Eight-hundred?”

(I’ll pause to add that, at this point, I was nowhere near certain I actually wanted to rent the place. But I found myself negotiating, nonetheless.)

He stared at me for what felt like minutes, before saying, “Let’s call it six-hundred, and I’ll give you the first couple months free to clean it up.”

I was unsure what to say, and don’t recall exactly how I replied, but I believe the words “sounds fair” and “thank you” were involved.

“I’m not a landlord, so I don’t want you bugging me about lightbulbs. Anything big breaks let me know, otherwise I want you to take care of it.”

I agreed to the arrangement.

“And I don’t do contracts, just a handshake type of thing.” He extended a callused hand. I shook it. He reached in his pocket, producing a house key. “Only works for the back door, you can make copies if you want more. And if you want to use the front door,” I didn’t realize at that point that the front door was apparently inoperable, “you’ll have to get a new doorknob.”

Other than a few texts and one phone call that I can remember, I didn’t see or speak to him again for over a year. And as a fellow Westerner, an introvert, and a bit of a lifelong loner (and an undeniable individualist despite my collectivist political sensibilities), Harvey’s no-nonsense, minimal contact, be-self-sufficient-and-don’t-bug-me-with-the-small-shit approach, made him a great landlord for me. I have a lot of gratitude for him and his family for the time I was able to spend there.

With that, Maizy and I had a home.

My parents helped me clean the place up. Mom helped do some much needed deep-cleaning. Dad helped me fix a cracked pipe in the bathroom, and plenty of other projects. And they both did so, so much more, not just upon move-in, but over the years. Between that, and letting me crash with them for those few months, and, you know, three-plus decades of always being there for me, I am forever indebted, and forever grateful. (Thank you, Mom and Dad)

I put in a lawn from scratch. Built a fence for Maizy. Raised two railroad-tie garden beds and a luffa and wildflower trellis. Re-painted that old clapboard trim with the help of some Rainier and Del McCoury. I was stunned by sweeping cloud formations that rolled overhead, the starkest rainbows I’ve ever seen, bleeding sunsets that fell behind Rattlesnake Mountain, and trundling fog tunnels that would roll up the valley from the Columbia in the winter time. I cried and laughed as I watched the sunflowers in my garden turn to paint and melt before my eyes as my relationship with psychedelics shifted, changed, turned from something irresponsible to something quite beautiful, transcendent, and fall away altogether once I got some of the answers I didn’t know I’d been looking for. I took daily walks through the shrub steppe pastures (after the steers were removed…) and got to know the gray and the green rabbitbrush, the sagebrush and the bitterbrush, the bits of cryptobiotic crust, and I became good friends with a lonesome balsamroot that bloomed bright and yellow each April. I mimicked the whistle of the western meadowlarks that frequented the pastures, and delighted in the coveys of quail that showed up each spring, and left their footprints in the snow in the winter. I sat outside in the winter sunshine and tracked the murmurations of the black birds. I watched red-tailed hawks and barn owls rabbits, and snakes in the pastures. I watched Maizy hunt gopher in the pastures. I spotted the pheasants that nested in the canal bank. I made the place mine, while letting the place be what, who, it was, and Maizy and I both fell deeply in love with it.

III.

I’ve always been a nester. I’m good at making a space my own. As-in, molding my immediate physical environment in a way that makes me feel sane, gives me some semblance of control. If my spaces feel out of control, in disarray, this can easily become reflected in my mental state. Understanding this about myself, and accepting it rather than fighting it, has helped me as I’ve gotten older.

But I think my attachment to my nest, my space, goes beyond just my office, or my living room. It’s also an attachment to place, on a slightly larger, yet still relatively specific, scale. In this case, that’s the Pacific and Inland Northwest region. Think Washington, northern Oregon, northern Idaho, western Montana. I feel a deep connection to the sprawling shrub steppe of the Columbia Basin, just as I do with the rolling hills of the Palouse. The Idaho and Montana Rockies, Washington and Oregon’s Cascades, these mountain ranges I’ve been sandwiched between my whole life feel very natural to me. A stand of Douglas fir, a group of western red cedars. Ferns and buckbrush and wild huckleberries. A wide open space with hundred mile views, a sea of sagebrush in a treeless coulee bottom of central Washington, or the dark, chopping waters of the rainforest-flanked Puget Sound. The extremes themselves feel like home. Despite having spent my entire life in this region, my desire to see more of it, to know it on a deeper level, to take another backroad or hike into another backwater, another basalt scrubland, none of that has waned.

Not only am I in this region—as in, physically living here—and of this region, but I feel that I am one of those people, for better or worse, who has had their region become a part of them.

All to say, place matters to me. It matters to me in my writing, and my very being, so leaving that house, the view and perspective of the landscape which surrounded it, those wide open skies that filled me with inspiration, has been bittersweet, to say the least.

But as I said, I’m a nester, and already, I’m making my new home, home. Granted, I didn’t move far. Just across the river to West Richland, about twenty miles from my old place. While it’s not far from where I was, it’s not exactly the same landscape. I don’t have the wide open views I had at the Helm House. It’s still in the countryside, but not as open. There are next door neighbors, and sounds of people and cars and barking dogs that were once a little more distant, a little farther and fewer between than they were at the old place, but that’s okay. There are pastures, too, with sheep and turkeys and chickens and four dogs. It is quite beautiful, bucolic, just in a very different way than the Helm House. And, as I mentioned, there are trees, lots of them. Mulberry, maple, Siberian elm, blue fir, Russian olive (hello, spring allergies). It’s near the Yakima River where the water table is high, so there is a green to this draw that is uncharacteristic of the Tri-Cities area.

Often, I find myself struck by my good fortune, for having had the privilege of living in one beautiful place for six years, and finding myself in another beautiful place again, despite my current inability to buy anything. For finding rural housing I can afford in this dumpster fire of a rental market, and not being forced to move into town where I know my body and my nervous system don’t want to be.

Oh, and there’s one other thing about this new place. There’s a young farmer woman who lives here, too. I see her out in the pastures with the sheep. Sometimes she’s hustling and bustling from one thing to the next, moving them from pasture to pasture, giving them hay. Other times she’s just sitting out there staring at them with easy, complete, unconditional love in her eyes. I see her out there with Ori, the big goofy livestock guardian dog, combing out his creamy coat. I see her feeding the chickens, talking to them, and laughing with the cackling turkey tom. Sometimes I see her in the sun porch, scribbling on something. Maybe it’s an NYT crossword, maybe it’s one of her never-ending to-do lists, or maybe it’s a poem she will probably not let anyone read.

This farmer woman has made me feel very at home here, on her farm, with her animals, in this space that has been hers for several years. And I am filled with gratitude that I’ve been accepted here, that I’ve been made to feel at home, that I get to see her work and love this place and these animals. And, I’ll admit, I’m a wee bit smitten with her…

(Oh, and I’ll shamelessly plug this hardworking, back-breaking, ass-kicking regenerative farmer’s business by saying she grows the best pasture-raised lamb, chicken, and turkeys this side of the Columbia, or the Yakima…and the other sides of them, too! If you’re in the region, check out her website and sign up for her newsletter pearljackfarm.com)

IV.

If you’ve made it this far, first, I commend you, and I’ll try and wrap up this world’s longest, most meandering, hardly-cohesive newsletter with some final thoughts, and just a few hundred more words.

Moving out of one place I held so dear, and into a new place I’m already falling for, and living with this incredible woman, is undoubtedly the beginning of a new chapter in my life. And as I begin this new chapter, I can’t help but peek backward.

Throughout my twenties I seemed to exist in this liminal space where I both thought I’d never not be in my twenties, and I was constantly waiting for the next chapter of my life, when I’d become a real boy. I felt I had all the time in the world, always more time to figure out what I was going to do next, even when I was sitting still (there was a lot of sitting still). But it also went by so fast, and while I had that feeling that I’d be in my twenties forever, I still remember feeling it pass me by, realizing in bursts that, “oh, wow, I’m twenty-five…six…nine…damn, I’m thirty.” Through it all, I seemed to be waiting. Waiting for the next chapter. Waiting for my life to begin.

Granted, I’m only thirty-three (in a couple weeks…), but something has changed in these past few years. Maybe it’s my brain going through it’s final stages of development. Maybe it’s Aubrey. Maybe it’s both, and a whole lot more. Whatever it is, this transition, this new chapter, feels very different, and already, I’ve noticed that life seems to be moving just a little faster than it already was (I hear this phenomenon only increases the older you get…). The calendar pages are turning quicker than they once did. It’s a breezy spring day and suddenly I’m seeing the changing of the leaves and feeling the chill of an October evening. (And hearing Jingle-goddamn-Bells again at the grocery store)

But despite this sensation that the tempo has increased, despite the malaise, the anxiety that feeling might conjure, I must admit that, lately, I feel rather good.

So much of the world feels like it’s in shambles. Our freedoms and securities and safety nets, our very utility as humans in the workplace, and as artists, feel as vulnerable as they ever have. There are wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a genocide in Sudan, violence on every continent, and I have loved one’s going through their own personal battles, their own personal hells and traumas and dark nights of the soul that I am powerless to protect them from, and the empathetic, college-educated liberal inside of me argues that, with so much suffering and fear and uncertainty around me, I should be feeling terrible, completely overwhelmed.

Some days I do feel this way. But more often than not, the anxiety I once felt, the fear and indecision and sporadic depression that could stop me in my tracks, all of that has receded from my day to day experience in a profound way. It’s not that I don’t ever feel those things, that I don’t have bad days, or bad hours, or moments, because I absolutely do. The best way I can describe it is that my calibration has shifted. Rather than feeling “bad” 70% of the time, and “good” 30% of the time, it’s more like the opposite. 70% of the time I feel pretty good these days. And that is no small victory.

As much and as long as I’m able to, I’m not going to deny those good feelings, even if things are scary and uncertain and bad all around me. Because, denying those feelings, denying that I feel hopeful, denying the sureness I feel in my decisions these days, and the sureness I feel in myself as a person, and as a man, denying all that serves no one. Least of all myself and those in my circle, in my tiny little sphere of influence.

So, as much as possible, there are a few choices I’ve decided to make. Whether I can stick to them remains to be seen, but there’s something to saying things out loud, so here we go.

I choose to try and lean in to that hopefulness, that confidence in my decisions, that newfound security in who I’m becoming. I choose to practice self-examination, to question and reflect upon my decisions, and the ways I carry myself through the world. I also choose not to allow that self-reflection to become self-loathing, to not allow it to become a self-conscious anxiety that paralyzes me as it once did. I choose to value compassion over empathy, and to apologize when I need to apologize, and to practice a wholesale rejection of regret, because the expression of sorrow for one’s actions, while refusing to regret the past, are two acts of compassion that can, and should, dance on the same plane.

And I choose to understand that the words “choose” or “choice”, are a poor choice of words to convey what I’m trying to, because I don’t believe we have the ability to choose or make choices in the way we think we do, but due to either a failure of the English language or my own limits as a user of it, I choose to understand that I have less choice in everything I do, think, and say than I feel like I do, for I am a product of my genes and my environment and my biology, and I choose not to take too much pride in the “good” parts of me, nor to lament too harshly the “bad” parts of me, for I chose neither.

Lastly, I choose to understand that this emotional place, like my physical place, is not the place I was in six years ago, and it may not be where I’ll be six years from now, and I choose to not take that for granted, and to understand that as good as my life could become, as good as I hope it becomes, it could also become much worse. I choose to regularly sit and consider that inevitable concept of impermanence, including my own impermanence, so as to remind myself that I am not the center of experience, and to inoculate myself from the whiplash of sudden change, and the disappointment of unmet expectations—and to have fewer expectations—and to pay attention to the present moment as much as I’m able to, and to do my absolute damnedest to not take myself too seriously, because I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s one of the biggest little secrets there is in getting some enjoyment out of this blink of consciousness we’re all experiencing.

Ok, enough of that. Time to go move some sheep.

Cheers, friends. Thanks for reading, and if you like getting this type of long, rambling musing from me from time to time, let me know. Maybe I’ll try and do it more often. Regardless, feel free to give me a shout back, I’d love to hear from you.

Happy trails,

Brent