The Innisfree no. 1: The Story of the SToryteller

9 year old Tres in a kick ass matching red windbreaker and shorts. Knee socks and tennis shoes complete the fit. And check out that huge tortoise in the back!

For nearly my entire life I have identified myself as a writer. When people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a writer as if it was more than a profession, but a way of being in the world. And it was, I suppose. I wrote my first "novel" at 9 years old (a beat for beat rip off of Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf). I still have the hand written manuscript; it took 2 of those long yellow legal pads to tell the story.

In high school I was lured by the sexy promises of rock stardom to transmute my writerly ambitions into those of a singer and a songwriter. Songwriting, and especially recording songs, provided me all of the joys of writing stories and combined them with the quick dopamine hit of performance. Writing is, after-all the most solitary of arts. The writer sits alone and works out a world of their making, and then waits days, weeks, years (?) alone as others experience their world and eventually provide their opinions. The feedback loop is very long. But with music, I could write a song and get an instant reaction. Beyond that, it also gave me a way to get in front of girls without having to actually say anything to them. For a twitchy and self-conscious ginger that was an important perk.

After bands and hundreds of shows around the Eastern US, after several records, a random interlude involving a new start-up called YouTube, and lots and lots of guitar playing I realized that while being a musician and writer seemed similar on the surface they were actually very different. To be successful as a songwriter (especially in the interstitial years between the collapse of the recording industry and the birth of the indie digital era) required about 10% songwriting talent, 15% luck, and about 75% grim determination to promote yourself to every available human being. It became pretty clear once I moved to Nashville (the grimmest of all the "music cities") to pursue the dream that I was not really cut out for the musical life. I was too quiet, too self-conscious, and too lazy, but more than that I didn't really want it.

As God would have it, I met my wife in Nashville, and we immediately set to work having our first kid. We moved to Atlanta to be nearer to grandparents and explore somewhere a bit more grown up than Nashville. Time moved swiftly on as it does for people in their middle age. We had another son, we bought a house, I changed careers multiple times, my hair faded, I got fat, and slowly the urge to write bubbled up inside me again.

So, I wrote and self-published a few novels (Black Stag, White Doe and The Sisters), I started and stopped blogging, and I tried in vain to find a foothold in the emerging digital fiction and blogging market. Nothing really worked, and as the pressures of family and working life grew writing became harder. I made excuses: I didn't have the time, I was too tired, etc. What I really meant was I had nothing to say. It was 2019, and it kind of seemed like the world was falling a part, and my little horror stories and vain social striving seemed really inadequate for the times. Of course, a few months later the world really would end, and everything that seemed bad in 2019 would be refracted through the funhouse mirror of COVID and George Floyd and Jan 6, emerging as the Hydra of the polycrisis. Where my striving felt base and inadequate before COVID, by 2024 all desire was extinguished.

My new friends in the Doomer Optimism circle and my conversion to the Catholic faith helped me accept and metabolize the horror of what I'd always known: everything is messed up, and while it will certainly get better, the rest of my lifetime is probably forfeit. Mine is the transitional generation, destined to bear witness to the ending of one age and the beginning of the next. It's probably going to really suck too.

In the face of this awareness, I turned whatever creativity I had away from writing and toward practical solutions to the things that I feared the most and had the most control over: food security and quality, habitat and ecosystem restoration, and community reestablishment. I cut my teeth with a climate solutions consultancy Roots Down, and emerged on the other side of that experience with a fire to resettle and restore every inch of America I could before I croak. I launched GreenBox Homes as the engine to achieve this, a sustainable landscaping company dedicated to growing more beautiful, abundant, and sustainable communities, and for the last 3 years I've been working with my team and my mentors to get better and better at running a small business with big goals.

Perhaps it's being 45 and realizing most of my life is over. Perhaps its being the father of a teenager who is about to graduate high school. Whatever the case, I find myself thinking often about what all these disconnected fragments of my life mean. Who am I in all these decisions and choices that have ultimately determined the strident timber of my life? Am I still a writer? Is it crazy to cling so hard to a self-conception I invented for myself when I was 6 years old?

Probably.

Yet all this self-examination has yielded a few insights. Its understandable that my 6 year old self latched onto the idea of a writer. It was an image that felt cozy and intellectually stimulating and in 1986 it was still a viable career path. In a different time and place I probably could have been a writer, but I was born in this place and in this time, and being a writer simply isn't sufficient to capture the scale of...well, everything! After all, writing is just one tool in a suite of tools meant to serve a much older magic, storytelling, the Word. The Word can be written or spoken, or performed with one's face and arms and body, or drawn or painted, or constructed out of marble and wood and iron nails. What is required is the storyteller.

The storyteller. That is who I am and have always been. That is the through line to all of my myriad striving. It's the way I see the world and my place in it, as a story that is being written as we live each and everyday. I'm speaking it and God's speaking it, and we're all speaking it. And now I see that everything I'm doing and have ever done is a single story, made of words, and actions, and dreams, intertwined with the stories of others, and with the story of the universe, the Word.

To whatever degree the story of one's life can be explained, I've come to understand mine as a place I call The Innisfree. Like Stephen King's Castle Rock, The Innisfree is a fictional setting for stories and parables. But it's also an analogue the small town where I actually grew up, and the life ways I'm striving to get back to and make available to others. It's in my hopes for a more natural, peaceful, and local American dream, and in my day to day work at GreenBox. The Innisfree is the story of my life, where I am both character, storyteller, and viewer all at once. And it's a story I now feel like telling.

How exactly this will take shape is unknown to me, but this blog will be the clearinghouse for all of it. And the heart of it all will be The Innisfree, a place that has existed, and will exist again someday, that lives in my heart and my dreams, and which I've committed the rest of my life to bringing into the world. I am a storyteller, always have been it seems. Here is my story, The Innisfree.